Kenyans Face Many Obstacles on Bumpy Road to Multi-Party Election : Politics: Run-up to first free contest in 26 years is marred by violence and government’s lack of cooperation.

This dirt-road outpost built on the edge of a potash lake is to President Daniel Arap Moi what Arkansas is to Bill Clinton. It is his home constituency and, it would seem, the one place in Kenya where he is certain of an overwhelming electoral victory.

But on a sere afternoon recently, Richard Kigoi paused in his work of repatching the patches on an ancient inner tube to acknowledge the new electoral realities of Kenya.

“I’m like the flag,” he said. “Whichever way the wind goes, I go.”

No one seriously suggests that Moi could lose a vote in his own tribal center, a sparsely populated area he has provided with a flawless road network, tourist lodges and a government research station. But Kigoi’s remark shows how much things are changing in Kenya, which for the 29 years of its independence has been ruled by a single party, the Kenya African National Union (KANU).

On Dec. 29, for the first time in 26 years and only the second time since independence, Kenyans will vote in a multi-party election for president and Parliament. Although Moi is the probable winner for president over a splintered and squabbling opposition field, many observers here believe that the election will give the opposition a substantial number, possibly even a majority, of seats in Parliament.

As befits such a novel process, the election is likely to be a messy one, afflicted by violence, charges of fraud and organizational snafus. Already the election date has been postponed once, from Dec. 7, after a High Court judge ruled that Atty. Gen. Amos Wako illegally altered an election law to benefit KANU.

At least seven people have been killed in recent weeks in confrontations between political factions, and one leading opposition candidate was injured in a stone-throwing melee that he says was started by KANU agents. Many fear that the atmosphere of intimidation will intensify as the election date approaches, and they believe that some post-election violence is inevitable no matter how the election turns out.

“It’s going to be a fairly dirty game,” said Robert Shaw, a Kenyan businessman who is the economic adviser to FORD-Kenya, one of the three leading opposition parties.

What hangs in the balance could be Kenya’s stature as one of Africa’s most stable and promising countries. Kenya has East Africa’s most vibrant economy and comes as close as any major African country to respecting the principles of free enterprise. But its one-party system has entrenched corruption and political arrogance. When the end of the Cold War gave the United States and other Western friends the latitude to lecture Moi about his country’s political rot, he had little choice but to accede to their demands that he open up the electoral process.

That was in December, 1991, when Moi, then in power for 13 years, reluctantly legalized opposition political parties. (Opposition parties--including one headed by Moi--disappeared or were absorbed by KANU after the last contested election in 1966, but they had been outlawed only since 1982.) Days later, the country’s first legal opposition rally in more than two decades drew 100,000 people to an open field in Nairobi, the capital.

By then Kenya was well behind the trend in Africa toward multi-party politics; several African presidents had already been turned out by voters.

But to this date, Moi has never shown genuine support for the electoral process, arguing that it is certain to polarize Kenya’s 23 million people along tribal lines. That viewpoint seemed confirmed last spring when western Kenya erupted in tribal clashes that took as many as 800 lives; but a subsequent parliamentary investigation blamed several KANU ministers for fomenting the violence. The KANU-controlled Parliament rejected the report as its last official act before its dissolution in October in preparation for the elections.

Throughout the campaign period, Moi and KANU have shown what could only be described as open contempt for the concept of free and fair elections. Opposition leaders are unanimous in their complaints that they have been granted virtually no access to the state-run radio and television system. Permits for political rallies, which technically require 14 days’ notice, have been routinely refused for the opposition parties, or their applications have simply been ignored. Many such rallies have been broken up by police.

Sometimes KANU’s methods are more insidious. Five minutes before the start of a FORD rally in the central town of Mwala earlier this month, the local district commissioner arrived, announcing at large that he was distributing free food at his compound, 1 1/2 miles away. The crowd evaporated.

Another question is the integrity of the country’s voter registration rolls. The government opened the rolls for new registrants for only a brief two-week period in November. Subsequently the government announced that 7.8 million voters were registered.

Given that 54% of Kenya’s 23 million population is under 16 and thus ineligible to vote, that as many as 1 million eligible young voters did not receive identification cards in time to register and that one major party declared a boycott of the registration, “the announced voter-registration figures sound too glamorous to be true,” said Lee Muthoga, a Nairobi lawyer heading a local election watchdog group. Opposition parties have charged that the rolls have been inflated to give KANU enough leeway to steal the election.

KANU’s most transparent act was to manipulate the election law. In April, Parliament enacted a law giving all parties “not less than” three weeks, following the official announcement of an election date, to hold nominating processes for parliamentary candidates. In October, Atty. Gen. Wako, exercising his power to correct “typographical or clerical errors” in parliamentary acts, changed the language to “not more than” three weeks. The government then called what amounted to a snap election for Dec. 7, giving the parties only eight days to hold nomination votes.

The plan unraveled Nov. 13 when a High Court judge, ruling that Wako had abused his authority, ordered the electoral process begun again. The embarrassed government had to reschedule the election for Dec. 29.

The court ruling was the most important to go against the government in years and has heartened politicians who sense that a KANU-controlled judiciary is beginning to look ahead to a post-KANU political era in Kenya. But many people note that after three decades of political domination, KANU still has tremendous power to manipulate the system.

“KANU’s had 30 years to build an outstanding organization,” said the head of a group of Western election observers who asked to remain unidentified. “The resources of the state are being used for partisan political purposes.”

FORD’s Shaw also charges that in recent weeks the government has stepped up the printing of money, funneling it through banks owned by government ministers to finance the KANU campaign, at the risk of mushrooming inflation.

“What is arguably an election tactic will backfire on the whole economy,” he said.

In recent days the government has pledged anew that there will be no more problems with granting permits for opposition rallies and has guaranteed the opposition access to state radio and TV.

Whether this represents enough of a change in attitude to put the election back on a fair course is open to question. “I think we’re in for a lot of trouble if the rest of the election process has been as unlevel as it’s been so far,” said Shaw.

Muthoga, the election monitor, blames Moi for having complicated a process that most Kenyans have long been ready to embrace tranquilly--even if he has been forced to be much more tolerant of dissent than he was as recently as a year ago.

“We’ve moved straight forward, it’s true,” he said. “But as a nation we could have achieved much more at far less cost.”