National Agenda : A Matter of Democracy : Kenya’s multi-party elections last December brought changes. But President Moi has resisted serious reform, fueling speculation that the African nation is headed for trouble.

For years, Karim Karmali, restaurateur, suffered a particularly pungent problem. It came from across the street, from the big bins that accept the daily refuse of the City Market, a prime tourist attraction in a town that calls itself the Green City in the Sun.

The problem was that a neglectful city government would fail to empty the bins for weeks and even months on end. And a miasma of putrefied fish and rotting meat would rise as the containers baked in the tropical sun, the stench enveloping the market’s basket sellers and fruit vendors and figurine carvers and invading Karmali’s upscale Indian restaurant. Customers walked away in droves.

No more.

In a small victory amid Kenya’s troubled transition to democracy, Karmali now routinely seats patrons on his tidy terrace overlooking the culprit bins.

As a result of Kenya’s first multi-party elections in 26 years last December, Nairobi replaced its appointed city commission with an elected council, and it got a new mayor in the process. An opposition figure with a keen sense of public relations, one of the first things he did was to get the garbage trucks running on time.

“They’re here every day, practically, emptying the bins,” said a pleased Karmali. The new mayor, Stephen Mwangi, has a simple explanation for the improvement: If he doesn’t do his job right, he loses it. His job depends on the backing of the city’s elected councilors. “They vote a motion of no confidence,” he said, “and I’m gone.”

But the mayor, other elected opposition politicians and even Kenya’s democratization process itself face what Kenyan and foreign analysts say is a major obstacle: a central government still dominated by a ruling party that shows signs of disregarding the pluralistic norms to which it is a reluctant convert.

International donors, who have maintained an arm’s-length relationship since cutting aid in late 1991 to force political and economic reform, remain adamant that President Daniel Arap Moi’s government must carry out further reforms. Prominent domestic critics concur.

Their freedom to speak, and the presence of a strong minority of opposition legislators in the single-chamber Parliament, points up the undoubted differences between Kenya after the landmark Dec. 29 elections and Kenya in the mid- to late 1980s. Then, public discourse was hushed, and government foes were imprisoned without fair trials. But critics say the new democratic opening, which Moi resisted long after other African countries had begun moving toward pluralism, has failed to change the way Kenya is governed.

“Consistently the government is resisting accountability, transparency--whatever multi-party means--and is seeking to go back to the days of command operations, where you don’t ask questions and do as you’re told,” Lee Muthoga, a prominent lawyer and coordinator of a political watchdog group, said in an interview.

The travails of Mwangi, the new Nairobi mayor, offer a small case in point.

Since his investiture, no senior government figure aside from two associated with tourism has had official contact with him--a situation that, given Nairobi’s disproportionate weight in national life, is rather like New York Gov. Mario Cuomo and his staff spurning contact with the mayor of New York City.

More serious than the lack of comity, the minister for local government recently issued a circular seeking to strip powers from elected local officials--opposition figures, for the most part--and hand it to appointed town clerks, who are mainly holdovers from single-party days. The circular also barred mayors from entering their offices more than three times a week.

Mwangi said in an interview that he will not comply with the order, characterizing it as “hostile (and) bordering on ridicule.”

Some foreign observers express alarm over the course of a country viewed until recently as a rare success story on a continent replete with warfare and economic collapse. Granted, Kenya retains assets available in few other African countries. Among these are reasonable, if dilapidated, road and telephone networks, diverse if struggling small-scale industry and a well-developed, albeit slumping, tourism industry built upon a verdant coast and spectacular game parks. More important than any of these, however, are the country’s people: Kenya has managed to develop a large and well-educated middle class, and it harbors large pools of entrepreneurial talent.

The country has enough resources to avoid going the way its neighbors have, said one diplomat, weighing Kenya’s chances of sliding to Ugandan or Tanzanian levels of deprivation. “That’s what makes it really, really a tragedy. Kenya didn’t need to go that route.”

The diplomat’s inadvertent use of the past tense reflects a discouraging series of developments, beginning with the landmark elections themselves.

International observers judged the campaign seriously flawed by manipulations in favor of the ruling Kenya African National Union. Election Day revealed a pattern of ethnic rivalry, with small tribes voting for KANU and two of the largest and most influential tribes--the Kikuyu in the center and the Luo on the west, near Lake Victoria--voting en bloc for the opposition.

After the election, Moi chose “a disheartening mix of defeated ministers and KANU loyalists, not at all representative of Kenya’s ethnic majorities,” for his Cabinet, said the New York-based International Republican Institute, which fielded the largest group of election observers.

Police have also impounded thousands of copies of four small independent magazines often critical of the government since the election, and the staff of two of those magazines face sedition charges. A peaceful protest march led by opposition members of Parliament was set upon by baton-wielding police. The provincial administration had declared the demonstration illegal, and David Andere, a government spokesman, defended the police action. “Democracy is being in Parliament and clearly taking the government to task,” he said. “But you don’t go demonstrating without giving the government a challenge in Parliament.”

Andere also signaled a change of tactics toward the press. “We will not impound,” he said. Instead, the government will use libel and sedition laws against magazines that violate what he called “professional standards” through unbalanced coverage.

There have been two outbreaks of violence outside the Parliament itself--once when police charged stone-throwing crowds that heckled and jeered Cabinet ministers, and again when bands of club-wielding Masai tribesmen attacked unarmed opposition demonstrators. The respected Daily Nation newspaper quoted KANU Secretary General Joseph Kamotho as telling a public meeting that he hired the Masai. Kamotho later denied the remarks.

The involvement of the Masai--a people noted for their proud aloofness from modern society and favored by tourists for their red robes, ocher hair and noble bearing--takes on particular gravity given continuing tribal clashes that have roiled the Rift Valley, Moi’s home area and a bedrock of his electoral support.

Against this backdrop, the country on March 22 abruptly reversed an array of economic reforms meant to lure the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank into restoring aid suspended in 1991. Negotiations, however, continued, and the World Bank last Wednesday promised to release $85 million in return for Kenyan compliance with a detailed list of conditions, including many that would undercut possibilities of corruption.

But many observers doubt the government’s willingness or even ability to undertake the fundamental reforms demanded of it. They contend that the source of Kenya’s financial and economic crisis is corruption that extends into the highest levels of government and that may have reached uncontrollable levels.

They point to large and unexplained credit transfers, amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars, from the Central Bank to a coterie of well-connected institutions dubbed “political banks” by the local press.

Along with the alleged import of 5 billion to 9 billion shillings ($110 million to $200 million) worth of bank notes printed in Europe during the closing phases of the election campaign, this has caused a huge increase in the money supply and fueled inflation, now running at more than 30%, according to sources who study Kenya’s economy. It was government unwillingness to rein in the money supply that was a chief reason why an IMF review team left Kenya in March without agreeing to restore aid. After last week’s agreement, the World Bank said it would closely monitor Kenyan promises to exercise tighter control over the central bank. Officials said no further aid would be forthcoming unless Kenyan authorities complied.

“The monetary side attacks the political banks,” one economist said. “The political banks are the core of the power, support and enrichment of Moi and his boys.

“Every single sector (of the economy) is in decline,” the economist added. “It’s going down and nobody knows when it’s going to stop. And (the reason) is corruption, on such a scale that it’s challenging and undermining the basic macroeconomic structure of the country.”