A Sterile Status Quo for Kenya

Daniel Arap Moi wins and Kenya loses again. Moi captured enough ballots in last week’s multi-party election to remain president. But an election fraught with irregularities does not a democracy make.

The 73-year-old incumbent’s continued grip on power promises to push the misery index even higher in the East African nation, for Moi has grown richer during nearly 20 years in office while his countrymen have seen one of the continent’s strongest economies turn sour. Annual per capita income hovers around $270, down from $700 at independence in 1963.

Kenya’s political nightmare is familiar in post-colonial Africa. An autocratic leader, intolerant of political dissent, has enriched himself at the expense of all but a few loyalists as his country has fallen to ruin. Taxes are high, yet the country lacks universal education and adequate roads. Hospitals need basic supplies and more sophisticated medicines to manage one of Africa’s worst AIDS epidemics.

Democracy is the exception rather than the rule in Africa, and dissent is often put down with bullets. In Nigeria, another large and important country, Gen. Sani Abacha and his military rule continue to thwart progress. In the former Zaire, now the Congo, the new leader, Laurent Kabila, has not begun to make good on his promise of democracy. In Zambia, former President Kenneth Kaunda is under house arrest. Burundi’s rebel soldiers murdered up to 200 civilians last week. In Sierra Leone, where a military regime has toppled a democratically elected government, the fighting continued last week in a refugee camp. This is a sad political landscape, one that makes the Kenyan situation appear unhappily normal.

Although eight people were killed in Kenya’s election campaign, Moi’s political rivals were put down not with bullets but fraudulent or missing ballots. Moi takes care of those who serve his regime and share his tribal ancestry, a pattern Africa must reject for true democracy.

Perhaps this will be his last hurrah. Perhaps he will finally make good on his promises of 1978, when he succeeded his mentor, the revered independence leader Jomo Kenyatta. Moi, Kenyatta’s vice president and a former schoolteacher, promised then to end illiteracy within five years, establish universal and free education and institute a 10% increase in employment in the private and public sector. Kenyans are still waiting.