The Political Economy of Development and Democratic Transitions in Kenya
Aerial view of Nairobi from the Kenyatta International Conference Centre by Jonathan Stonehouse, Flickr Creative Commons
By Cassandra R. Veney and Paul Tiyambe Zeleza
Since the 1990s, Kenya, like most African countries, has undergone a protracted transition to democracy. There are arguably four watershed events in this story: 1992 when the first multiparty elections were held since Kenya had become a one-party state; 2002 when the 40 year reign of Kenya African National Union (KANU) came to an end after the party lost to an opposition coalition; 2007 when the disputed election results triggered the worst outbreak of violence the country had ever seen since independence; and 2010 when a new constitution was finally adopted. These developments, culminating in the March 2013 elections, raise critical questions about the patterns and processes of transition to democracy in Kenya, and the historical and contemporary contexts that have made the transition so problematic, and its likely trajectory. Studies on the subject tend to focus on specific events, actors, challenges, and roadblocks and offer prognoses that are often soon overtaken by new developments. In many studies ethnicity looms large as an explanation.
These analytical tendencies are evident in the studies published immediately after the disputed elections of 2007, which sought to account for the violence that convulsed the country leaving 1,300 people dead and 600,000 displaced. Many commentators in the popular media and even scholars feared for the very survival of the country. Introducing a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary African Studies, Kagwanja and Southall warned that Kenya “faces a real possibility of slipping into state failure.”
[1] Yet in 2010, a new constitution was finally passed and Kenya entered the road to what was popularly dubbed “the Second Republic.” In March 2013, the first election under the new constitution was held.
This underscores the need for historical analyses that avoid projecting too much from the grind of daily or episodic events and divorcing particular issues from their structural contexts. In this essay we seek to place Kenya’s problematic transitions to democracy and development in the complex legacies and transformations in Kenya’s political economy. Our argument is that since the 1990s Kenya, like most African countries, has been struggling to construct a democratic development state. Such a state embodies the principles of competitive electoral democracy, ensures citizens’ active participation in governance and development processes, is socially inclusive and accountable to civil society, and has the capacities to foster growth and development.[2]
The essay is divided into four parts. First, we briefly examine the period from independence to the turn of the 1990s. The beginnings of democratic developmentalism in the 1990s exposed old and new contradictions and ushered changes out of which erupted both the failed elections of 2007 and the successful referendum of 2010. In the second part we focus specifically on the period between the 1990s and 2007 that began with the abolition of the one party state, followed by KANU’s ouster from power in 2002 and ended in the tragedy of the country’s worst postelection violence. Third, we outline developments in the immediate aftermath of the 2007-08 postelection violence. We conclude with a synopsis of Kenya’s bumpy road to the “Second Republic” in the run up to the 2013 election.
The Era of Authoritarian Developmentalism
African nationalism sought to achieve five historic and humanistic agendas: decolonization, nation-building, development, democracy, and regional integration.[3] Economically, colonialism left behind underdeveloped economies characterized by high levels of uneven development and external dependency, which fostered regional and ethnic tensions and made African states extremely vulnerable to external pressures. Politically, the newly independent countries faced the challenges of nation-building—how to turn the divided multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-religious, and multi-racial cartographic contraptions of colonialism into coherent nation states; the democratization of state power and politics—how to wean the state from its deeply entrenched colonial authoritarian propensities; and national development—how to build national economies without colonial despotism.
It is possible to identify three broad trends in Africa’s development paradigms and processes since independence. First, the era of authoritarian developmentalism in the period from 1960 to 1980; second, the period of neo-liberal authoritarianism from 1980 to 2000; and third, the current moment of possible democratic developmentalism.[4] In the 1960s the new independent countries were characterized by statism—the growth of state power, and driven by developmentalism—the pursuit of development at all costs. The state became an instrument of accumulation for the underdeveloped indigenous capitalist class. In the meantime, the legitimacy of the postcolonial state lay in meeting the huge developmental backlog of colonialism, in providing more schools, hospitals, jobs and other services and opportunities to the expectant masses.
Kenya emerged out of colonialism in 1963, after a prolonged liberation struggle, with a political economy marked by the existence of an authoritarian state, uneven regional development, deep social cleavages, and an intolerant political culture sustained by deep historical memories of grievance and injustice. Nationalist ideology both masked and reinforced the inherited political deformities of the colonial state in so far as it mobilized the colonized for freedom while simultaneously seeking to homogenize them in the inflexible ideology of nation-building. Thus, in Kenya the seeds of democracy sown by the nationalist struggles wilted before the stubborn legacies of the despotic colonial state which its authoritarian postcolonial heir inherited virtually unchanged. The KANU government moved quickly to centralize the state apparatus: regionalism was abolished in 1964; a republican constitution was promulgated, followed by the abolition of the senate two years later. The new ruling class gradually consolidated immense power in the hands of the executive.
There were strong pressures for both political fusion and fission. The first led to the dissolution of the opposition Kenya African Democratic Union into KANU within a year of independence; the second manifested itself with the split in KANU two years later with the formation of the Kenya People’s Union.[5] In subsequent years, the move from Kenya to a de facto one-party state after the KPU was banned in October 1969 bolstered the tendency to coercive fusion, while the proliferation of parties following the emergence of multi-party politics in 1991 saw the resurgence of fission. Broadly speaking, the struggles between the various factions of the political class between 1964 and 1970 were indicative of the disintegrating alliance that had been formed between the restive petty bourgeoisie and disaffected masses in the struggle for independence. New alliances were now emerging, primarily between the landed capitalists, many of whom had been loyalists during Mau Mau, the expanding bureaucratic and managerial classes, and those peasants who benefited from the land resettlement schemes.[6]
No wonder KANU leadership, representing this class alliance, increasingly became conservative or moderate in its political orientation and economic policies. By 1970, the dominance of this new ruling class was firmly established, although that did not mark the end of intense factionalism within the political class. As the parameters of national political discourse and parliamentary debate narrowed and lost their ideological edge, ethnic mobilization and contestations assumed greater salience. This is to suggest that authoritarian developmentalism required the suppression of economic and class solidarities and struggles, which could threaten the material interests of the political class seeking to accumulate their way into a hegemonic national bourgeoisie.
Despite the drift to authoritarianism, Kenya enjoyed the reputation of a stable country with a rapidly growing economy. The truth was far more complicated. In the first decade of independence the state not only encouraged domestic and foreign private enterprise but also created large public sector corporations and invested heavily in the physical and social infrastructure. The growth rates were high, averaging 6.6% between 1963 and 1973. But by the early 1970s, it had become clear that growth by itself was not a panacea as evidence mounted of persistent indeed deepening regional and social inequalities, poverty and unemployment.[7] Meanwhile, the global economy entered a period of protracted crisis, which resulted in slower economic growth in Kenya and served as a prelude to the ‘lost decades’ of the 1980s and 1990s.
By the time of President Jomo Kenyatta’s death in 1978, a national bourgeoisie had emerged, even if its hegemony was limited by the deepening crises of development and democracy. The Kenya of 1978 was vastly different in its social character from the Kenya of 1963. It was more extensively capitalist and had a more ‘developed’ and diversified economy than the Kenya of 1963. The nationalization of the Kenyan economy was accompanied by its internationalization. Thus, the dynamics of internal uneven development and integration into the world capitalist system had deepened. It was under the reign of President Moi, who succeeded Kenyatta, that the contradictions of authoritarian-dependent capitalist development became more evident and explosive.
Following the attempted coup of 1982, a constitutional amendment was passed making Kenya formally a one-party state. The centralization of power intensified as associational space shrunk.[8] As social movements were driven underground, KANU was turned into a powerful weapon to discipline members of the political class themselves, and a dreaded mechanism of patron-client dispensations of resources. The Moi presidency coincided with the bleakest period in postcolonial African history, the era of structural adjustment programs (SAPs) that created the conditions, unintended by the architects of these programs, for the resurgence of struggles for the ‘second independence’—for democratization.
The introduction of SAPs reflected the conjunction of interests between fractions of the national bourgeoisie that had outgrown state patronage and global capital that sought to dismantle the post-war fetters of Keynesian capitalist regulation.[9] SAPs were pursued with missionary zeal by the international financial institutions—the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank—and imposed on the developing countries experiencing difficulties with their balance of payments. The SAPs called for a minimalist state and extension of the market logic to all spheres of economic activity. The results were disastrous for African economies. By the 1990s it had become clear that SAPs were deeply flawed in conception and execution. Kenya’s economic growth rate went from 6% in 1973 to 4% in 1990 and 0% in 2000.
Structural adjustment bolstered authoritarianism in so far as it was often imposed with little parliamentary, let alone popular, participation. The SAPs reinforced the triple crises of legitimation, regulation, and sovereignty for the postcolonial state, on the one hand, and fueled struggles for fundamental transformation on the other, culminating in the crusade for the “second independence” as the increasingly pauperized middle classes and the working masses rose in defiance against the tottering leviathan, reenergized old and new civil society organizations emerged from underground, and as opposition parties resurfaced from the political wilderness.
The Birth Pangs of Democratic Developmentalism
The transition to democracy in Kenya started at the turn of the 1990s with the resurgence of civil society organizations.[10] These included non-governmental organizations, many supported by western donors, that had emerged to address the social crises engendered by structural adjustment; religious movements both old and new; the women’s movement coalesced around new organizations that espoused more radical feminist agendas; and the youth movement that encompassed groups and activities ranging from youth wings to vigilante groups such as Mungiki, and student activism on university and college campuses.[11]
It was in this climate that the opposition political parties emerged. They were comprised of disaffected renegades from KANU keen to regain their access to the spoils of state power, civil society activists committed to reforming the political system, and underground militants ready to challenge the regime openly. As the struggles for democratization intensified, western donors rediscovered the virtues of good governance and minimalist democracy and sought to channel the process by increasing political conditionalities for loans prior to the elections of 1992 and 1997 and tempering the demands of the opposition during electoral intervals. Although the opposition won the majority in both elections, President Moi was returned to office with 36.3% of the vote in 1992 and 40.1% in 1997 because the splintered opposition had fielded several candidates.[12]
The failure to dislodge KANU from power in the two elections showed the limits of the civil society organizations and opposition parties. But KANU’s concession to multiparty politics and revision of key constitutional provisions demonstrated their increasing strength and the crumbling of the authoritarian order. The pro-democracy movement suffered from the lack of clear objectives, failure to articulate a unifying ideology, crisis of leadership, inability to mobilize and retain devoted followers, and dependency on external resources, which compromised their autonomy and made them vulnerable to state attacks on their ‘patriotism’.
More specifically, the opposition parties were riven by factionalism, ethnocentrism, and the egotistical ambitions of their founders, and debilitated by low levels of institutionalization, internal democracy, shortages of resources, and the inability to define distinctive party policies and programs. This proved perilous in the face of continued dominance by the ruling party and its capacity to harass, intimidate, co-opt members of the opposition, and sponsor ethnic clashes to undermine the appeal of multiparty politics and terrorize opposition supporters. In 1992, ethnic clashes ravaged the Rift Valley and in 1997 the coastal province. Altogether, 2,000 people were killed and 500,000 displaced; more than in the 2007-8 violence.
In the 2002 general elections, the opposition parties banded together into the National Rainbow Coalition (NARC), which finally dislodged KANU from office, bringing to an end nearly 40 years of KANU rule. Kenyans were electrified by the possibilities of the new era, by the tantalizing possibilities of constructing a new democratic developmentalist state. The early signs seemed promising as political and civil freedoms expanded and the economic stagnation of the Moi years receded; the country’s economic growth rate jumped from 0.6% in 2002 to 6.1% in 2006. Buoyed by this robust growth, the government unveiled its ambitious Kenya Vision 2030, a development blueprint to turn Kenya into a newly industrializing “middle income country providing high quality of life for all its citizens by the year 2030.” This represented the fourth phase of postcolonial Kenya’s development strategy that sought to reprise the ambitions of the first two and redress the lessons of the third.
But the euphoria did not last. NARC collapsed over broken promises contained in a secret memorandum of understanding signed before the election among the coalition partners. Although the next five years saw the growth of both democracy and the economy, the marriage between democracy and development remained unfulfilled. The chickens came home to roost following the disputed elections of 2007. The closeness of the elections and corruption of the electoral commission proved a combustible mix. When the results were hurriedly announced on the night of December 30 in favor of the incumbent, President Kibaki, over the main opposition leader, Raila Odinga, the country exploded. Riots erupted spontaneously, followed by ethnic vigilantism, opportunistic criminal violence, and excessive use of force by the police.[13]
Media reports blamed the violence on the proverbial “tribalism” of African politics, while scholars distinguished ‘moral ethnicity’ as a complex web of social obligations and belonging from ‘political ethnicity’ as the competitive confrontation of ‘ethnic contenders’ for state power and national resources and faulted the latter.[14] Both are socially constructed, but one as an identity, the other as an ideology. The apparent ethnic clashes were not about primordial identities, but for claim-making in the present and the future. Ethnicity had become more salient as political fission intensified and the political class became more fractured due to the very advent and limits of multiparty democracy. It also reflected the failures of the new dispensation to resolve the enduring legacies of colonial and postcolonial uneven regional development.
It is often forgotten that since 1992 no president has won through the mobilization of his ethnic vote alone. This underscores the fluidity and complexity of ethnic political affiliations.[15] Underneath the regional and ethnic cleavages, there were also deepening social inequalities following more than two decades of neoliberalism. Kenya’s economic recovery from 2002 largely benefited the middle classes rather than the workers and peasants. Even among the middle classes, the benefits flowed unequally between those in the rapidly expanding private service sectors rather than in the retrenched public sectors. If the economic growth after 2002 stoked expectations of development, the unequal distribution of wealth thwarted those expectations and engendered popular frustration, while the democratic opening gave a new vent to express the frustrations.
In the authoritarian past there was no political alternative to the one-party state, now the discontented electorate could transfer its hopes for development to the opposition, even if that investment did not promise to yield different dividends. This manifested itself in rapidly shifting party alliances and affiliations among politicians who made up what they lacked in coherent programs in populism and clientelism. In short, the expansion of democratic space led to rising expectations that were increasingly frustrated and manipulated by politicians entrenched in the divisive politics of ethno-regional mobilization. Class is not always a reliable predictor of political loyalties and voting behavior even in the so-called developed countries. It acquires its political potency once it is latched onto the powerful affective identities of ethnicity or race. Not surprisingly, the epicenter of the violence was the Rift Valley, stoked by land conflicts between the Kalenjin ‘indigenes’ and Kikuyu ‘settlers,’ and the shantytowns of Nairobi and Kisumu where ethnic militias and criminal gangs terrorized rival communities.
Unlike the pre-election violence of 1992 and 1997, in 2007 Kenya was engulfed by post-election violence. The two were connected in so far as in the 1990s the beleaguered Moi regime had orchestrated militia violence against the opposition, which led to the gradual decentralization and privatization of violence that engulfed the country in 2007-08.[16] The crisis reflected both the population’s yearnings for democracy and their bitter disappointment in the country’s weak institutional capacities to deliver a clean election. Kenya was reaping from the failure of constitutional reform since the 1990s, in which the institutional arrangements of the old authoritarian order remained largely intact save for minimal procedural changes. This stifled the growth of democratization and widened the gap between the needs and aspirations of the population and the capacity and willingness of the political class to address them.[17]
The Postelection Violence Aftermath: Power Sharing and Constitutional Reforms
The post-election violence rocked the economy and shocked Kenyans, civil society, donors, and the international community into action. Mediation efforts led by the African Union Panel of Eminent African Personalities resulted in the Kenya National Dialogue and Reconciliation Process and a power sharing agreement between Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement and Kibaki’s Party of National Union. “This signaled a little noticed shift,” notes one author, “For at least two decades, democracy promotion and foreign aid emphasized the importance of building political institutions. Suddenly new postelection pacts put peace before process.”[18] Calling this a process of power sharing is too generous, for it “has condemned opposition parties to accept inferior positions within the government, despite their success at the ballot box.”[19] Certainly, the Kenyan agreement “focused on institutional engineering, and failed to address root causes of conflict such as land tenure and human rights abuses.”[20]
Nevertheless, the power sharing agreement ended the violence as Odinga joined the multiparty government as prime minister and his top lieutenants joined as ministers and assistant ministers. This proved enough to calm the violence, but it was clear that underlying issues would have to be addressed, which Kenya’s constitution was incapable of doing. Fundamental issues surrounding citizenship, representation, and land needed to be examined and solutions found not just for presidential elections, but also for the entire electoral, judicial, and political system. The struggle was on to draft a new constitution, led by the protagonists of the 2007 post-electoral crisis, President Kibaki and Prime Minister Odinga. Their close partnership reprised the Kenyatta-Odinga and Kikuyu-Luo alliance of the decolonization era. Kibaki sought to burnish his legacy as the ‘Father of the second Republic’, while Odinga wished to jump-start his claim to the 2013 presidential elections.
The new constitution went a long way to address many of the challenges that had bedeviled Kenya since independence, including curtailing the authoritarian powers of the “imperial presidency.”[21] Three features stand out. First, it entrenches a bill of rights in which all the so-called three generations of rights (civil and political, social and economic, and solidarity rights that include development and environmental rights) are recognized. Second, it lays out a clear separation of powers between the executive, legislature, and judiciary and their respective limitations. Parliament is expanded to include the National Assembly and the Senate representing the counties. The electorate is given the right of recall. The president is limited to two terms and can be removed on grounds of incapacity or by impeachment. His power to nominate cabinet secretaries, the attorney general, director of public prosecutions, and the chief justice and deputy chief justice is subject to parliamentary approval. Third, the constitution entrenches the principles and structures of devolved government. It creates 47 county governments each with an executive and an assembly headed by an elected governor and deputy governor who are also subject to removal for violation of the Constitution, abuse of office, criminal acts, or incapacity.[22]
The Bumpy Road to the Second Republic
The March 2013 general election was the first under the new constitution. Important institutional reforms have been made that give room for cautious optimism. The reforms included the use of biometric voting registration, a new two-round voting system to ensure the winning presidential candidate garnered fifty percent plus one and twenty-five percent of the vote in at least half of the new counties, and the provision to post results immediately outside each polling station. Also, both the judiciary led by the indefatigable human rights campaigner, Chief Justice Willy Mutunga, and the Independent Elections and Boundaries Commission are more independent and far more robust than their predecessors.[23] Moreover, both Kenyans and the world were watching through five international monitoring missions and Kenya’s own Elections Observation Group, a consortium of civil society organizations and other stakeholders created in 2010, which planned to deploy 30,000 observers and conduct parallel vote tabulation.
Casting a shadow over the 2013 elections was the question of the prosecution of the perpetrators of the post-election violence in 2007-08. When it became clear that the new coalition government did not have the political will or wherewithal to bring the perpetrators to justice, the International Criminal Court intervened and charges of crimes against humanity were brought against six individuals. It is of crucial importance that two of the people who were indicted are on the presidential ticket—Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto, leaders of the Jubilee Alliance. While the Kenyatta-Ruto alliance promised to potentially suppress the Kikuyu-Kalenjin conflict that plunged the Rift Valley into some of the worst postelection violence, a victory by them threatened to plunge the country into the unchartered waters of international isolation and even sanctions while some feared their loss could unleash forces of destabilization. Opinion polls suggested the election was too close to call. If no candidate won in the first round, a run-off election would be held in April 2013 at the same time that Kenyatta and Ruto were scheduled to go on trial at the ICC. Whatever the outcome of the ICC case, the issue of seeking justice for those who in 2007-08 suffered from police, gang, criminal, military, and individual violence stood to continue haunting whoever assumed power after April 2013.
Thus, despite a new constitution with many important reforms some of the deep-seated issues that undergirded the 2008 post-election violence remained. Indeed, there were disturbing signs of communal violence in several regions over land and water rights. According to Human Right Watch, “already in 2012 and early in 2013 inter-communal clashes in parts of Kenya have claimed more than 477 lives. Another 118,000 people have been displaced.” [24] It was an open secret that several communities throughout the country were arming themselves vowing not to be caught off guard as they were in 2008. What made this even more troubling than the 2008 violence was that communities were better equipped to defend themselves as they acquired weapons from Uganda, Somalia, and Ethiopia. Although the government banned hate speech, it was difficult to eradicate it especially with the use of social media and the Internet. Another problem that remained unsolved centered around the failure to resettle and reintegrate the hundreds of thousands of people who were left internally displaced following the post-election violence of 2007-08. Many of them were Kalenjin who complained that the Kibaki government had not done enough to secure housing for them compared to the Kikuyu, the President’s ethnic group.
The issue of the police and security continues to worry human rights activists and other members of civil society. As stated earlier, many of the deaths that occurred following the 2007 elections were attributed to the police and there was no guarantee that the March 2013 and a possible run off in April would not spark violence and the police and security could be reigned in to protect citizens instead of killing them. The security forces in some areas were accused of stoking ethnic tensions. At the same time, the police and military came under fire from armed gangs and criminal groups who put their support solidly behind certain politicians. To quote Human Rights Watch again, “the common theme, however, is the unwillingness of the government and other state authorities since the post-election violence of 2007-2008 to address the root causes of the violence, reform the police, tackle official corruption, disband criminal groups, resettle displaced persons, and hold accountable the many perpetrators of the violence.”[25]
Clearly, since the dawn of the era of multiparty democracy in the early 1990s, Kenya has experienced many bumps in the road to the construction of a democratic developmental state. Elections have served as important barometers of the challenges and possibilities of this complex and protracted transition. The elections in 1992, 1997, 2002, and 2007 were a testament to the citizens’ wish for accountability, transparency, and representation, while the accompanying disputes and violence were a testimony to the incapacity of the political class to fulfill such wishes. The scale of the 2007-2008 post-election violence was particularly shocking. If 2007 marked the nadir of the deferred dreams of the “First Republic,” 2010 represented the possible birth of the “Second Republic” based on inclusive citizenship, good governance, devolution of power, and more equitable development.
Thus, the crisis of 2007-08 led to the constitution of 2010. In short, the possibilities of democracy and development promised by the new constitutional dispensation were incubated in the violent maelstrom two and half years earlier, a development few could have predicted. The election of 2013 will tell how far the country has traveled and has yet to travel in its journey towards democracy and development, towards entrenching a political culture of accountability and an economic system in which economic growth fosters social inclusion and wellbeing for the majority of Kenya’s people not just the elite.
About the Author
Cassandra R. Veney is Associate Professor of Political Science at Loyola Marymount University who specializes on politics, human rights and refugees in East Africa. Her numerous publications include Forced Migration in Eastern Africa: Democratization, Structural Adjustment, and Refugees.
Paul Tiyambe Zeleza is Presidential Professor of History and African American Studies and Dean of the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts at Loyola Marymount University. His most recent book is In Search of African Diasporas: Testimonies and Encounters.
Endnotes
See Peter Kagwanja and Roger Southall, “Preface,” Journal of Contemporary African Studies 27, 3 (2009): 259.
See the following, Thandika Mkandawire, “Thinking about Developmental States in Africa,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 25 (2005): 289–314; Robinson Mark and White Gordon, eds., The Democratic Developmental State: Political and Institutional Design (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); and Omano Edigheji, “A Democratic Developmental State in Africa? A Concept Paper,” Centre for Policy Studies, Johannesburg, May 2005.
For a detailed examination of this subject see, Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, “The Historic and Humanistic Agendas of African Nationalism: A Reassessment,” in Toyin Falola and Salah Hassan, eds., Power and Nationalism in Modern Africa (Durham, North Carolina: Carolina Academic Press, 2008): 37-53.
For a more elaborate discussion see of this periodization see Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, “The African Renaissance and Challenges of Development in the 21st Century,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 29, 2 (2009): 155-170.
The factionalization of politics among the Kenyan nationalists reflected deep divisions about their respective visions of the postcolonial state, economy, and society. The questions of land redistribution and the allocation of power loomed particularly large. Key contexts concerned the future role of the European settlers and the ideological rivalries Cold War. See, Donald Rothchild, Racial Bargaining in Independent Kenya: A Study of Minorities and Decolonization (New York, Oxford University Press, 1973); Gary Wasserman, Politics of Decolonization: Kenya Europeans and the Land Issue 1960-1965 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976); William Ochieng’ and Bethwell A. Ogot, eds., Decolonization & Independence In Kenya: 1940-93 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1996); and David Percox, Britain, Kenya and the Cold War: Imperial Defense, Colonial Security and Decolonization (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2004).
The dynamics of Kenya’s politics in the early post-independence years from the vantage point of the elites, peasants, and workers is covered in Cherry Gertzel, The Politics of independent Kenya, 1963-8 (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1970); Geoff Lamb, Peasant Politics in Kenya (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1974); and Richard Sandbrook, Proletarians and African Capitalism: The Kenya Case, 1960-1972 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975).
Many of the influential studies of Kenya’s economy during this period were written from dependency and Marxist perspectives. They include Nicola Swainson, The Development of Corporate Capitalism in Kenya 1918-1977 (Berkeley: U of California Press, 1980); Colin Leys, Underdevelopment in Kenya: The Political Economy of Neo-Colonialism, 1964-1971 (London: Heinemann, 1975); and Gavin Kitching, Class and Economic Change in Kenya: The Making of an African Petite-Bourgeoisie, 1905-1970 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980).
Kenya’s political economy during these turbulent years is well captured in the works of Michael Schatzberg, The Political Economy of Kenya (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1987); Angelique Haugerud, The Culture of Politics in Modern Kenya (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and David Himbara, Kenyan Capitalists, the State, and Development (Boulder: L. Rienner Publishers, 1994).
Among the best monographs on structural adjustment, see Kwame Akonor, Africa and IMF Conditionality: The Unevenness of Compliance, 1983-2000 (New York: Routledge, 2006); Thandika Mkandawire and Adebayo Olukoshi, Between Liberalisation and Oppression: The Politics of Structural Adjustment in Africa (Dakar: Codesria Book Series, 1995); and David Sahn, et al., Structural Adjustment Reconsidered: Economic Policy and Poverty in Africa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
For perceptive accounts of struggles for and transition to democracy in Kenya, see Godwin Murunga and Shadrack W. Nasong’o, Kenya: The Struggle for Democracy (Dakar: Codesria Books and Zed Press, 2007); Paul Kaise and Wafula Okumu, eds., Democratic Transitions in East Africa (Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2004); Makau Mutua, Kenya’s Quest for Democracy: Taming Leviathan (Boulder, CO: L. Rienner Publishers, 2008).
For intriguing analyses of Mungiki, see Peter Kagwanja, “Facing Mount Kenya or Facing Mecca? The Mungiki, Ethnic Violence and the Politics of the Moi Succession in Kenya, 1987–2002,” African Affairs 102, 406 (2003): 25-49; and David Anderson, “ Vigilantes, Violence, and the Politics of Public Order in Kenya,” African Affairs 102, 405 (2002): 531-555.
For extensive studies of these elections, see Marcel Rutten and Alamin Mazrui, Out for the Count: The 1997 General Elections and Prospects for Democracy in Kenya (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 2001); and David Throup and Charles Hornsby, Multi-Party Politics in Kenya: The Kenyatta and Moi States and the Triumph of the System in the 1992 Elections (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1995).
For attempts to categorize the different types of violence and its perpetrators, see Njoki S. Ndungu, “Kenya: The December 2007 Election Crisis,” Mediterranean Quarterly 19, 4 (2008): 111-121; and Adam Ashford, “Ethnic Violence and the Prospects for Democracy in the Aftermath of the 2007 Kenyan Elections,” Public Culture 21, 1 (2009): 9-19.
For various views on the concept of ‘moral’ and ‘political’ ethnicities, see Dickson Eyoh, “Community, citizenship and the politics of ethnicity in postcolonial Africa,” in Ezekiel Kalipeni and Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, eds., Sacred Spaces and Public Quarrels: African Cultural and Economic Landscapes (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1999): 271-300; John Lonsdale, “Moral Ethnicity and Political Tribalism,” Kenya Imagine, April 21, 2008 http://www.kenyaimagine.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1338&catid=266:international&Itemid=128 accessed February 15, 2013; and Jacqueline Klopp, “Can Moral Ethnicity Trump Political Tribalism? The Struggle for Land in Kenya.” African Studies 61, 2 (2002): 269-294.
For a vigorous account of this see the much circulated essay by Wachira Maina, “Kenyans Don’t Always Vote Tribally,” The Star http://www.the-star.co.ke/news/article-109270/kenyans-dont-always-vote-tribally accessed February 28, 2013.
See, Suzanne D. Mueller, “Dying to Win: Elections, Political Violence, and Institutional Decay in Kenya,” Journal of Contemporary African Studies 29, 1 (2011): 99-117; and Marcel Rutten and Sam Owuor, “Weapons of Mass Destruction: Land, Ethnicity and the 2007 Elections in Kenya,” Journal of Contemporary African Studies 27, 3 (2009): 305-324.
The following studies explore these developments in informative details, Lahra Smith, “Explaining violence after recent elections in Ethiopia and Kenya,” Democratization 16, 5 (2009): 867-897; Sebastian Elischer, “Ethnic Coalitions of Convenience and Commitment: Political Parties and Party Systems in Kenya,” German Institute of Global and Area Studies, Working Papers No. 68, 2008.
Carl A. LeVan, “Power Sharing and Inclusive Politics in Africa’s Uncertain Democracies,” Governance: An International Journal of Policy, Administration, and Institutions 24, 1 (2011): 31.
Nic Cheeseman and Blessings-Miles Tendi, “Power-sharing in Comparative Perspective: The Dynamic of ‘Unity Government’ in Kenya and Zimbabwe,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 48, 2 (2010): 225.
Andreas Mehler, “Peace and Power Sharing in Africa: A Not So Obvious Relationship,” African Affairs 108, 432 (2009): 470.
Government of Kenya, The Constitution of Kenya 2010 http://www.kenyalaw.org/klr/fileadmin/pdfdownloads/Constitution_of_Kenya__2010.pdf accessed February 15, 2013.
See, Migai Akech, “Institutional Reform in the New Constitution of Kenya,” International Center for Transitional Justice,” http://www.ictj.org/sites/default/files/ICTJ-Kenya-Institutional-Reform-2010-English.pdf accessed February 15, 2013.
As might be expected, there is a lot of commentary on how the elections might go in the domestic and international press. For more reflective commentaries, see Mwangi Kimenyi, “Kenya at a Tipping Point: The 2013 Presidential Election,” The Brookings Institute, http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/reports/2013/01/foresight%20africa/foresight_kimenyi_2013.pdf accessed February 15, 2013; The Economist, Don’t mention the war, March 2, 2013;
Human Rights Watch, High Stakes: Political Violence and the 2013 Elections in Kenya, p.1, http://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/kenya0213webwcover.pdf accessed February 15, 2003; also see Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect,” The March 2013 Elections in Kenya and the Responsibility to Protect,” http://www.globalr2p.org/media/files/march-2013-elections-in-kenya-and-r2p-4.pdf accessed February 15, 2013.
Human Rights Watch, High Stakes, p.1.