Nick Wadhams

Scenes from Kenya's election

Violence across Kenya today, except for downtown Nairobi, after the presidential election. Some pictures:

Here was the scene at the electoral commission headquarters just before chaos erupted when the chairman tried to read out the results declaring Kibaki the winner on Sunday.

Police ring Uhuru Park on Monday in expectation of an opposition rally that never happened because opposition did not want to get roughed up. The police would not let me take a picture any closer up, but those heavily padded uniforms are brand new (purchased just in time for the elections, presumably). Interesting to me, at least, a quarter of the police I saw in the padding were women.

Opposition leader Raila Odinga, who won lost the election, consults with the Canadian ambassador at the Intercontinental Hotel before speaking with the press on Monday afternoon. He's the one in the tan jacket looking at the camera.

I guess if you're a tourist stuck in a country experiencing total meltdown, you have to do SOMETHING.

All wrong

President Kibaki was just sworn in for a second term in a farcical little ceremony transmitted live by the television cameras up the road at his residence. A few hours later, the government banned live television broadcasts indefinitely. A few hours before, the electoral commission announced Kibaki had beat his rival, Raila Odinga, by 200,000 votes.

I was skeptical at first about the claims of vote-rigging, but the final results make it look pretty obvious. Early official tallies read out before the European Union were later revised to reflect "previously uncounted" votes for the president. Election officers with the ballot boxes went dark for hours at a time, refusing to answer their cell phones. Results from Kibaki strongholds that had been delayed for days came out in a flood in the last few hours, and he just managed to nip Odinga.

The sham that was Kenya's election makes me wonder if all of us media hacks read the country's politics wrong. Before the vote, the one thing you seemed to be able to say about Kenya was that it had made great political strides since the era of Daniel arap Moi, a vote rigger par excellence. And this year's vote seemed to have gone so well -- massive turnout, lots of corrupt politicians given the boot, minimal violence on the day.

But this whole post-election charade, capped by Kibaki's hasty swearing-in before loyalists applauding politely and making wisecracks as the slums erupted with rage, makes me think that's not quite true. Last time around, in 2002, he was sworn in before a jubilant crowd of hundreds of thousands in Uhuru Park. Not this time. The man himself hasn't given a press conference in five years and is of dubious health, but his cronies now seem well in control. The violence will probably die down in a couple of days and things will go back to normal, but the luster is gone. Kenya has changed.

Kenyan Elections

Kenya's elections are coming down to the wire. As of Saturday afternoon, the opposition candidate, Raila Odinga, had 4.3 million votes to 4 million for President Mwai Kibaki. Most disturbing has been the delay in announcing results from Kibaki strongholds. That has led to claims that Kibaki's cronies are cooking the books in a vote that has otherwise been praised as free and fair.

The delays seem suspicious, but Odinga's campaign seems eager to raise the anxiety level at every opportunity. His team is calling for calm, but its actions don't seem to back that up. It has declared him the winner even though several hundred thousand votes remain to be counted.

Clearly the opposition feels that if it does not raise hell now, the vote-rigging will be allowed to proceed. But it has also encouraged the feeling among its followers that a loss by Odinga will itself be evidence of a rigged vote. That seems dangerous.

In the meantime, sporadic violence and looting have broken out across the country, though it remains to be seen if this is standard election unrest or the start of something really bad. The police have blocked almost all the roads leading into downtown Nairobi so the place feels like an abandoned movie set. Saturday afternoons are usually pretty quiet, but you can practically see the tumbleweeds in these pictures.

Counterfeiting in Somalia

My wife Zoe is just back from Somalia, where, among other things, she picked up a little of the local currency. Counterfeiting is rife in Somalia, and these bills prove it. No one seems to mind particularly that various bills have different coloring. A 'thousand shilin soomaali' is worth about five cents and coffee is paid with stacks of bils.

The differences are more obvious when the bills are in your hands, but this picture gives a sense of it. These bills are not faded or particularly old (though the middle one is stained).

Here's a closeup of the woman on the right. The differences, particularly between the middle picture and the other two, seem pretty stark.

And below is the reverse image of two bills. Completely different colors!

The Joys of Photoshop: Presidential Edition

Slap Happy

President Mwai Kibaki's wife slapped a man in a rather public place a little while back, and something about the way it was reported seemed interesting.

The story was this: At an Independence Day event attended by Kibaki and his wife Lucy, the master of ceremonies referred to Lucy Kibaki as "first lady Mama Lucy Wambui," a slip that will no doubt haunt him to the end of his days.

That's because Mary Wambui is Kibaki's other wife, a woman who is widely known but never referred to as such.

Security agents hustled the MC off stage and then collected all the film from journalists who recorded the slap. Kibaki’s government didn’t want Lucy’s antics all over the news during election time, and he does not address the issue of “Mary Wambui,” even though she is reported to live well in a guarded compound north of Nairobi, has said before that she's Kibaki's wife, and gave birth to a daughter who says Kibaki is her father.

More Ads!

Couldn't resist a couple more campaign ads, including Kibaki's endorsement from the USA!

You will need a bucket or wipe box

The other day, I set out to prove the hypothesis that if even the most insignificant thought has ever occurred to you, people have debated it ad nauseam on the Internet. That hypothesis is true. Yes it is, yes it is, yes it is.

P.S. Another hypothesis proven to be true: People are bonkers. Quote of the century: "You will need a bucket or wipe box to store the used flannel until you have enough to wash."

Wipe box?

P.P.S. Is this really a necessary Wikipedia entry? And what, no picture? Who writes this stuff?

Campaign ads (Part II)

All of the following campaign ads were in today's Daily Nation newspaper.

Which came first?

The endeavour to develop - even more

President Kibaki reads to school children in a great campaign ad from Saturday's Daily Nation newspaper.

The book is "KAR -- A History of the King's African Rifles," by Malcolm Page, which seems to be holding these kids' attention more than you'd think possible (though the boy on the left does look like he's fading).

The King's African Rifles fought in both World Wars and formed the core of the Kenyan Army after independence.
Nonetheless, the book seems like an odd choice for a campaign ad since the KAR was also used to crush the Mau Mau in the 1950s.