Theater scholar Gĩchingiri Ndĩgĩrĩgĩ writes that in 1991, at the height of the clamour for multi-partyism, the government denied a license for the staging of a play “Drumbeats of Kirinyaga,” by Oby Obyerodhiambo.

​The reason given was that the play portrayed an ethnically diverse and politically cohesive Kenya, which contradicted the president’s argument at the time that Kenya was too ethnically divided for multi-partyism.
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While President Moi was claiming to care for Kenyans who are too tribal, his government was ironically also suppressing any public display of Kenyans transcending their tribal identities. The government needed to encourage tribalism among Kenyans in order to give itself something to cure.

​In the last few days, in the run up of the repeat “election” that takes place today, the business community has gone full throttle in bombarding Kenyans with the idea that the elections have cost the economy too much. The latest in this messaging came from the Kenya Private Sector Alliance, which released a statement saying that 700bn shillings have been lost over the last four months. In other words, democracy is too expensive for Africans.

​Similarly, it is clear that the US, its embassy and media, have taken the side of the current government, although with less subtlety than the business community. The US Ambassador’s statements, for example, suggest that Kenyans should not set a high standard for Kenya’s electoral body, and instead be grateful that we’ve come this far in the democratic process.

As the world moves on after Kenya’s stunning stamp on democracy, namely the nullification of an election of an incumbent president, we Kenyans have been subjected to drama na vindeo from State House. After a cleaner version of “I don’t agree but I accept,” clearly targeted at an international audience, the off-the cuff version of Uhuru’s disbelief was displayed before crowds where an apparently inebriated president called the Supreme Court judges “wakora.”

​Unfortunately for the president, the Chief Justice, now a hero, comes from an ethnic community which NASA have argued was one of the areas where the voting tally is largely suspicious. So in order to back track and appeal for their vote, he had to explain why he was displaying such unpresidential behavior at one of their own. His explanation? I’m only human.

Reflections on the tyranny of evidence (LONG READ)

​In January 2008, at the height of the post election violence, I penned a blog post, then at Zeleza Post, in which I voiced my shock at seeing African intellectuals justifying the violence in the country. In that post, I intended to argue that whatever political side we were sympathetic to, our obligation as intellectuals was to affirm freedom and life. For that reason, I said, it was possible to defend life and argue that no election, no matter how flawed, was worth the loss of life.

To my shock, I was attacked for taking PNU's side. One academic, not a Kenyan, even attacked me as a “Kibaki intellectual” and seemed to have been so bothered to find out my ethnicity, but not my gender, because he kept referring to me as “he.” ​That blog post has entered academic studies on Kenya’s post-election violence of 2007 as evidence of how intellectuals offered “problematic” support for election rigging. 

​Never in my life, did I imagine that in the name of democracy, a massive fraud would be committed against the Kenyan people with the participation of the international community. The Kenyatta oligarchy, having bought the complicity of the international community through inviting them to buy into the privatization of our schools and hospitals, turned against the Kenyan people and made international players like UNDP, John Kerry and the Carter Center cheer them along. Never has the victory of racism been so complete in Kenya. It has made the world expect so little of Africans that they do not care whether the freedom we have is genuine, or whether the elections are fairly done.