Teetering on the brink

Well, the peace talks have failed. We had the current chair of the African Union, the president of Ghana, here for the past few days, and he ended up going home without brokering an agreement between the president and the opposition party. So far we’ve had him, Desmond Tutu, four former African heads of state, and probably a few others come through to try to mediate for peace. Now there’s talk of brining Kofi Annan in.

The president is really being shrewd and is consolidating his power and making it harder to unseat him through any legal or political means. He named half his cabinet this past week, which entrenches him more and shows that he’s claiming the presidency back even more. Now he can claim, “I’m trying to govern here! Can’t you let me get on with it?” He also appointed another former rival, a man who was a member of another, smaller opposition party running against him as president, as vice president. So the thinking is that by bringing part of the opposition onto his side, if there is a re-election, the president’s party would have slightly less than a majority of the vote (if the “accurate” results are the same as the first election), but then with a candidate from an opposition party in his camp now, he can collect their votes, giving him a clear majority.

So now what? The major opposition party has called for rallies again next week on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. So it looks like we’re in for another week of uncertainty – threats of violence, office and shop closures, staying indoors, etc. But then these rallies end up being canceled.

Meanwhile, the humanitarian crisis across the country continues with hundreds of thousands of people who were forced from their homes by the violence remaining homeless. Yesterday I spent much of the day out again with Church World Service (CWS), an ACT member, who is sponsoring distributions of emergency relief supplies to some of the displaced families from the slums in Nairobi through the Kenya Evangelical Lutheran Church. Yesterday’s trip was for a slightly different purpose. I went with some CWS program staff who work with a partner that works with groups of youth and orphans and women caregivers in the Muthare slum. This is where I went last weekend for the distribution of food. Actually it was just outside the slum because going into the slum was too dangerous. Well, I flirted with danger yesterday by going into the slum (trust me, my hosts asked a lot of questions about who we could go with and where the safest streets were, especially given the fact that another white person and I were among the group – they were afraid we would be mobbed by people desperate for food).

What an eye-opening trip this was! Well, nothing that I saw was really a surprise or new to me (I’ve seen poverty in Africa that looks like this before as well as displaced people). But my mind, rather, is expanding to the additional social consequences this disputed presidential election has brought about from what I heard residents of the slum say yesterday. For the first part of our visit, we talked to some youth (boys and a young man who is 24) about life in the slums and what they think needs to happen – how peace on the streets can be achieved. The more I ponder what he says, the more I realize that this country is on a razor’s edge (and will continue to be for the coming week) from the social/civil-society perspective. I got the impression that things could easily go either way – all-out civil war or genocide or a return to the way Kenyans were living before. We’ve got some elements of the Israel-Palestine situation here. Those with nothing (in the deepest of poverty) have nothing to lose and so will not hesitate to fight and resort to violence to try to gain something – anything – not necessarily for their benefit, but for their country’s benefit. I caught a glimpse, as these youth have as well, of a country that could so easily go down the tubes and how painful it is to see your country turn and in such a short period of time. This is what has happened to all of the countries around it practically – but this was never supposed to happen with Kenya.

So the whole world knows from what it’s seeing in the media that political solutions at the top levels of the government need to be found. But how this country can go on at a social level (it’s now largely a conflict between tribes) makes the political solutions seem almost easy. This larger issue is something I almost don’t want to think about. It’s too big and too complex and would be too devastating and have widespread, dire consequences for this whole country (and region of Africa).

I’ll post the feature article I will write for ACT about this work with youth in the slums when I finish it.