BLOOMINGTON, Minn. – Maina Kiai, the chairman of Kenya National Commission on Human Rights, said Saturday that hoped President Mwai Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga, who recently signed agreement to share power, would focus on replacing a constitution he said expired years ago.

Kiai was addressing Kenyan-born residents of Minnesota and their friends, who flocked the Sheraton Hotel in Bloomington to hear a first-hand account of the post-election violence that led to the death of over 1,000 Kenyans and the displacement of an estimated 300,000 others. While the violence shocked Kenyans abroad and the international community, Kiai said the signs had been there for many years.

 “It was bound to happen,” Kiai said.

Kiai attributed the violence to a constitution that allows a winner-take-all political system, which raised the stakes and made politicians more willing to incite Kenyans to kill each other.

“Kenya’s constitution was like milk with a sell-by date,” Kiai said. “That date was in 2002. For five years we have been drinking spoilt milk and in December it gave us diarrhea,” he added, as his audience applauded with laughs and cheers.

Kiai cautioned Kenyan against laying all their hopes in a political deal made by competing politicians, but instead pressure Kibaki and Odinga to put Kenyans first. He cited the response former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan gave when Kiai thanked him for brokering the peace deal because “when two elephants fight, it is the grass that hurts.”

“Anna told me, ‘At the same time, when these same elephants make love, the grass hurts too!’” Kiai said amid laughter. “We have to make sure they don’t make love too much.”

Kiai said he hoped that the “co-presidency” agreement would create a functioning Parliament that would shepherd reform. He advised the unity government to have not more than 25 ministries with a balanced portfolio where ministers and permanent secretaries alternated between parties.

Organized violence

Citing the burning of a church in Eldoret that left an estimated 50 people dead, and the later vengeful killings in Nakuru by members of the dreaded Mungiki sect, Kiai said it was clear that some leaders were behind it.

“I am not sure if it was pre-planned, but it was organized,” Kiai said.
 
Kiai said that on his visits to mortuaries in Kisumu, Kakamega and Migori, he saw that victims had gun shots wounds on their backs, indicating that they had been shot by police officers as they fled – a gross violation of human rights by the state.
Kiai said the political upheaval and violence that pitted Kenyans against people they had lived with side by side as neighbors also found the Good Samaritan in many Kenyans once the killings had stopped. Even members of Kenya’s middle class, who have come under fire in the past months for detaching themselves from the crisis by hiding in the safety of their suburban homes, came out in droves to donate resources to those affected by the violence.

Peace and reconciliation

Kiai called for a truth and reconciliation commission that would bring to justice the perpetrators of the violence in different parts of the country. He alluded to high ranking politicians in instigating violence and was confident that they would face their day in court. This same commission would be urged to facilitate peace talks between different Kenyan communities. Other things that the commission would include solving Kenya’s land issue, and a national discussion on creating new economic resources for the country’s poor who solely rely on depleting land resources, Kiai said.

In response to Kenyans who contend that such a commission would hurt the country by reviving old pain, Kiai said: “There is no healing without pain. When you have a decaying tooth, you have to go through a painful extraction to avoid an infection that could kill you.”

Several members of the audience expressed concern over the continued violation of human rights as internally displaced persons continue to live in fear for their lives. Some Kenyans continue to live in camps while others have sought refuge in neighboring Uganda and Tanzania. According to news reports at least 50 people have died since the deal was signed two weeks ago. The crisis has left a wound that will take Kenyans a while to heal.

“The crisis has exposed our differences,” Kiai said. “Members of different communities continue to distrust each other.”

MINNEAPOLIS – Rep. Keith Ellison, the first African American from Minnesota to be elected to the U.S. Congress, challenged Liberians in the state to run for political office.
 
Ellison was speaking Saturday at The Cedars Hall in Minneapolis, during the Inaugural Ball of Kerper Dwanyen as the 20th president of Organization of Liberians in Minnesota.

“I am looking forward to a day when a Liberian will get on the ballot and run for political office,” Ellison said.

Rep. Ellison, who served as guest speaker, lauded Liberians and said they are blessed with great gifts. He said Liberia and the United States have a special relationship which dates back to the 1800s.
 
He noted that the name “Liberia” means freedom. He asked Liberians to push for the passing of the “Liberian Permanent Act” to enable their fellow citizens living in the United States under temporary protected status to become permanent residents before expiration of the 18-month extension President George W. Bush granted them in September.

In his inaugural statement, Dwanyen said that OLM had established a political action committee – the Liberian Community Action (LCA) – “to elect Liberian Americans to city council seats” in Brooklyn Center and Brooklyn Park.

The post-election violence was fueled in part by outrage resulting from President Mwai Kibaki’s failure to honor a similar accord with opposition leader Raila Odinga that led to Kibaki’s election in 2002 as Kenya’s fourth head of state.

NAIROBI, Kenya – A few days before Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki and his main opponent Raila Odinga signed the Feb. 29 agreement to share power, it looked as if the country was closer to returning to the post-election ethnic violence that had claimed the lives of more than 1,000 people and left hundreds of thousands more wounded and displaced.

Earlier in the week, it appeared as though Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general who was leading the talks, was going to fail a task he had embarked on more than a month earlier to bring together Kibaki’s Party of National Unity and Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement after the Dec. 27 disputed elections.
 
Violence erupted in many parts of the country on Dec. 30 when the Kenya’s electoral commission declared that Kibaki had won a second term, despite evidence that the tallying of the votes had been seriously flawed.

When Annan, who had been in the country since Jan. 22, emerged from the meeting with both parties to announce that he was suspending the talks, panic spread a cross the country as Kenyans feared that ODM would call for fresh “mass action,” which could have certainly led to riots and more violence. But the former UN chief did not give up; he went to straight to the top by calling a meeting with Kibaki and Odinga. By the end of the week, he had managed to get the two leaders to sit next to each other at a desk outside the Office of the President to sign an agreement to share power.

“This process has reminded us that, as a nation, there are more issues that unite than divide us,” Kibaki said after signing the documents.

Odinga added, “With the signing of this agreement, we have opened a new chapter in our country’s history – from the era or phase of confrontation to the beginning of co-operation.”

A time of merry

After the two leaders signed the agreement, Annan said, "Today we have reached an important stage, but the journey is far from over. The real challenge now is for President Kibaki and honourable Raila Odinga to work together to heal and reconcile this nation, working jointly to implement the reform agenda on which they have agreed, and sustaining the effort until the job is done.”

Celebrations rocked opposition strongholds and other parts of the country as news spread that Odinga and Kibaki had signed a power-sharing deal that would bring an end to the post-election turmoil and political impasse that had engulfed the country for two months. Residents took to the streets of the lakeside city of Kisumu to as motorists hooted to celebrate the good news. In the coastal city of Mombasa, celebration was the same soon after the deal was signed. Revellers, singing and dancing, jammed entertainment joints. Tourism businesses, which were severely affected by the violence, were prompt to react.

Some citizens asked the Government to pick a work-free celebration day in the following week to compensate for the New Year’s Day, which Kenyans did not celebrate because the violence began on Dec. 30. Many also commended Odinga for agreeing to work with Kibaki.

In the North Rift, however, there were mixed reactions to the deal. Cheruiyot Ruto, a resident, said the deal was an affront to democracy. But many people called for reconciliation and healing, with others saying that the arrest and prosecution of people suspected to have engaged in violence should stop in order to achieve peace.

Residents praised Annan for his humility, saying that his team had done a commendable job despite opposition from hardliners on both sides.

There was excitement at camps for the displaced in the western district of Trans Nzoia when people received the news. They urged Kibaki and Raila to facilitate their return to their homes.

The agreement between Kibaki and Odinga will see the return of the Office of the Prime Minister, scrapped in 1964 by Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s founding president. The prime minister will supervise all Cabinet ministers and lead the government in Parliament. The arrangement will also provide for a sharing of Cabinet positions based on the strength of parties in the Parliament. The prime minister will be assisted by two deputies, positions that will be shared by PNU and ODM.

The power-sharing deal also stipulates that to fire the prime minister the president must seek consultation from the parties involved. Such a decision must also be put in writing and made in agreement with the prime minister’s party. But the prime minister may be removed by a motion of no confidence in Parliament by a majority vote.

A historical accident

Both parties agreed to work together to ensure that Parliament cements the agreement into the Constitution. When that is completed, the leader of the political party with the largest number of members in Parliament will almost automatically become the prime minister.

Foreign leaders, who had been involved in one way or another in brokering the truce expressed satisfaction with the agreement. Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete, who is also the chairman of the African Union, called the post-election violence a historical accident, adding that it was possible to make it a “thing of the past.” Kikwete, who flew to Nairobi to continue the mediation after hosting U.S. President George W. Bush for four days, said the toil and sweat of the mediation team had been handsomely rewarded.

“This agreement, if implemented fully, will help the people of Kenya,” Kikwete said.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told journalists that Kenya’s leaders had reached a power-sharing agreement that represented a triumph for peace and diplomacy, and a renunciation of the violence that had scarred a country of “such enormous potential.”

 “Common sense has prevailed, and the Kenyan people have the outcome for which they have hoped and prayed,” Brown said. “I applaud the courage that Kenya’s leaders have shown in taking the tough decisions necessary to put Kenya back on the path to the prosperity, democracy and stability which it is so richly deserves.”

Tom Casey, the U.S. State Department deputy spokesman, said the agreement was an important and very positive step forward for Kenya.

“We are very pleased to see that this agreement has been reached,” Casey said.  “We want to see this agreement implemented. We certainly would hope that everyone associated with their (Kibaki’s and Odinga’s) political parties and movements would work with them to support this deal and move it forward.”

Negotiations not over

Although the agreement was good news, it is unclear how President Kibaki and Odinga are going to make it work. There is still a strong rivalry between the two men stemming from the failure of a similar agreement popularly know in Kenya as the MoU or memorandum of understanding. If fact, what led to the bitterness between the two men was their subsequent differences on the agreement signed before the 2002 elections to rally Odinga’s followers behind Kibaki against KANU, the incumbent party.

But there is hope that the involvement of the international community in the brokering and signing of the new accord will force Kibaki and Odinga to put aside their differences for the good of Kenya. If they succeed, the memorable covenant could usher in a new era of reforms that successive regimes had procrastinated over, leading to the post-polls meltdown.

Although Annan left Kenya on March 2, the team of mediators, headed by Nigerian diplomat, Ambassador Oluyemi Adeniji continues with the talks to define the specifics of how it will be implemented to address, land access, injustice, poverty and corruption in government – the main problems that led to the violence.