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Last Tuesday, Nairobi felt like a city awaiting the apocalypse. Streets normally clogged with traffic were eerily quiet. Grocery-store shelves had been largely emptied of supplies. Anxious wealthy residents booked flights out of town, conveniently scheduling their summer vacations to avoid the chaos of a Kenyan national election. The Chinese government, Western private-sector companies, and other foreign investors braced as well. A peaceful vote in Kenya, which is regarded as the most vibrant economic and democratic power in East Africa, could unleash billions of dollars in infrastructure and development contracts.

Kenya has had a long and calamitous history of political violence and corruption since it gained independence from British colonial rule, in 1963. Much of this conflict is rooted in ethnic tensions between different tribes, which many historians attribute, in part, to decades of British colonial rule that intentionally played major tribes against one another. Rich and poor Kenyans alike feared a repeat of the 2007 post-election violence between two of the countrys largest tribes, the Luo and Kikuyu, which killed more than twelve hundred people and displaced more than half a million.

In this years Presidential election, the Kikuyus and Luos were once again competing for the highest office in the land. Uhuru Kenyatta, the incumbent President, is a member of Kenyas largest, and arguably most powerful, ethnic group, the Kikuyu. His opponent, Raila Odinga, is a member of the Luo, who live predominantly in western Kenya. This years race was Odingas fourth bid for Presidency. After each past loss, he has accused his victorious opponents of corruption and fraud. After his loss in 2013, he unsuccessfully challenged the final results in Kenyas Supreme Court, citing the widespread failure of the countrys electronic voting system.

In an effort to insure fairness and prevent renewed violence, Kenyas nonpartisan Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission, known as the I.E.B.C., was tasked with overseeing the countrys voting and tallying processes. But, just a week before the election, the police discovered the tortured and mutilated body of the I.E.B.C.s head of information technology, Chris Msando, on the outskirts of Nairobi.

On election day, throngs of voters across the country waited patiently to fill out their ballots. As I made my way through the crowds, I spoke to people who had woken up as early as 4 A.M. to beat the long lines. Many were fresh-faced young voters, such as Rafael Nyunge, a twenty-three-year-old who hoped that his generation could use their vote to end Kenyas legacy of entrenched tribal politics.

When Im voting, Im expecting change in our country, Nyunge told me. Im not concerned about tribalism. We dont encourage tribalism in Kenya. Right now were voting on how the quality of that leader is and how he or she is good to us.

Election day ended auspiciously, with no reports of major violence and only a handful of irregularities at polling stations. International observers, including former Secretary of State John Kerry and hundreds of others from the United States, European Union, and African Union, hailed the day as a success and said that the voting had run smoothly.

Over all, things went very well, Owora Richard Othieno, a Ugandan observer with the East African Community Election Observer Mission, said. He has observed the past three Kenyan elections and noted that this one had the highest voter turnout. Peaceful. No confrontations.

When the initial results began appearing on Kenyan televisions that evening, showing President Kenyatta in the lead, the mood began to shift. Overnight, Odingas National Super Alliance coalition ( NASA ) released a statement alleging election fraud and hacking of the election commissions electronic system, sowing doubt in the minds of his supporters. NASA claimed that the initial results being sent electronically to the election commission were incorrect, and could be verified only by comparing them with the hand-counted paper tallies coming in from polling stations. The I.E.B.C. rushed to post images of the hand-written forms online as proof.

On Wednesday night, small riots began breaking out in areas with high concentrations of Odinga supporters, in Western Kenya and in slums across Nairobi, with protesters chanting, No Raila, no peace. Kenyan police and government officials cracked down. On the Friday after the election, undercover police officers raided NASA s alternative tallying station and shut it down. Government actions just before the election had also fuelled doubt. Days before the vote, Kenyan officials deported several international analysts working on Mr. Odingas campaign. And the unsolved murder of Msando, the election-board chairman, stoked suspicion of election fraud as well.

I would say the real troubling issues in this election were the death of Chris Msando suspiciously close to the election, given how sensitive that position is, and the harassment of the NASA people, particularly at their tallying centers, a Kenyan human-rights expert told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity. These secret-police goons are seen to operate as though theyre above the law. There is a danger of the country going backwards in terms of political harassment.

The final spark for Mr. Odingas supporters came late on Friday. The election board officially declared President Kenyatta the winner. Violence erupted in Odinga strongholds across the country, and police, heavily armed with tear gas, water cannons, and live ammunition, battled protesters.

In a step that exacerbated suspicion and anger among Odinga supporters, many Kenyan television stations that night aired only footage of jubilant celebrations across the nation. And, the following day, police arrested and harassed international and local journalists covering the protests. The total number of dead remains unknown, but at least twenty-four people, including a young girl, have been killed since election day, according to the nonpartisan Kenya National Commission on Human Rights. The Kenyan Red Cross said that a hundred and eight people had been injured. Kenya, poised to move past ethnic divides and emerge as one of Africas most promising democracies, was behaving like some of its more dictatorial neighbors.

But some signs emerged that electoral reforms, namely devolution, are succeeding. In 2010, Kenya revised its constitution to allocate more power and development funding to local governments. The hope was to place checks and balances on central-government power, and to reduce corruption and encourage voters to consider competence over ethnic affiliation in local races, according to Kenyan political experts.

In Makueni County, in southern Kenya, Governor Kivutha Kibwana gained public attention when he gave local communities the power and funding to implement their own development projects. Kibwana is a prominent human-rights activist and a Harvard graduate. During his last term, he refused to bribe local members of the county assembly for support, an expert told me, and unsuccessfully called for the assembly to be dissolved. Kibwana switched parties this year and ran as an outsider, but he still won, with nearly eighty-eight per cent of the vote. Many of the members of the county assembly who had opposed him were voted out.

During the first devolution cycle, we laid the foundation. On this second cycle of devolution, we will emphasize on development, Kibwana tweeted two days after his election win. One of his supporters responded, We also made sure that you have 100% new faces who we think will support you. But, in other parts of the country, candidates who ran campaigns that did not rely heavily on ethnic affiliation or traditional political parties, including Boniface Mwangi , a photojournalist turned activist who is the countrys best-known critic of established political machines, could not capture enough votes to win.

Nic Cheeseman, a professor of democracy and international development at the University of Birmingham, who was in Kenya for the vote, told me that it was unrealistic to expect an overnight shift in Kenyan politics. Its very difficult to break out of this cycle of mistrust and a cycle of violence, he said. That kind of memory exerts a strong hold. Its going to take incrementally better elections, and Kenyas going to eke up there slowly. Maybe over twenty years it can do it. On Sunday, Odinga addressed huge crowds of supporters. He pledged to remove the government of Kenyatta and encouraged his supporters to skip work on Monday to observe a day of mourning for the dead.

But some Kenyans ignored Odinga and returned to work. Weve [been] resting at home and the little money we have is depleted, Joseph Kirui, a fifty-nine-year-old Uber driver in Nairobi, who decided to work on Monday, told me. He said it was very irresponsible for Odinga to encourage a strike. Because we, the voters, have done our part, so its [up to] them, the politicians, to sort out their issues.

On Wednesday, Odinga held a press conference and announced that he would, in fact, take his challenge to Kenyas Supreme Court, after initially stating that he would not use the legal system. He referred to this years post-election violence and the recent crackdown on civil-society organizations in the days after the vote as evidence of the current governments unfitness to rule. Odinga encouraged Kenyans to keep resisting, albeit peacefully, and to not become sheep who will willingly go along with democracys slaughter.

Cheeseman said that Kenyas traditional politicians were squandering a chance to use the election to move the country forward. I think this is Kenyas wasted opportunity, Cheeseman told me. Because, in contrast to all those other elections, less seems to have gone wrong this time. The question here is why? Why, even when the process is right, can Kenya not seize the opportunity to build public confidence in the state? And thats the Kenyan conundrum.

More here:
Kenyan Democracy's Missed Opportunity - The New Yorker