Election thieves and the beauty of horrible consequences

Alan Tacca

What you need to know:

  • That IT expert at Kenya’s Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission; who killed that man?
  • Why? A little-known man; but in my estimation, that was a huge, huge, huge, crime. Can the questions around Kenya’s annulled presidential election ever be resolved without delving into the mystery around that murder?
  • Why didn’t the international community make a big meal out of that crime?

Washington, New York, London, Berlin, Oslo, Copenhagen, Brussels, Tokyo and so on. We have fellow humans in those centres. When sheltered in their individual privacy, where the issue of political correctness does not arise, I believe many of them pause for a few moments every now and again and think: These Africans, when they set their minds to it, they can be really barbaric.

You are disconcerted, aren’t you? When I write it down like that in a newspaper, which is a public space, you probably wish I had made a more ‘sensitive’ generalisation, some studied liberal assertion signalling optimism about the oneness of mankind rather than despair.

I sometimes read or hear graphic details of how common adversaries or estranged spouses and lovers butcher each other; or a parent mutilates and sets their own child on fire over a minor offence; or the extremes contenders will go to in the competition to capture or to retain political power, and I marvel at the savagery.

All right, these things happen everywhere, and the most gruesome cases recorded in history may not necessarily have been on this continent. But the frequency with which the African repeats these horrors in the 21st Century is frightening. The numbers make barbarism look almost ‘normal’.

I know you are still a bit uncomfortable, and I admit I am exaggerating a little, but you can see that when those ladies and gentlemen in Washington or Brussels or Tokyo sit or think together as the ‘international community’, there is at the back of their minds a lingering fear that if an African leader is not handled carefully, the barbarian in him may explode and embarrass them all. Perhaps more importantly, he may torture and kill many of his fellow citizens.

You have noted the word ‘handled’. Like a big cat. Like a large primate. Like a beast. Capricious and sometimes deadly. Zoo keepers and game wardens are warned to handle them carefully.
That capacity for raw savagery can be turned to one’s advantage. In situations where the dictates of concepts like civil order and democracy seem to threaten the supremacy of whoever happens to be the supreme authority in any territory, the chief can display his teeth. And his guns.

Even if the chief is only vaguely an ally, as long as he fulfils the minimum requirement of not declaring the international community an enemy, then let him deal with his fellow natives more or less as he will. Token objections or expressions of concern over his ways must be balanced by expressions of qualified endorsement or even outright praise.
Precisely because he has the instincts he has, you mess up with him at your peril. And at his people’s peril!
If that code of fear is broken, the African despot is left vulnerable.

Flashback: That IT expert at Kenya’s Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC); who killed that man? Why? A little-known man; but in my estimation, that was a huge, huge, huge, crime.
Can the questions around Kenya’s annulled presidential election ever be resolved without delving into the mystery around that murder?

Why didn’t the international community make a big meal out of that crime?
Leaping over the corpse of that man and marching ahead as if nothing had happened was in effect the very definition of the hypocrisy of the international community.
The ordinary African is caught between that hypocrisy and the cynicism of the continent’s despots, a condition Kenya’s Supreme Court has tinkered with.

When the code of fear is broken, ordinary Africans may of course be confronted by more coordinated action by the continent’s despots, who would be determined to reinstate it. These glorified men – they are almost exclusively men – could, for instance, ‘persuade’ the Kenyan establishment that a generalised disruption of order in Kenya was necessary to drive home the message that you do not fool around with the electoral victory – and the supremacy – of a sitting African president.

Ironically, the international community could also stand on the corpses of the new victims and proclaim that the reason for their original hypocrisy was now fully evident.

Mr Tacca is a novelist, socio-political commentator. [email protected].