The British government has sparked outrage—and applause from right-wing voters—with its new plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda.

The plan applies only to single men, who would be given one-way plane tickets to a country 4,000 miles away, where their asylum claims will be processed. Even if they are granted asylum, the men would not be allowed back to Britain. Rejected applicants will be deported again. The idea is to deter migrants, stop people smugglers, and ultimately end mass immigration. The scheme particularly targets migrants and asylum seekers who cross the English Channel from France in rubber dinghies, after paying a fortune to people traffickers. Some 6,000 people have crossed the channel this way so far this year, almost three times the number that had crossed by this time last year. The migrants largely come from Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Somalia, Myanmar and Venezuela.

The irony is that the controversial plan is the brainchild of Home Secretary Priti Patel, the daughter of Ugandan-Asian immigrants who arrived in Britain in the 1960s. Under her hostile immigration regime, it is highly likely that her own parents would not have been allowed in – something she has admitted. It is also ironic that the government says Rwandan asylum seekers will still be allowed into Britain.

The government is selling this as a great opportunity for migrants to start a new life in a country they call “fundamentally safe and secure”. The reality is that Rwanda is a dictatorship, with a very poor human rights record, intolerant attitudes to LGBTI+ people, and a tendency to crush any kind of dissent. Migrants fleeing detention and torture could now experience further trauma. An earlier deal that Rwanda cut with Israel, between 2014 and 2017, failed; many of the asylum seekers reportedly left Rwanda almost immediately, and used people smugglers to try and return to Europe.

The government has faced increasing pressure from voters to curb immigration. In the Brexit referendum in 2016, after which the UK left the European Union, the “Leave” camp promised to end illegal immigration. But the dangerous channel crossings have risen sharply under Prime Minister Boris Johnson, much to the anger of Tory voters. This new plan was hatched after failed attempts to collaborate with France to stop the boats. Initial costs are projected to be up to £30,000 per migrant, although the actual cost is likely to be much higher. Rwanda will receive £120 million from Britain for “economic development”.

Cynics say this is a distraction and a “dead cat” story, announced just before the May council elections when the Tories fear electoral defeat. Johnson faces leadership challenges, amid fierce criticism of the so-called “partygate” scandal which has seen him, his wife and senior No. 10 staff investigated by the police and fined for breaking COVID lockdown laws.

The United Nations, human rights lawyers, opposition parties and refugee bodies have condemned the plan as criminal, inhumane, cruel, and unworkable. Some leading Tories have also condemned it, notably former ministers Andrew Mitchell and Rory Stewart.

Other reactions

“I think it’s a way of getting rid of people the government doesn’t want, dumping them in a distant African country, and they’d have no chance of getting out of there again,” said Lord Alf Dubs, 89, a Labour peer who sits in the House of Lords. Lord Dubs came to Britain as a child fleeing the Nazis, via the Kindertransport scheme before World War Two, which saved thousands of young Jewish lives. He campaigns on refugee and asylum issues.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, the most senior cleric in the Church of England, condemned the plan in his Easter Sunday sermon. He said it raises “serious ethical questions” and cannot “stand the judgement of God”. In response, Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Minister for Brexit Opportunities, defended the policy as “almost an Easter story of redemption”.

The United Nations, human rights lawyers, opposition parties and refugee bodies have condemned the plan as criminal, inhumane, cruel, and unworkable.

Unions representing civil servants who work at the Home Office warn of mass walkouts and requests for transfer to other government departments if this plan goes ahead. Human rights lawyers and refugee bodies say they will vigorously fight the scheme in the courts. There is also likely to be strong opposition from politicians in both houses of parliament (the Commons and the Lords).

But Brexit voters are thrilled—this is what they voted for. Typical comments posted online in the right-wing media include: “Send them all back to Africa!” … “With the policy all the way! Brilliant plan.” … “The majority [of migrants] are not asylum seekers or refugees but economic migrants who are just jumping the queue illegally.” … “This is the best idea the government have come up with in a long time, make it retrospective and get rid of what is already here, women and children as well, get on with it.” Different reactions on Twitter include this: “The Rwandan one-way ticket scheme is rooted in the fundamentally racist notion that all black people are ‘the same’ and can simply ‘get sent back’ to Africa.”

Meanwhile, British people have largely welcomed government plans to bring Ukrainian refugees to the UK, at least temporarily. Perceptions of the cross-channel migrants as black and Muslim (many are neither) are compared to nice white Christian Ukrainians who “share our culture”. (In fact, Ukraine has one of the largest Jewish populations outside Israel.)

Antecedents

Britain has form when it comes to deportation. Most famously, more than 162,000 convicts were deported to Australia between 1788 and 1868, the majority for petty crimes such as stealing a sheep, cutting down a tree or poaching. In the early 18th century, it also deported convicts to the American colonies to work; the alternative was execution. Once freed, many of the ex-convicts in Australia stayed there and joined the free settlers. Some rose to prominent positions in society.

British people have largely welcomed government plans to bring Ukrainian refugees to Britain, at least temporarily.

On a much smaller scale, in colonial East Africa the British punished Africans they considered dangerous by sending them into internal exile. They fell into three main groups: political figures like Harry Thuku and Samuel Muindi Mbingu; convicted witches/sorcerers; and prophets or other religious figures. The last group included the Maasai prophet Senteu, half-brother to Paramount Chief Olonana, who was deported to North Nyeri, the Samburu prophet Leaduma (sent first to the coast, then Embu, where he died), and Kamba anti-colonial prophet Ndonye wa Kauti (deported to Lamu). Thuku and Senteu were allowed home; Mbingu, Leaduma and Ndonye were not. A few “undesirable” whites were also deported overseas.

Who would ever have guessed that, decades later, post-colonial Britain would be planning to deport thousands of “undesirables” to the middle of Africa?

Genocide victims made homeless

In an exclusive front-page splash headlined “Priti heartless”, Britain’s Mirror newspaper reported that former genocide victims living in the Hope Hostel in Kigali have been ousted to make way for the migrants. Patel was pictured touring the hostel this week with Rwandan officials, after striking the controversial deal. It was a shelter for traumatised orphans, who are now adults. “I barely know any other home. I was only told about moving out a few days ago,” said one woman.

Rwandans react

In Rwanda and across East Africa, the news that Rwanda is set to receive UK migrants has been received with an unprecedented level of incredulity. In part, this is to do with the fact that the first Rwandans learned of the idea was after the UK press reported it. Those living in the diaspora heard about it first.

“It is astonishing really, but we have become used to these sorts of things happening here,” said a former minister.

Rwanda remains one of the most densely populated countries in the world. In 2019, there were 1,242 people per square mile, making it the world’s 14th most densely populated country. Some of the objections that British voters have against migrants, particularly around the additional pressure on school places, hospital appointments and general access to public services, can be made about Rwanda too.

Given the magnitude of the policy and the potential triggers around community cohesion, it would have been a good idea if the proposal had been debated in parliament before an agreement was reached with the UK. None of the parliamentarians we spoke with knew of the policy before it was announced.

More than 162,000 convicts were deported to Australia between 1788 and 1868, the majority for petty crimes such as stealing a sheep, cutting down a tree or poaching.

“It is ill thought out, and if I am being frank, likely to backfire”, noted the minister. “There are so many loops to this. We already have a significant number of refugees in the country from Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Some of these, especially the Congolese, are already very difficult to manage. What makes us think we can take on Britain’s migrants?”

In 2018, Rwandan police shot and fatally wounded 12 Congolese refugees who had gathered to demonstrate against a 25 per cent cut in the food provided by the UN refugee agency at a camp in Kiziba, western Rwanda. Rwanda hosts about 174,000 refugees, including 57,000 people from neighbouring Burundi who fled violence in 2015.

It is telling that Rwandan media has almost unanimously stayed clear of the asylum pact despite the furore surrounding the announcement in the UK media. In Rwanda, the few media organisations that still exist have either made a choice not to cover the story, or are waiting to see how it plays out. This explains in part why the Rwandese public has not engaged with the story, even though many might have opinions and things to say about the proposed plan to settle migrants in their communities.

“It is a difficult one,” said a local editor. “But you know how it works. Everyone is waiting to see which way the wind blows. At the end of the day, no one wants to be shut down over Eritreans or Syrians. But generally, there is despondency.”

Tiered asylum system

Questions have also been raised as to how the UK scheme would work vis-à-vis existing refugee schemes in the country. The Rwandan government insists claims will be decided according to existing Rwandan and international law.

In Rwanda and across East Africa, the news that Rwanda is set to receive UK migrants has been received with an unprecedented level of incredulity.

Already, the agreement with the UK appears to be treating UK migrants better. Traditionally, Rwanda has settled refugees and those seeking asylum in refugee camps – away from local communities. By using Hope Hostel to accommodate UK migrants, Rwanda will be offering one set of refugees a form of accommodation that is completely different from the other.

Besides, what is there to prevent those already living in camps from seeking ways to travel to Europe in the hope of being returned? That way, they would have access to hostel accommodation as opposed to camps.

Not all is doom and gloom

The headlines may be brutal, and they are certainly not what the two countries expected when they agreed this deal. Overall, Rwanda stands to gain, at least financially. The estimated £120 million that Rwanda will receive initially is a definite bonus for a country trying to regrow its economy after the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Rwandan government is also using the agreement as proof that countries like the UK have confidence in its policies and governance, and acknowledge it as a worthy partner – a boon for President Paul Kagame, whose style of leadership, especially with regard to opposition politics, has been on the ropes lately.

“For the last 28 years, we have built a country that is united,” government spokesperson Yolande Makolo told Sky News, responding to criticism of the plan from Human Rights Watch. “We have built a country that is stable. We have built a functioning government that provides services for Rwandans. Human Rights Watch might say what they want to say, but that is up to them. It doesn’t mean it is the truth.”

Events around the admission of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) into the new East African Community (EAC) tell us one clear thing: East African regional integration is going to be one kind of experience for the State House elites and their cronies, and quite another experience entirely, for the ordinary citizens.

On the very day of the announcement, thousands of Congolese citizens fled to the Uganda border district of Kisoro to escape a new flare-up of fighting.

Between the 2nd and the 8th of April, they were caught in a cycle of fleeing and returning, only to flee again with their livestock and their bedding, as more fighting broke out.

The first two clashes were blamed on renewed activity by M23, an on-off rebel outfit that the DRC government accuses the government of Rwanda of backing, a charge Rwanda’s rulers have consistently denied, saying that any possible Rwandan armed action in the DRC would be in pursuit of another military outfit that grew out of the defeated forces of the previous genocidal Rwandan regime they deposed over 20 years ago.

On the day of the formal signing-in ceremony in Nairobi, more citizens fled again, with the fighting this time being blamed on the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) that are supposedly linked to the Islamic State.

On both occasions, it has been the Uganda armed forces entering the DRC—citing an invitation of its government—to confront the militants.

So we have the interesting situation of an organization inducting a new member who comes pre-loaded with an accusation and a complaint against an existing member. The new member is also subject to repeated armed visits from another member who has an outstanding debt to it as established by the United Nations, and sanctioned by the International Court of Justice.

Make no mistake, this is a very significant economic and geographic development. The DRC is actually the physical heart of Africa: it borders nine other countries, as well as the Atlantic Ocean. Its sheer breadth places it in southern, eastern, central and even western Africa all at once. And of course, it is famously rich in terms of natural resources.

Just by adding this one country, the East African Community doubles its geographical size and increases its population by over 30 per cent to 314 million people.

As an echo of the four key things that African leaders have historically called for as the solutions to the African development challenge—free movement of people as labour; free movement of trade goods; joint security initiatives; and integrated communication and infrastructure to support all these things—it is a great prize, by any account.

The challenge of African reconstruction following the immense damage of the colonial conquest and occupation, which in itself came on the heels of the earlier three centuries of depopulation through enslavement, has been first and foremost a challenge of finding a method. A general consensus, historically and today, is that “Pan-Africanism” is the solution.

Back in 2018, I pointed out on these pages that there is not simply one way of joining Africans together, and even then, not every kind of joining Africans together meant Pan-Africanism was in the African’s interest. Pan-Africanism is not one thing: there are Pan-Africanisms.

There is the cultural, the state-based, the popular types, and the corporate.

The first basically means first doing away with the organizational logic of the current states, whether amalgamated or not, as it starting point.

The second could also be termed Nkrumahist after its best known advocate. It is completely premised on the notion of using these states as a primary building block of uniting the Africans into a new, modern identity and then propelling them rapidly towards industrialization and “development”.

The third means rejecting, of course, the colonial model, but also its offspring.  It is centred on the idea of bringing native knowledge (which is available free in the community) into the question of enhancing people’s lives through sustainable production, healthcare and teaching. It envisages interaction on a largely horizontal, community-to-community basis.

The fourth is the longest and best established. The 19th century European powers had already brought together vast areas of the continent into spaces ultimately answerable to one political and one economic authority. Many of the countries they founded started life as trading companies, and corporate profit-making has remained the essence of their utility to the West.

It has resulted in a two-fold enclosure. First, the indigenous nations were forcibly incorporated, in whole or in part, into the conquest units of the colonial order. Today, these very same units, masquerading as independent states, are being joined together as market units. There is little essential organisational difference between this model and the Nkrumahist one: bringing the Africans together under a new economic culture.

But between the four approaches—cultural, state-based, political and popular—there does not seem to have been much progress made beyond the attainment of political independence.

It is well known that one cannot serve two masters, yet the needs and demands of the ordinary African people are in direct conflict with the desires and intentions of Western corporations. So, the critical question is whether trade blocs such as the EAC are being built in opposition to those imposed strictures or in their favour.

This East African Community is not the same as the one that existed between 1967 and 1977. And even that one was not entirely fit for Pan-Africanist purpose. However, with the original East African Community, these were economic units oriented a little more to organized production, as opposed to extraction and plunder.

But as long as we are organized within the structures of the colonial units, remain in debt to the financial institutions of Western countries, and locked into the European Union trade treaties, then this integration will do the opposite of what we are being told.

The needs and demands of the ordinary African people are in direct conflict with the desires and intentions of Western corporations.

How does the new and expanded EAC address this legacy? Much practical and conceptual confusion has thrived, and at the centre of that web sits the National Resistance Movement regime in Kampala, woven around the person of President Yoweri Museveni.

Since Pan-Africanism could not decide what it was, President Museveni happily repurposed it for the benefit of Western power. Having been installed 35 years ago by a circle of Western corporations, he has developed a masterfully duplicitous confection of Pan-African, neo-Marxist and anti-imperialist ruminations suitably distorted to justify the very things those arguments were meant to fight.

Museveni has basically bolstered the 19th century Western corporate regional integrationist model, by disguising it as Nkrumahism (for whatever that in itself was worth).

What has been done is to create a hierarchy for plunder, in which everyone understands their place, and presumably gets paid accordingly. The Kenyan financial elites (easily the most substantial of the region) were already prepared and, just days after the Nairobi signing ceremony, announced an initial US$1.6 billion initiative into Congo’s mining, manufacturing and construction sectors.

As for the wananchi, this will make it cheaper and simpler for them to move as citizens of the widened free trade area, than as refugees in need of all manner of permits and processing from the host country and the United Nations.

In 1964, the United States congress used reports of  a partly fictional attack on its navy units in the waters near the Republic of North Vietnam to pass an Act “legalising” deeper US involvement in the then escalating Vietnamese civil war.

This “Gulf of Tonkin Resolution” formalized the US’s attempted occupation of South Vietnam and destruction of North Vietnam, over the next decade. The Americans lost the war, but many American corporations got very rich out of it.

With its ADF shadow-boxing, Uganda has been “Tonkining” in the Democratic Republic of Congo for decades now.

Therefore, the inclusion now of the DRC into the new and expanded East African Community is simply a formalisation of that reality and a tightening of the Western corporations’ headlock around DRC wealth. It is also the completion of the lumpen-explorer Henry Morton Stanley’s dream of linking the Indian and Atlantic Oceans under one economy. It may also give Kampala the upper hand over Kigali in their private elite rivalry over the DRC, and could well lead to further border dramas.

With better intra-continental communications (road, rail, air and electronic) no doubt some of our ordinary people will be able to use their celebrated “resilience” and “ingenuity” to see opportunities in these changes and make a new living from them. However, there are no guarantees that the larger free trade area will not simply become a bigger playground for the usual predatory economic forces from outside the continent.

With the original East African Community, these were economic units oriented a little more to organized production, as opposed to extraction and plunder.

If the state foundations remain the same, it is unclear how merging seven of the same kinds of indebted, exploited economies governed by leaders who have difficulties organising fair elections (so as to determine what their people actually want) can bring better outcomes than we have already lived through. And a single EAC-wide border will still be a colonially-defined border.

Certainly there will be a greater aggregation of wealth and more elite business opportunities. But for as long as the historical trade strictures are not addressed, this will not alter the central dynamic of the crisis of African trade and development.

The one window of some kind of hope is if the leaders make good on their statements about using the greater scale of the economic bloc to demand better terms of trade globally. If American and the wider Western-European Union economic dominance shrinks (not least through an escalation of their ongoing war with Russia in Ukraine), then perhaps those controlling resource-rich trading blocs such as the EAC become more general brokers of those resources on the world stage.

Either way, the expanded Community is likely to be a continuation of the already damaging experience suffered by the ordinary people, with the elites controlling the various capitals squabbling over the leftovers thrown them by the Western corporations that are behind the wealth extraction that is fuelling the endless conflicts in Africa’s Great Lakes region.

In short, this is likely to be, and to remain, an integration of economic territories, not of values or cultures. It is the lack of respect for the indigeneity of the inmates, now relabelled “citizens”, that has enabled the easy plunder of minerals, the creation of native-free “nature reserves”, and the widespread environmental damage all over the region.

The freedom of movement is actually the freedom to go and be poor somewhere else, as the plunder of their fertile lands and mineral resources intensifies where indigenous populations once lived.

On the 9th of August, Kenyans will once again queue to vote in the seventh general election since the introduction of multi-party politics in 1992. The elections will also mark the third time in Kenya’s multi-party history that power will be transferred from one ruler to another through the ballot. In recent months, the question for many observers has been whether the elections and the transition process will be peaceful or violent.

Given Kenya’s recent history of political violence, this is, actually, a genuine and legitimate concern, although a casual analysis of the previous elections shows a higher propensity for the elites to use violence when the incumbent is fighting for re-election than when not. Since the incumbent, Uhuru Kenyatta, is not fighting for re-election, we should, at least, be optimistic that the 2022 elections will not result in large-scale violence.

In this article, we go further and suggest that not only will the August 2022 elections be relatively peaceful (relative to the 2007 elections) but also that Kenya’s history of large-scale political violence, may be a thing of the past. We base our prediction on the shift in the institutional and political landscape, facilitated by the political settlement that emerged out of the 2007/2008 post-election violence (PEV).

The key imperatives include the intervention by the International Criminal Court (ICC), the demobilisation of the highly charged political competition through devolution and the implicit peace commitment and political contract between Kenya’s political elites and the citizens that has considerably diffused political tensions and the febrile atmosphere that previously nurtured large-scale violence. We argue that the three factors have, to an extent, fostered a tacit agreement among Kenyans that large-scale violence is too high a price to pay for any short-term political gains.

As in other sub-Saharan African countries, Kenya’s transition to “democracy” has had confusing implications—facilitating multi-party competition and regime change through the ballot, but also fomenting political instability through violent politics. Although the root cause of political violence in Kenya has been primarily linked to the “land question” and the instrumentalization of grievances around land and resettlement, other accounts have focused on the elite fragmentation and state informalisation that began under Daniel Moi and continued under Mwai Kibaki with the inevitable diffusion of violence from the state to local gangs.

With the first two multi-party elections—in 1992 and 1997—being violent, many observers had come to expect political violence to be a natural outcome of Kenya’s elections until this conjecture was disrupted by the scale and intensity of the 2007/2008 PEV. With Kenya tottering towards anarchy, and fearing complete state collapse, the international community was forced to intervene in 2008, to not only halt the bloodletting but also engineer a major institutional reset through the 2010 constitutional change, and chaperone retributive justice via the ICC mechanism.

With Kenya approaching another election, and ten and five years respectively after the constitutional changes and the collapse of the ICC cases, we take stock of the implications of these major events on Kenya’s political landscape.

The ICC’s intervention in Kenya

First, the ICC’s intervention in Kenya was remarkable as it was the first time that attempts were made to hold the country’s political elites accountable under an institutional mechanism that they could neither intimidate nor corruptly influence.

While observers have either lamented or celebrated (depending on one’s ideological leaning) the failure of the ICC to successfully prosecute the so-called “Ocampo Six” (those the Court interdicted for their alleged planning of the 2007/2008 PEV), we argue that evaluating the performance of the ICC in the Kenyan crisis should be against its unprecedented attempt to confront the intractable impunity among the country’s political elites.

Since its post-independence birthing, Kenyan politicians had perfected the art of self-preservation through the construction of the perception that they were untouchable and above the law. The ICC, by hauling to its dock some of the big names in Kenya’s political landscape, including the current president, Uhuru Kenyatta, and his deputy William Ruto, and in so far as it has fractured the elites’ pejorative attitude towards the rule of law, the court’s intervention should be viewed as a partial success. Consider the narration of utter shame, frustration, humiliation and stigma among the “Ocampo Six” following their interdiction by the ICC, which clearly manifested their shock at being made to account under a neutral institution.

It was, therefore, not surprising that the accused and their enablers engaged in Machiavellian tactics, including counter-shaming strategies performed through neo-colonialism narratives, in order to delegitimise and undermine the ICC’s prosecutorial authority in Kenya and elsewhere in Africa. Whereas these strategies contributed to the inevitable collapse of the “Ocampo Six” cases, if the Court action has been successful in institutionalising fear of future intervention in Kenya as a credible threat against political mischievousness among the elites, and if it has blunted their assumed political invincibility, then the intervention should be viewed as partially successful.

The ICC’s intervention in Kenya was remarkable as it was the first time that attempts were made to hold the country’s political elites accountable.

Anecdotal evidence shows that the ICC intervention has brought Kenya’s politics to an inflection point by gravitating the country’s political discourse towards greater forbearance. This is clearly manifested by the assimilation of the “ICC” vocabulary into Kenyan public discourse, frequently invoked by ordinary Kenyans and politicians—including those who joined Uhuruto (as Kenyatta and Ruto have been popularly known) in the public vituperation of the Court—to credibly threaten those perceived to be engaging in inflammatory narratives.

Also, an empirical outcome from the ICC’s intervention has been the realisation among the Kenyan elites that accountability for inciting violence is no longer with the imagined political community of the “tribe” but, rather, on the individual politician. Consider the remarkable disposition by the elites to apologise and withdraw any inflammatory remarks attributed to themselves or to their lieutenants, something that was previously unthinkable.

A contributing factor to this “transparency” and the “politics of extenuation” has been the integration of social media in the way politics is chronicled and experienced in Kenya. The ubiquity of the smartphone, has ensured that the previous private sphere of reckless political talk and public deniability has been dissolved, as the private has become public via social media, forcing public apologies. Anybody, anywhere can now easily capture and post on social media negative political rhetoric that may yet, in the future, be used as evidence in court.

It is, therefore, not coincidental that the theatre of political violence in Kenya has recently shifted from the rural to the urban areas—with the state mostly implicated— thus blunting its association with specific ethnic groups and leaders. The ICC’s intervention in Kenya has to some extent fostered restraint against the large-scale political opportunism that was previously a feature in Kenya’s politics and responsible for the violence, ushering in a period of negative peace but with the potential of transitioning to positive peace in the future, if these imperatives can be harnessed and institutionalised.

Constitutional reset and institutional dividends 

Secondly, the 2010 institutional reset through constitutional changes has yielded significant political dividends for Kenyan political elites in the form of devolution of power and resources to counties and provided access to resources through the political party funds allocated by the exchequer.

While these outcomes have not completely eliminated the fierce electoral competition synonymous with Kenya’s elections, we think that it has to an extent toned down the competition as losers now have alternative access to power and a platform from which to articulate and implement their policies. This has recently been manifested in the political tussling over local electoral seats—in the form of zoning—as the two major coalitions, Azimio and Kenya Kwanza, attempt to craft a strategy that will ensure their dominance in the local seats in the August polls.

Previous analysis has shown that the institutional context under which elections are organised can either moderate or escalate adverse outcomes, including violence. Institutional designs that afford greater opportunities for losers through certain “sweet points”, including fair treatment of losers, may reduce tensions and appetite for political violence.

For Kenya, while the desired “sweet points” has not been fully achieved because decentralisation has widened patronage networks, it may yet provide vast “eating” opportunities for losers of presidential elections and their followers even as they wait to compete in the next polls. Likewise, losers in presidential elections may also be co-opted into the decentralised graft network through elected proxies, as some anecdotal evidence shows.

The ICC’s intervention in Kenya has to some extent fostered restraint against the large-scale political opportunism that was previously responsible for the violence.

Meanwhile, the provision of political parties’ funds by the exchequer on the basis of the parties’ performance in local elections has also created opportunities for parties that compete in elections to access alternative resources. While there is yet no evidence of the extent to which this may have impacted political competition in Kenya, we think that it has shifted the former singular attention given to national political competition to local elections. This is because political leaders have had to strategize in order to win significant seats in local elections in order to access the funds. Consider the revelation that the ODM party is owed KSh 7.5 billion by the Office of the Registrar of Political Parties (ORPP) and the protracted infighting among the former NASA coalition partners over these funds.

On a different note, the creation of various political positions by the 2010 constitution, be they governor, senate or running mate positions, has rendered coalition building in Kenya a delicate affair as major political leaders have been forced to expend their political energy, previously fundamental to the orchestration of violence, on party politics at the expense of national political organisation. The creation of these positions and the dawn of ex-ante coalition building in Kenya has unexpectedly rewired political scheming from the national to internal, as manifested by the ongoing contestation over various seats in the forthcoming elections.

Cumulatively, we think that these institutional “dividends” —including devolution, the provision of political party funds and the creation of diverse political positions—have generated diverse opportunities to be competed over by Kenyan politicians and this may yet deter the need for large-scale mobilisation of groups for political violence.

Violence fatigue 

Thirdly, findings from recent fieldwork in Burnt Forest by one of us show that there is acute fatigue among Kenyans from the recursive violence and this is fostering some degree of tolerance for, and openness to, hitherto political nemeses. The fatigue has been especially reinforced by the realisation among Kenyans that the elites’ concerns are for their own interests and self-preservation.

Consider the dissatisfaction and grumbling that accompanied the political rapprochement between Uhuru Kenyatta and his long-term rival Raila Odinga in 2018. The reconciliation, popularly known as the “handshake”, wrong-footed the support base of both leaders, who were of the opinion that the political settlement was motivated more by Kenyatta and Odinga’s narrow interest of perpetuating conditions favourable to the durability of the dynastic political order, and less by genuine national interest.

Because the rapprochement did not yield retributive justice and compensation for the victims of political violence, it gave way to despondency among ordinary Kenyans. Most have since opted for suboptimal political outcomes, especially stability, whatever the electoral outcome, aptly conceptualised by the phrase “accept and move on” to capture the inherent need to sidestep the negative externalities associated with Kenyan elections.

Recent evidence from Burnt Forest shows that violence fatigue may have fostered tolerance among local groups and made them less supportive of large-scale collective violent action, precisely because previous violence yielded asymmetric outcomes—economic and personal losses for the citizens and political gains for the political class. However, the full extent to which violence fatigue and citizen despondency may result in wholesome political stability in Kenya is something that needs further investigation.

Because the rapprochement did not yield some form of retributive justice and compensation for the victims of political violence, it gave way to despondency among ordinary Kenyans.

In conclusion, while it may be too soon to form concrete opinions on the feasibility of large-scale political violence occurring in Kenya in the upcoming elections and in the future, we have argued in this article that the ecology of events including the ICC’s intervention, institutional dividends and violence fatigue among ordinary Kenyans may yet immunize the country against large-scale political violence.

We are aware that peace spoilers may emerge and threaten violence as a way of gaining power or accessing political office through some form of political settlement, but for now it seems that Kenya is at the point of a halfway house, occupying the institutional space between negative peace and the possibility of positive peace in the long-term, if these factors are institutionalised.

As long as the threat of the ICC endures, devolution and the political party funds are maintained and the Faustian bargain between Kenyan citizens and the political elites remains stable—that is, selecting peace whatever the political outcomes—it is just possible that large-scale political violence akin to that witnessed in 2007/2008 may never again happen in Kenya.

But again, as Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine has shown, “Never Again” moments have the tendency to yield the very same conditions that were responsible for eliciting the “Never Again” statement. We, therefore, must remain hopeful but realistic that a major peace spoiler may yet emerge and usher in political disorder in Kenya.