Kenya: Chain Reaction

KENYA

Chain Reaction

It’s been a tough few weeks for Miguna Miguna – and for Kenya.

The 55-year-old Kenyan lawyer has always been a staunch critic of President Uhuru Kenyatta. Even so, his visibility was heightened after last summer’s presidential elections were declared illegitimate by the nation’s Supreme Court, throwing East Africa’s most prosperous nation into political turmoil.

Violence ensued, and the Supreme Court promptly ordered a rerun.However, opposition leader Raila Odinga rejected that attempted solution and boycotted the second election in the fall, leaving Kenyatta to win unopposed with 98 percent of the vote.

On January 30, with Miguna assisting, Odinga declared himself president in front of tens of thousands of onlookers at a mock swearing-in ceremony.

The ceremony held no legitimacy, NPR reported, and was clearly a ploy to challenge the authority of Kenyatta, whose executive powers have been constrained by the slew of revisions made to Kenya’s constitution in 2010.

The chain reaction that ensued was swift.

The government pulled the plug on the nation’s largest broadcasters for covering the event, starting a media blackout that lasted a week and “turned a non-event with no legal or political significance into an international issue,” one diplomat told the Financial Times.

Several TV stations remained dark for days, despite a court demanding they be reopened. Larry Madowo, an anchor with NTV Kenya, wrote for CNN that he and others were forced to spend the night in their station’s newsroom as security forces blocked the building’s exits.

Miguna faced a more permanent fate.

He was promptly charged with treason for participating in Odinga’s symbolic swearing-in. Then he was kicked out of the country.

Miguna held dual Canadian and Kenyan citizenship, but the government declared the latter invalid, despite rules in the new constitution that bar those born in Kenya from being denied citizenship, Deutsche Welle reported.

He’s already been deported back to Canada.

Now, many fear that the events of recent weeks are warning signs of something much more sinister at play in a nation once revered for its democratic strides.

“In the space of just one week, a Kenyan government that proclaims itself a rule-of-law government has repeatedly defied nearly a dozen court orders in an alarming descent toward authoritarianism,” Madowo opined in a separate piece for the Washington Post.

Many are concerned that such a troubling chain reaction in a regional leader like Kenya might spark a similar one elsewhere in East Africa, the New Yorker reported.

“Kenya is one of the beacons for media freedom on our continent and the world and should be a leader in terms of democratic governance and respect for fundamental human rights,” said Angela Quintal, the Africa coordinator of the Committee to Protect Journalists. “Its leadership role in the region is now being compromised.”