SJS2 - “The Warming Business Climate in Africa”

Source

Lynch, Gabrielle. "The International Criminal Court and the Making of a Kenyan President." Current History, vol. 114, no. 772, May 2015, pp. 183-88.

Author Credentials

The author is qualified because she is a professor of comparative politics at the University of Warwick and the passage covers the politics and disputed election of Mwai Kibaki. She also wrote a book on the ethnic politics of Kenya and the Kalenjin which are also covered in this writing.

Summary

The election of 2007, where Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga faced off with Kibaki winning, in Kenya lead to much violence. Over 1,000 people that were part of either the Kikuyu and Kalenjin died. These groups opposed each other, and who the other voted for, in the election which lead to the violence. Following the election, the International Criminal Court prosecuted William Ruto and Jomo Kenyatta as leaders in the post election violence. The two opposing sides then joined forces after being prosecuted to create the Jubilee Party and support Kenyatta and Ruto in the next election. The Jubilee Party won the election despite their candidates being persecuted, but not because of their candidate’s background or proposals necessarily, but in part due to the court’s intervention. Kenyatta used to be thought of as a man who was simply a high level, wealthy supporter of the Kenya African National Union, but when he joined with Ruto he was seen more as his own person. Ruto and Kenyatta promoted themselves by proclaiming the ICC was controlled by the west and that it was serving their interests and making an example of Kenya. They showed themselves as supporting peace and stability as well as protecting nationalist sentiments. They framed the ICC as biased and claimed they had not researched the case thoroughly. Ruto and Kenyatta were also depicted as protecting their communities. They are depicted as helping and protecting their country. This adds to what is being studied in class in terms of Africans following their colonial predecessors examples. Surely they saw the corruption of their former colonial masters and how they gained power through changing situations to appear that whatever they are doing is in the right. For instance, how the Germans came in to “help” with the conflict between the Herero and Nama, but only used it to gain power in Africa. Another example was how the Europeans used situations to change the view on the Berlin Conference to their advantage when they called the Berlin Conference to stop slavery, but in reality it was just a land grab. This passage is similar to this because the Jubilee party is following the corruption of their colonial predecessors and using the situation of being persecuted and changing it to their advantage to persecute the International Criminal Court. They used many campaigns to twist the ICC’s alignments to that of with westerners and then in turn persecute them for “wrongfully” persecuting Ruto and Kenyatta.

Analysis

The author made a very strong argument for how the ICC’s intervention did not help to change the political ways, but to instead make a path for the defendants in the case to win the election. The author uses substantial evidence like the idea that people were persuaded to view the ICC as an organization controlled by the West to use Kenya as an example of political change. The authors states how the defendant's use this to target the ICC as a biased organization that does not support Kenya’s needs. The author only slightly touches upon the opposing side’s view points on the Jubilee Party. The author does a good job of illustrating the Jubilee Party’s supporters views on the election and what they think, but the author does not talk much about the other party’s supporters beliefs on the situation. The piece is much of the opinions of the Jubilee Party supporters and not so much of Odinga supporters. The author is a reliable source to interpret the political situation in Kenya because of her degree in comparative politics. She also has a book on Kenya’s politics, though it is based more on the Kalenjin than the Kikuyu, the other side of the violence in the 2007 election.