Business Daily (Nairobi)
Albert Muriuki
10 January 2008
A World Bank internal memorandum endorsing the controversial re-election of President Kibaki has stirred a major diplomatic controversy over the polls outcome.
The memo has also put Mr Colin Bruce, World Bank's Kenya country director, on a collision path with the Orange Democratic Movement, whose presidential candidate Raila Odinga is contesting Mr Kibaki's re-election and has opened internationally mediated talks, demanding his removal from office.
The talks, led by Ghana's President John Kufuor, were yesterday wavering with Reuters news agency claiming that former UN Secretary- General Kofi Annan would take over as the mediator.
The international community's attention was, however, focused on the leaked memo and the subsequent exchanges within the World Bank, the European Union and the UK.
It reveals the behind-the-scene battles that ensued as the international community struggled to deal with the poll outcome and the political fallout that has claimed nearly 500 lives and destroyed Sh60 billion worth of property. Analysts said the memo also unravelled the various diplomatic interests that are shaping debates on Kenya in Western capitals - mostly driven by foreign policies of the participating governments.
The battles will also help shed light on the underlying positions that the various international organisations have taken and the great powers that support them. This could influence the outcome of the political settlement reached by the mediation process.
Email correspondence between senior World Bank officials in Washington and Nairobi show that two leading international bodies, the UN and the World Bank - which offer the most development aid to Kenya - consider the re-election of President Kibaki to have been proper.
The UNDP office in Kenya however denied having agreed with the World Bank on anything in relation to the Kenyan elections. The UNDP office in Kenya told the Business Daily that the World Bank "had misquoted them".
While the US has dispatched Jendayi Frazer, its Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, and asked her to stay in the region - as long as it takes - the Kenyan problem now appears to be tied to the future of the war on terror.
Endorsement by the World Bank was also being understood to explain President Kibaki's confidence in announcing the date of the opening of the 10th Parliament and his naming of a Cabinet, even as President Kufuor, the preferred mediator of both President Kibaki and Mr Odinga, tried to arbitrate.
On January 7, a statement from White House "condemned the use of violence as a political tool and appealed to both sides to engage in peaceful dialogue." A day later Mr Odinga called off the protest rallies he had planned for the next day as Mr Kibaki went on to name a Cabinet and announce the opening of Parliament.
"The endorsement could of course have contributed to the confidence the president had in announcing a date for the opening of Parliament and naming the Cabinet," said Dr Kithure Kindiki, the Associate Dean of the Faculty of Law, at the University of Nairobi.
In a clear departure from the stand taken by international observers, and in particular the European Union the Election Observation Mission (EU-EOM) in Kenya, the World Bank memo indicates that Mr Bruce, who is in charge of Kenya, Comoros, Eritrea, Rwanda, Seychelles and Somalia, together with the UN, had initially broken ranks with the EU-EOM about the results of the presidential elections.
"The considered view of the UN is that the ECK announcement of a Kibaki win is correct," reads the internal memo between Mr Bruce and Hartwig Schafer, the Director of Operations Africa Region based in Washington DC.
Mr Graham Elson, the Deputy Chief Observer of the EU-EOM, however told the Business Daily, that the EU-EOM still stands by the contents of the preliminary statement they issued.
"We will release a full statement in February which will give more details," he said.
The email, obtained by the Business Daily on Monday concludes that upon receiving complaints from the opposition about irregularities, the ECK spent 24 hours, in the presence of observers, reviewing each concern.
"On balance, they determined that there were more irregularities of consequence on Mr Odinga's side than on the Kibaki side. For example, ECK considered reported turnout above 90 per cent to be a red-flag for irregularities. Data available so far indicates that the highest reported turnout in a Kibaki stronghold was 90 percent; in Mr Odinga's strongholds, there were six heavily populated areas with a reported turnout of between 102 to 116 per cent," reads the email, which however does not name the six areas.
The memo states that the draft EU-EOM report cites two constituencies (Kieni and Molo) in which Kibaki's margin was inflated, but does not say whether that invalidates the overall results.
"The reader is left to determine that the inflation could not have been higher than 48,000 votes against the ECK declared margin of victory of 230, 000," reads the email.
Contacted by the Business Daily, Mr Bruce, through a spokesman, confirmed the authenticity of the correspondence.
Mr Schafer, the senior World Bank official to whom Mr Bruce wrote the memos, did not respond to emails sent to him, neither did he return calls.
Mr Bruce said the memo was a factual account of information available at the time to the World Bank from various sources.
"It is part of the normal reporting on Kenya that takes place between Nairobi and headquarters. It is not a position statement," he said.
In public, the World Bank, through press releases is however more cautious on how it deals with the political situation in Kenya, though, unlike the EU-EOM, it does not out rightly deny Mr Kibaki's re-election.
Instead, the Bank raises concerns about the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rate and warns that the current crisis may hinder recent economic growth.
A press release from the World Bank in Kenya, states that the GDP growth rate of seven per cent, rising business confidence, increasing tourism, measurable progress in firm level productivity, significant gains in democratic development, and the lifting of over two million Kenyans out of poverty would be put at risk if the crisis is not urgently dealt with.
Noting that the gains achieved by Kenya have been done with donor assistance of only about one percent of Kenya's GDP compared to about 10 percent of GDP for Tanzania and Ghana, the Bank states that at stake also is the opportunity to begin addressing the serious challenges of insufficient employment creation, infrastructure deficits, inadequate health care, unequal access to productive services, and massively scaling up the campaign against corruption.
Mr Bruce told the Business Daily that while the internal memo's were not the official stand of the World Bank, it was an analysis of the facts available to the Bank.
While the memo is not the Banks position, "it put facts on the table that were not being reported-namely, that there were irregularities on both sides," said Mr Bruce.
"The full text of the European Union (EU) Observation Mission report contains such facts but its press release did not. This may have been an oversight given the time pressures of the moment. Similar facts about problems on both sides are contained in other reports like that of the Kenya Elections Domestic Observation Forum. But these details were missed in the euphoria of the moment," he said.
The internal memos among senior staff of the World Bank could be a clear indication that the United States, the Banks biggest donor, actually does covertly support the current regime but for fear of seeming to endorse suspicious elections, is giving a behind the scenes support.
"I must say that the position of the US about this matter seems to be rather unclear," said the President of the East African Law Society (EALS), Mr Tom Ojienda, "but it seems to be in favour of a re-run of the elections," he said.
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