Kenya's battle for a new constitution

 Kenya

Bananas v oranges

Sep 22nd 2005 | BANANA HILL, NAIROBI
From The Economist print edition

Would you like a stronger president or more checks and balances?

AFP

Kibaki wants more juice

“NDIZI! Ndizi!” shouted the crowd of mostly young, underemployed men. “Banana! Banana!” Kenya's vice-president, Moody Awori, an Anglican in a Hawaiian shirt, waved a ripe banana. A roar went up through the Nairobi shanty town, appropriately enough named Banana Hill. At the back of the crowd, it was said, a woman had been soundly beaten by a mob for brandishing oranges.

In the run-up to a referendum due on November 21st on Kenya's first proper constitution since independence from Britain in 1963, the country has divided into bananas (yes) and oranges (no). Violence is already rife. The country's electoral commission has tried, without success, to stop any campaigning before its civic-education project can be carried out. Instead, politicians have resorted to incendiary populism, sometimes along tribal lines, to sway voters on a draft constitution few have read and even fewer understand. At an up-country funeral, a banana MP captured the national mood by launching himself at an orange speaker and getting himself wrestled to the ground at the feet of none other than Daniel arap Moi, the former president who was ousted in a poll in 2002 after a corrupt reign that had lasted 24 years.

There are plenty of nits to pick in the draft. Muslims complain it does not allow for their religious courts. Christians as well as Muslims fret that it might, even in the smallest way, condone homosexuality. Kenyans of all stripes, especially those abroad, wonder whether they can have dual nationality.

But the central point, on which fruit is so furiously lobbed, is what sort of presidency Kenya should have. Bananas want a stronger, American-style one. Oranges—a more varied bunch, including thoughtful civic leaders, acolytes of previous regimes, and opportunists led by the roads minister, Raila Odinga—would like to devolve more power to parliament and to the regions. Mr Odinga's proclaimed outrage positions him for the general election due in 2007. Like many oranges, he thinks the present version has been tinkered with to the benefit of the present president, Mwai Kibaki, with whom he has fallen out.

Whatever side Kenyans choose, they are likely to be disappointed. It is telling how little effort politicians have made to put copies of the draft into the hands of the people. But then Kenyans are used to disappointment. The country's downward drift since independence has been dismal. True, there has been no war and a laudable history of peacekeeping, but that only makes it harder to explain why the country is placed 154 out of 177 in the UN's latest development index. The UN's World Food Programme estimates that 1.2m (out of 31m) Kenyans are on the verge of starvation in the arid north. Mr Kibaki caused donors, appalled by the country's persistent corruption, to rock back in disbelief in New York last week when he made an impassioned plea for Kenya's debt to be forgiven.