The future is Orange

 Kenya

The future is Orange

Nov 24th 2005 | NAIROBI
From The Economist print edition

Old tribal divisions trump a proposed new constitution

EPA

Oranges beat bananas

FOR months, Kenyans had pored gamely over the 200-page draft of a new constitution put forward by President Mwai Kibaki's government. This week, after a furious national debate, Kenyans rejected it by a decisive 57-43% margin, so they are left with the same old document the departing British bequeathed them in 1963.

It was largely a protest vote against Mr Kibaki. It certainly leaves his authority diminished—which, ironically, is rather what he said he was campaigning for all along, proposing a new post of prime minister. But, more dangerously, the debate sharpened old tribal and regional grudges, polarising the country between “Bananas” (yes) and “Oranges” (no), the symbols used to help illiterate voters. MPs punched each other in the face and at least 24 people were killed in protests, some shot dead by the police at rallies. The cabinet split so bitterly, with seven ministers joining the opposition campaign, that it has hardly met since July.

Mr Kibaki, the lead Banana, spent a lot of state and other money promoting the new constitution. He bought off key tribal constituencies with land grants, new district boundaries, concessions to sugar farmers and so on. In the end, he had to rely almost entirely on his Kikuyu tribe, the biggest in the country, for the yes vote. To Mr Kibaki's credit, the poll was fairly clean and peaceful, and he conceded defeat quickly and graciously.

The Oranges were savvier. They borrowed a British company's advertising slogan, “The Future Is Orange”, and convinced voters in western Kenya, on the coast and in the Nairobi slums that in fact Mr Kibaki was pushing for a still stronger presidency and more central control that would make the Nairobi elite and the Kikuyus more dominant. Areas of the country inhabited by the Luhya, Luo, Kalenjin and Kamba groups overwhelmingly voted no.

The big Oranges—Raila Odinga, a leading Luo from western Kenya who is the roads minister, and Uhuru Kenyatta, a son of the founding president—are now well-placed for a tilt at the presidency in 2007. Mr Kibaki had promised to fire Mr Odinga, and the other cabinet ministers who defected to Orange, in the event of a Banana victory. Instead, two days after the referendum vote, he sacked his entire cabinet.

Messrs Odinga and Kenyatta are awkward bedfellows, both ambitious and both wishing to give their rival supporters a bigger piece of the pie. The problem is that the Kenyan pie, never large enough, is getting smaller. Economic growth of 5% this year, and the same projected for next, will not match the country's population growth; Kenya may have more than 40m people by 2015, up from 3m a century ago, 9m at independence and 32m or so today. As much as anything, this week's message to Mr Kibaki was that a better constitution might be nice but the people would prefer the more mundane things he originally promised them when he was elected in 2002: more jobs and less corruption.