After that violence, investigations began to reveal fears of democracy, Murithi Mutiga, the Africa program director for the International Crisis Group, told me. “People are preparing for elections as they are preparing for war,” he said, stocking up on food and medicine. This year the atmosphere is much less tense, but the low voter registration suggests a different challenge, he said: “disappointment with the choices people are making” among the candidates.
If the goal is a capable government that strikes a healthy balance between the masses and the elite, that has the ability to lift people out of abject poverty and correct itself when things go wrong, the rewards of democracy don’t always seem like the to be worth it. risks.
Kenyans I spoke to last month complained that Americans selectively promote democracy when it serves their own interests, and that the concept is too narrowly defined. Indigenous models should also have been considered self-governing. Many African villages had been run by effective councils of elders before the settlers arrived. Now they are stuck with rules that give an 18-year-old who has never raised a child or had a job as much voice as a 65-year-old.
“The ideal of democracy is inspiring,” acknowledged James Mwangi, the executive director of Dalberg, an international consultancy. “It created a space where thoughts, engagement and ideas flourished. We are all the product of that.”
But democracy required a shared public square, and that just doesn’t exist anymore, he argued. Parts of Africa with low literacy levels and deep ethnic divisions have always struggled to participate in a single national political discourse. Social media has further torn the conversation apart, opening up space for sets of alternative facts for specific audiences not only for Kenyans but also for Americans.
“America is being reintroduced into what literate or highly ethnically divided societies that have tried to implement the American model have always known,” he noted. “All politics is tribal and zero sum. You have created tribes and the tribes no longer talk to each other.”