Tensions and Reversals in Democratic Transitions: The Kenya 2007 General Elections

Reviewed by Carl Odera

A book by a group of Kenyan scholars was launched this Monday at Serena Hotel. Dubbed Tensions and Reversals in Democratic Transitions: The Kenya 2007 General Elections, the publication reflects on the progress that has been made and the inherent threats in respect to democratic process in Kenya.

With quite a scholarly ambition, the book undertakes to provide under one roof, a scholarly inquiry into all the key elements, issues, and driving forces of the 2007 general elections and its aftermath. 

Youth in Kibera block road in protest in early 2008

The Kenya 2007 General Elections was a hotly contested one without a clear winner, at least by the findings of an inquiry that followed afterward and brought the worst post-electoral precipice in the country’s recorded history. 

Highlighting the balance sheet of Kenya's democratization project the publication demonstrates a mixed result. 

Whereas in the period leading up to December 2007, the "assets" side of the balance sheet was arguably healthier, the subsequent events, and post-2007 election violence in particular, exposed huge liabilities - mostly hidden in the structural inefficiencies of the Kenyan.

There had been expectations in the country that the repeal of the Section IV of the Kenya constitution would fundamentally change the electoral and political culture and lay a framework for democratic processes henceforth, which has never been.

Elections often turned out to be tourneys of communal and or ethnic values in which interests compete in pursuance of centralized political powers in search of an imperial presidency. 

From the role of mass media, soft power in electoral politics, the dynamics of religion, to the institutional capacity of political parties an manifestos, to the geopolitics of development and elections, the book is a valid source of  facts and figures as pertained  to the subjects in question.

The book uniquely  and aptly, with its stellar cast of largely Kenyan academics and writers whose analysis and perspectives provide quite a considerable information and highlights various dimensions of what is referred as in the book as  "democratic accident that was Kenya's 2007 general elections" is a must-have for any student and pundit, or perhaps this could be one of the best for scholastic reference on the questions of election and democracy in Kenya, and even Africa.