A Letter From Samuel Kivuitu
Written by Kwani · May 30, 2008
Kenyan poet extraordinaire, Shailja Patel, has elicited a response to a letter she slipped to ECK comissioner, Samuel Kivuitu, during a talk he gave in Nairobi on May 14. In her own words…:
At the beginning of this year, I wrote an Open Letter to Samuel Kivuitu, Chair of the Electoral Commission of Kenya. It was picked up by a number of sources, online and off, within and outside Kenya, and widely distributed, forwarded, and republished.
http://shailja.com/news/newsletterblog/2008/01/open-letter-to-samuel-kivuitu.html
On May 14th, Samuel Kivuitu spoke, for the first time since “The Crisis”, at a forum on Post-Election Violence in Nairobi. I arrived early at the venue, and slipped a paper copy of my Open Letter under the blotter where he was going to sit. I’d abridged and updated the letter to reflect our current Kenyan reality. It ends with a plea:
It’s not too late, Mr. Kivuitu. To recover your own humanity. To open your eyes to the suffering and longing of this nation. To admit that something went terribly wrong. If you could only rise to the desperate need of this turning point in Kenya’s history, you could redeem yourself with the simplest of words:
“I’m sorry.”
Those words might be the most revolutionary ever spoken on this continent. They might open the floodgates for every leader, every public servant, to acknowledge their own deep fear, grief, and remorse. To admit fallibility. To take responsibility.
We are still waiting, Mr. Kivuitu, for you to speak.
During the forum, I watched Mr. Kivuitu bluster, blame, deny all culpability for the stolen election that took Kenya to the brink of civil war. In the plenary, I stood up, heart pounding, and said:
Mr Kivuitu, the whole country, from IDPs (internally displaced persons) in camps to affluent residents of Karen and Mountain View, are waiting for the tiniest expression of remorse, regret, from the Electoral Commission of Kenya. As a human being, a Kenyan, can you find it in your heart to offer just three words: “We are sorry,” to the people of Kenya?
He couldn’t.
Five days later, this arrived in my inbox. It is posted here, and for public distribution, with Mr. Kivuitu’s permission.
Dear Madam,
I thank you for your letter dated 14 May 2008 and the concerns you expressed
therein.
The Holy Bible has taught me to leave judgment of others to God the
Almighty. I do not know if you are the Almighty God or not but you did not
seem to be Him when I saw you on 14 May 2008.
You are all the same entitled to your views. I however humbly deny any wrong
doing. The laws require that I declare the winner of the presidential
elections once the Commission determines the candidate who scored highest,
and led 25% of votes cast in his/her favour in 5 provinces. That is all I
did. And there was no other candidate or his/her agent seeking me to hold on
and re tally – no. After announcing the results a fellow appeared before me
and requested me to hand over to him the president’s certificate. I told him
that that is only done to the winner personally and directly.
The fellow then informed me that Hon. Kibaki was awaiting to be sworn as the
President and the Chief Justice was present, duly robed, for the assignment.
He requested me to take the certificate there. I had no business retaining
the certificate. It was not mine. The law says it be given at the place the
President is to be sworn. I obeyed the law and took it there. Commissioners
do not count votes.
Commissioners do not tally counted results. They simply verify these. They
do this through the Commissioners’ senior officers whose competence and
integrity you seem to recognize. Commissioners announce the results as
presented to them by these officers. Or what else do you suggest they should
have done?
My conscience is absolutely clear. I know how dangerous it is to delay
announcing the results. There are several interests in the results and all
are equally important. I was hurt in 2002 for not announcing results which I
had not yet received. I am not a seer, like you seem to be, to be sure that
there would have not been deaths if I postponed the announcement of the
results.
With my humblest view I do not share the view that people killed others, or
destroyed the properties belonging to others, on account of my announcement
of the winner. I believe that irrespective of whoever of the two top
candidates won, there was going to be violence. That environment was created
by the politicians themselves. You seem however to worship them as deities.
Secondly, I respectfully believe the killers, who had been already charged
with rhetoric, reasoned thus – why did Kibaki or Kalonzo get these votes in
our areas? They looked round and saw Kikuyus, Kambas and other “madoadoas”
(as they had been told to call them). They reasoned these where the ones
who voted thus and they must eliminate them.
Even in poor Coast, suspected “wrong” voters were ordered to pronounce
certain words. Once they did not do so like the locals, they were violently
evicted and robbed of their properties and raped. Thus the genesis of the
tragedy is in our dirty politics and negative ethnicity. It is bad luck we
have kind people like you who are too naïve to realize the depth of our
malaise. No wonder facile and dishonest assignments that Hassan Omar
(1)advanced thrilled some of you. This confirms Kenya is in for hard time
for a long while to come.
Have a nice day Ms. Patel.
S. M. Kivuitu
(1) Hassan Omar Hassan, Commissioner of the Kenya National Commission for
Human Rights, condemned Kivuitu and the Electoral Commission of Kenya as
delinquent in their duties, at the May 14th forum on Post-Election Violence.
I work as a retail admin manager in a healthfood store where Mr. Kivuitu is a regular customer. Therefore I get to do some small talk with hin every now and then. I agree with him here that Ms. Patel expressed herself from too emotional a point of view and thus threw apects of objectivity outside the window. Incidentally, Ms. Patel also frequents the same health food store as Mr. Kivuitu but there paths have never seemed to physically cross!
Ms. Patel should have placed the blame exactly where it belonged - on the asshole politicians. But she made an asshole out of the wrong guy, unfortunately.
Mehul
I tend to agree with Mehul, Mr. Kivuitu is not to blame for anything that happened in Kenya. Politicians are to blame for the chaos, the maiming, the killing & the raping. The politicians fueled all these since they are self seekers with bloated egos.
The Kenyan citizens also are to blame. Why agree to be ignited? Why did they take to the streets leaving behind a wake of violence? They were chanting “our rights our rights” they should understand that poor fellows have no rights but to eat what is delivered unto them.
Where are the Kenyan citizens now in the Grand Coalition, was the one who killed my brother elected? Did the poor man who insulted me because of my tribal background benefit? He is still selling bananas and milk in the street, taxed like a nonsense!!!
High Hills.
If we are to blame the ‘Kenyan Citizens’ we need to be selective on which ‘Kenyan Citizens’. Personally, I would never blame the the man ’selling bananas and milk in the street’.
We have to understand the mindset with which such banana sellers live. They are much more preoccupied with finding from where the next shilling is going to come. So are very rich and high powered businessmen the only difference being the banana seller’s shilling is the do or die shilling.
Therefore the banana seller has no time, cannot afford, and in his situation would, in pratical terms, be very stupid if he tried to ponder upon the intricate shadings of tribalism and et al. The pressure and stress the do or die shilling imposes makes him willing to depressurize and destress on the whims of the verbal throes of the nearest politician. If this politician said a decade back that the Kisumu Muhindi’s are colonizing all business opportunities, that the Kikuyus have taken over Kenya and everything that is Kenyan (including the lake shore 100 metres from your feet) etc, then when the depressurisation is given an opportunity to happen these old memories of heard political speeches will surface suddenly and will be acted upon. It’s not his fault. I would say he behaved according to the flaws of modern ‘developing world’ society.
The ‘Kenyan Citizen’ that should be blamed is the middle-class, the intelligentsia that are the mochama’s & binyavanga’s, the upper-class, the rare or rarified poetess who will prefer to do her shopping in the the most expensive malls in East & Central Africa but will never buy the banana seller’s banana and who shamelessly feels free to expound on the poetic logic of who is right and who is wrong. As Kivuitu says, the poetess did not appear to be a god.
Or some guy like me who gets a kick out of writing some bloggish thing like this though the only contribution I made to the election debacle was watching the whole drama on TV whilst sitting on a sofa and sucking the juice from the lambchop.
I still insist that Kenyan citizens are also to blame for the post election crisis.
Everyone, big or small, rich or poor, middle class or high class.
Why should the poor behave as your put it Mehul, “according to the flaws of modern ‘developing world’ society?”
Do these flaws state that one should arm himself to kill the next door neighbour, destroy the other person’s property? And these people belong to the same class and the only difference is based on ethnic community?
Why did they not take a stand and have respect for life? These are the people who make a living in the streets; the people who live in the village and people in the slums of Nairobi, Nakuru and Naivasha. Look at what they did to each other. Killing a neighbour while calling out his/her name!
The middle class - they spread messages of hate through short message service (sms) and through emails.
High Hills
I too think that most if not all of us are at fault, some of course have the lion’s share of the fault like the politicians and all the crazy folk who organized and executed violence.
I think the crisis just showed what most hid underneath their breath, if we really did love one another then we would have stopped ourselves from destroying others and property, whether we felt betrayed,stolen from, hurt or any other strong raging emotions we felt during that time.
Well, here is a lady who is not afraid to speak her mind.
I think she is absolutely right to rail like she did (I read the letter with a lot of interest) against the culpable Mr Kivuitu, for if there is one man who (almost) brought Kenya to its knees, it is Kivuitu.
I had the opportunity to serve as a senior elections official (some three or so years before the elections proper), and I had the good luck to observe this man closely. He has had the reputation of being an honest manager of elections. What is perhaps not known is that he is a very vain man, who is so self-possessed that he really believes that he is God’s ultimate gift to Kenya. I am speaking from a point of knowledge, and I believe this is the Man’s fatal flaw. He was, in my opinion, right at the centre of the rigging machine that saw a man who only won 2 ou of Kenya’s 8 provinces declared ‘winner’.
I am certain that Kivuitu knew there would be violence if he subverted the will of the people, the only thing he never knew is the extent of the people’s anger. If only he was living somewhere in the Rift Valley he wouldn’t have dared to do the evil he did.
Kivuitu says he took the certificate to the ‘winner’, and there he found the ‘winner’ already primed for swearing-in, just 23 minutes after he announced the damned results. How did the CJ and all the other fellas knew there was going to be a swearing in? Imagine my surprise and indignation when I found in the TV footage (from Citizen TV, no less) that my ousted MP Hussein Maalim was there! (I understand he was collected at 11 00am that fateful Sunday from Garissa Military Airstrip by an Air Force plane for the inaugguration. This is one area that needs investigation, in order to actually get to the bottom of this most tasteless buglary: who actually ordered that election rigging be undertaken? Michuki? There is an interesting piece of documentation with the US Senate on this, done for the US Govt, (see David Mozersky, Horn of Africa Project Director, International Crisis Group to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations’ Subcommittee on African Affairs on “The Immediate and Underlying causes and Consequences of Flawed Democracy in Kenya.”)
If he knew he won fairly, why did he have to fly secretly to a military base at the Coast? Escapism from the harsh reality?
All the best
A