Election fever

I was at a petrol station in Nakuru, a city in Kenya’s Rift Valley, when I experienced my first moment of genuine terror since arriving in Africa. I was standing in a queue, waiting to pay, when a crowd of about 500 locals suddenly invaded the garage forecourt. They were campaigning for one of the candidates in Kenya’s forthcoming election — a mob, in other words, and not a very friendly one at that. Some of them were clutching makeshift weapons — clubs, sticks and whatnot — and I looked on in horror as a breakaway group surrounded my Toyota Land Cruiser and started rocking it from side to side. My wife was sitting in the passenger seat and my four children were in the back.

I’d been warned not to travel to Naivasha, the other big city in the region, but that had been earlier in the week when various primary elections were held throughout the country. Sure enough, ten prominent politicians were deselected and that led to a series of violent protests in Kisumu, Kenya’s third largest city. That has sparked fears that the upcoming general election, due to take place in March, will see a repeat of the tribal violence after the 2007 election, when more than 1,000 people were killed and thousands more displaced.

Here in Gilgil, where I’m based, the local expats have plenty of horror stories dating back to that period. Our neighbour, a Spectator reader and mother of three, burnt her hand quite badly on election night and her husband had to drive her to the Naivasha District Hospital. To get there, they had to make their way through a series of impromptu roadblocks erected by rival political factions, and at each one they were stopped and told to turn back.