Journalist, writer and curator of the Wall of Great Africans
Kenya's fascinating election — and burgeoning democracy — continued to play out in the week. The dispute over the August 9 election went to the Supreme Court, and some strange "unAfrican" orders were made.
Among them, the judges ordered the Independent Electoral and Boundaries and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) to give the petitioners access, under supervision, to all the electoral body's servers, so they could dig around for evidence of election rigging.
The courtroom proceedings were notably magisterial, with the judges sitting up on stage with passive Buddha-like facial expressions and on the floor, the lawyers preening like sages.
The flood of evidence was a reminder, if anyone needed it, that Kenya is an equal-opportunity-election-fiddling nation.
The incumbent or incumbent-favoured presidential candidate or party, and the outsider or opposition, have an equal chance of helping their electoral fortunes with some vote performance-enhancing drugs, as it were.
The East African attention that the Kenya election has grabbed asks some big questions about the future of the proposed East African Community federation (in Swahili, Shirikisho la Afrika Mashariki).
Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni has been the loudest proponent of the EAC Federation and, in the past two years, was joined on the rooftop to beat its drums by outgoing Kenya President Uhuru Kenyatta.
However, recent events in Kenya and the past few days have thrown up the vexing matter of the political standards that would apply in an East African federation.
Consider, for example, that as the "craziness" we see around the Kenya election is playing out in Tanzania, the only thing a presidential candidate who feels he or she has been robbed in the election marketplace can do is quarrel with the road while driving home to cry on the shoulder of their spouse or children.
Tanzania's constitution provides that once a presidential candidate has been declared the winner, "no court of law shall have any jurisdiction to inquire into the election of that candidate".
It is an EAC outlier in that case because, in the six other partner states, you can challenge a presidential outcome – though in some of them, you could end up with broken ribs, a stint in jail or house arrest, or have to flee abroad for safety, for the effort.
It only adds to the complications already presented by other disparities. Some EAC countries have presidential term limits, while others don't.
Corruption is the fuel on which the politics in some EAC countries runs. In others, being long-fingered is a deadly business.
Ethnicity and regionalism are the logic around which politics and electoral competition are restructured in some EAC states.
In some of them, anti-ethnicity and anti-regionalism are the foundation on which the dominant political forces of the day have built the political system.
This Kenya election also threw up another issue that is less remarked about. Years of onslaught by various democracy, civil rights and anti-statist forces have weakened the Kenyan state considerably —though some would argue that's good.
It is withering at the centre though bulking up on the periphery.
In another 10 years, whoever is president in Nairobi will have limited power to influence whether Kenya joins an East African federation.
It had better happen sooner, then.
Charles Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer, and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3
