Word: nairobi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...revived questions of whether democracy works in Africa. Kenya is the economic and political center of East Africa, and its success or failure is an indicator of the region's political health. But within days of the vote, as counting continued, paramilitary police stormed the election-commission offices in Nairobi and forced them to declare for incumbent President Mwai Kibaki. The President is a member of the Kikuyu, Kenya's largest tribe and a group widely resented for its dominance of government and business since independence in 1963. Opposition leader Raila Odinga, a Luo from western Kenya, accused the Kikuyus...
...When Kibaki flew to Kiambaa for the funeral last month, he found himself without Odinga and addressing an almost exclusively Kikuyu crowd. The Kikuyus spoke of how Kalenjins were still plotting their slaughter. Hearing an account of the funeral, Adams Oloo, a politics lecturer at the University of Nairobi, nods and says: "There is no healing." That's often the case in Africa. Kenyans want peace. But their leaders thrive instead on enduring enmities and division. "Political leaders use ethnicity as an instrument to achieve power and their goals," says Oloo. Which means, adds a Western diplomat...
...according to a February report by Philip Alston, U.N. rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions. Days after his report was released, the police were accused of the murders of two human rights activists who assisted Alston's research; they were shot dead as they sat in traffic during Nairobi's evening rush hour...
...beseeched the country's biggest newspaper, The Nation, in a front-page editorial on April 10. The same month Annan warned of a dangerous "impasse." On May 10, former U.S. ambassador to Kenya and new Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Johnnie Carson, made talks in Nairobi with Kibaki and Odinga the focus of his first trip to the continent since his appointment by President Barack Obama. His message: Washington was "deeply worried" about the possibility of more violence...
John Githongo is an unlikely hero. The son of a patrician Kikuyu family - his father was accountant to Kenya's first President, Jomo Kenyatta - Githongo grew up in Nairobi's leafy suburbs, went to the best schools and studied abroad. He enjoyed privileges that 95% of Kenyans can only dream of. In 2003, on the strength of that background, Githongo was appointed his country's anti-corruption czar...