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Now he’s running in Kenya’s general elections under the banner of his new Ukweli Party on Tuesday to join the legislature in hopes of improving politics in his country.
Under normal circumstances, Mwangi’s chances would be slim against incumbent President Uhuru Kenyatta and his Jubilee Alliance, and also against the opposition National Super Alliance and its candidate, Raila Odinga, CNN noted.
But the activist’s participation illustrates how Kenyans are getting fed up, even as they also fear violence erupting during or after the vote, wrote Kenyan commentator and cartoonist Patrick Gathara in a Washington Post op-ed.
Already, the country’s top election official was found tortured and murdered last week, while Nairobi has become a ghost town.
“People are moving their families away from ethnically mixed neighborhoods in areas anticipated to be flashpoints of violence, and into tribal enclaves where there is safety in numbers,” wrote Gathara.
Most Kenyan voters cast ballots according to their tribe rather than candidates’ policies or personalities, Deutsche Welle explained. Corrupt elites who perpetuate and benefit from that system have absconded with the country’s riches, rewarding their allies while letting others struggle and go without, exacerbating a yawning gap between rich and poor and stoking resentment.
At the same time, voters younger than 35 comprise 51 percent of the electorate, yet politicians are failing to address the needs of youth, wrote Kenyan journalist John-Allan Namu in an op-ed for Al Jazeera.
In the 2007 election of President Mwai Kibaki, those resentments came to a boil amid allegations of vote rigging that led to protests where more than 1,000 people died. Elections in 2013 were relatively peaceful, but vote rigging was rampant and police cracked down on protesters, the Guardian wrote.
Today, a similar environment prevails in the country, wroteNewsweek, reporting that some Kenyans were stockpiling machetes to prepare for fighting.
Polls show Odinga with a slight lead, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. Mwangi is making headway, too. He has 700,000 Twitter followers and 250,000 likes on his Facebook page, for example. He’s been crowdfunding his campaign, too.
But already, there’s talk of a vote postponement due to problems with vote printing that would likely help Kenyatta, who is running for reelection.
The Carter Center said Kenyan authorities were doing their best to make sure the election goes off without civil unrest.
But clearly there are much larger forces that leaders, not bureaucrats, should be addressing with voters.
And because they haven’t, many in Kenya are waiting to exhale.
