By Strategic Intelligence News.
Kenya’s Prime Minister Raila Odinga is engaging in political activities that are increasing hostilities between two key communities in Kenya, intelligence gathered by Strategic Intelligence shows.
The Intelligence community is aware of how ethnic conflict occurs hence closely watching the behavior of every Kenyan presidential candidate.
Strategic Intelligence analysts and researchers validates that ethnic conflict occurs when a particular politician influences a set of factors and conditions to whip ethno-political emotions.
Intelligence shows Raila Odinga has converged a set of factors which include: a major structural crisis; presence of historical memories of inter-ethnic grievances; institutional factors that promote ethnic intolerance; manipulation of historical memories by political entrepreneurs to evoke emotions such as fear, resentment and hate toward the “other”; and an inter-ethnic competition over resources and rights to isolate competing presidential candidates based on their ethnicity.
Strategic Intelligence has found out that for every additional month closer to the competitive presidential election, Odinga and his crew are adding more vitriol to ethnicity.
The objective of increased attacks on the main rivals and their ethnic-economic identities Strategic Intelligence finds a bias that implies that Odinga’s policy on the electoral competition is causing ethnic identities to displace class/occupational identities.
Social media reactions on Odinga’s political policy and bare-knuckle approach against the main competitor are indicative of an alarmed society with many respondents insisting Odinga is polarizing the country.
If this behavior by such politicians does not cease immediately, Kenya will plunge to another political nightmare with ethnic wars being inevitable.
A critical analysis on Odinga and his CORD coalition politics shows increase in ethnic tension whereby, this is validated by previous research that that ethnic identities in Kenya are strengthened by exposure to political competition.
Strategic Intelligence reports that Odinga’s policy seeks to procure social identification in the Kenyan society, a policy/fact that is consistent with the view that ethnic identities matter in Kenya because they are useful in the competition for political power.
On Social Media, the Kikuyu Community and the Luo Community members have increased their attacks on each other with most of those used for this OSINIT find increasing the level of ethnic attacks whenever Odinga makes an inflaming statement.
Strategic Intelligence main finding is that the increasing salience of ethnic identification that occurs in proximity to competitive presidential elections corresponds with a decreasing salience of class/occupational identities.
Direct verbal attacks on one ethnic community have increased with the land issue and economic gains of that community being used as the basis of this ethnic intolerance.