Revisiting Kenya’s defunct Building Bridges Initiative: Quest for justice, or manipulation of collective memory for political expediency?

Contemporary scholarship overwhelmingly suggests that political elites cannot be trusted to initiate and lead reconciliation processes, for various reasons such as the manipulation of collective memory for political expediency. Accordingly, this paper posits, Kenya’s now-defunct Building Bridges Initiative (BBI), the product of a 2018 political truce (“handshake”) between arch-rivals—former President Uhuru Kenyatta and opposition leader Raila Odinga—ought to be critically reassessed. Although it was presented to Kenyans as an instrument for building lasting unity, giving the impression that it would yield justice for, among others, victims of electoral violence, it may also have been motivated by succession politics. This study, therefore, employs a qualitative design anchored in focus group methodology to seek answers to the following two broad questions: 1) Did Kenyans at the grassroots consider the handshake and the resultant BBI appropriate justice mechanisms vis-à-vis the post-election violence of 2017? 2) How did the handshake and BBI affect collective memory of the 2017 post-election violence? It finds, partly, that the grassroots understanding of what constitutes justice for victims of post-election violence in Kenya largely differs from and even transcends the content of the BBI report; it is multifaceted and features, amongst other aspects, the need to first acknowledge the victims of Kenya’s post-election violence and a grassroots-oriented approach to conciliation, involving apologies and forgiveness deriving from face-to-face engagements between citizens and the police. Also, Kenyans remember the 2017 election cycle, and the atrocities thereof, vividly. The findings suggest that future conciliatory measures in the Kenyan scenario would have greater impact if they combined elements of transitional and rectificatory justice to ensure the restoration of the dignity of victims of atrocities.