One hot, cloudless afternoon in October, I sat in the members’ salon of the Kenyan Parliament as the guest of Joseph Lekuton, an M.P. from the desolate bush country to the east of Lake Turkana. Around us a dozen other Kenyan politicians sat in comfortable armchairs, sipping tea from silver services and gliding from English to Swahili to tribal languages and back again. The décor — dark wood paneling, white concrete pillars and a flying-saucer-like brass-and-steel chandelier — suggested both the Soviet Politburo and a Las Vegas lounge in the Rat Pack era. Lekuton (pronounced LEH-koo-tone), an animated man in his late 30s, had dropped by to catch up on developments in the country’s election campaign. On Dec. 27, Kenyans are voting, for the first time since 2002, to choose a new president and Parliament; Lekuton was in the capital raising money and trying to decide whether to throw his lot in with the government coalition or with the main opposition party. (Kenya’s parties are fluid, and continuous maneuvering takes place during a campaign season.) Lekuton, a rising political star, was being wooed by both sides, which put his constituents in a state of considerable anxiety. The election, meanwhile, was promising to be the most democratic and unpredictable in Kenya’s history: polls showed President Mwai Kibaki slipping behind the challenger, Raila Odinga, a former political prisoner. The prospect of an incumbent president caught in a genuine electoral contest — a nearly unprecedented event in Africa — excited Lekuton. “There’s never been anything like this in Kenyan politics,” he told me.
But along with this democratic opening have come social stresses that Lekuton could not have anticipated when he entered public life. His association with America, where he has spent most of the past 20 years, is becoming a burden: his Muslim opponent, Abubakar Godana Harugura, has not shied away from asserting his Islamic identity, and Lekuton has found himself backing into the political role of a so-called antifundamentalist. And both men have discovered that this West-vs.-Islamism political drama attracts money in a way that rural development, say, never could. It’s now possible that Lekuton’s remote constituency will become embroiled in an ideological conflict that might just as easily have passed it by.
The son of nomadic cattle herders in Kenya’s far north, Lekuton has compiled a three-decade-long winning streak. After finishing Catholic missionary school, he won a full scholarship to St. Lawrence University in upstate New York and earned a master’s degree in international education policy at Harvard. He spent the next 10 years teaching American history at the Langley School in northern Virginia; wrote an autobiography for young people, “Facing the Lion,” published by National Geographic; then came home in the spring of 2006 to run for Parliament in a special election following the death in a plane crash of a serving M.P. Partly on the strength of his U.S. connections (he was only the second person in his constituency to attend college in the United States), Lekuton narrowly defeated the M.P.’s widow, and in his first year in office compiled an impressive record. He channeled public funds to construct schoolrooms and boreholes for wells, lured Western development agencies to his constituency, mediated between ethnic groups in the region that have been clashing over livestock-grazing rights and access to water and distributed some of his ample salary to pay school fees and health-care costs for the indigent. (Kenya’s Parliamentarians earn one million shillings in salary and perks, or $16,000 a month, making them among the highest-paid legislators in the world.) Despite Lekuton’s successes, he faces a very serious challenge from Godana Harugura.
A 38-year-old engineer and the former chief of the roads department of Marsabit District (which includes Lekuton’s constituency), Harugura had no political experience. What he does seem to have is access to money and influence, in part because he comes from one of the area’s most important clans and thus can count on the built-in support a network like that provides. Just as important, perhaps, is that Harugura is also a convert to fundamentalist Islam — he began reading the Koran in college in Nairobi, joined the Islamic student union there and adopted the Islamic name Abubakar around the time of his graduation. After announcing his candidacy this past spring, Harugura reportedly raised money from Muslims along Kenya’s volatile border with Somalia by promising to “reclaim” the region for Islam — and by attacking Lekuton for inviting Christian development groups into the area. He hinted darkly that Lekuton’s decade in the Washington area had made him subservient to U.S. interests and potentially hostile to Islam.
Earlier, in Lekuton’s apartment, I was introduced to three college students from Harugura’s home village, Kargi, who told me that Harugura’s austere manner, obeisance to Islamic law, Islamic dress, proselytizing and questionable connections had earned him the mocking nickname Al Qaeda. Indeed, in the view of some of Lekuton’s supporters the election was shaping up to be a proxy confrontation between the West and Islam — a clash of civilizations in the Kenyan bush. Lekuton himself, however, was more reticent about the perils posed by “Engineer,” as Harugura is commonly called in the north. “I’ve not seen his manifesto,” he told me as we sat in the Parliamentary lounge. “The assumption is that with strong religious views, he’s bound to step on people’s toes. We’ll know more as he continues campaigning.”
Continue reading the main storyI asked Lekuton whether it was true, as I’d been told, that Harugura had been recruiting aggressively among the young people of the area and had sponsored some of them at Islamic schools, or madrassas, in other cities in Kenya, including Thika and Mombasa.
“Yes, I’ve heard that,” Lekuton said cautiously.
“Are these madrassas that preach a radical message? Along the lines of the madrassas in Pakistan?” I asked.
“I’m sure they are strict.” Lekuton leaned forward. “Look, we have religious freedom in Kenya. You do what you want. What I’m saying is that in order to have a society that is developing with democratic principles, we need sober minds.”
These are some of the most extraordinary and unsettling times in Kenya’s postindependence history. The country is in the middle of a boom, its 5.7 percent annual growth rate among the highest in Africa. Shopping malls and office towers are rising in nearly every corner of Nairobi; S.U.V.’s and luxury cars fill the streets, and the traffic has gotten bad enough to invite comparisons with Bangkok. Kenya’s tourism industry has been highly sensitive to both domestic and international terrorism but is now flourishing. And while the country is still plagued by corruption, tribalism and poverty, the one-party rule that gripped Kenya for four decades — first under Jomo Kenyatta, then under President Daniel arap Moi, who voluntarily stepped down in 2002 after 24 years in power — has given way to one of Africa’s liveliest multiparty systems.
At the same time, militant Islam has also found a foothold. A sizable, largely poor Muslim population concentrated along the coast — and proximity to the volatile states in the Horn of Africa, including Somalia and Sudan — have made Kenya especially vulnerable, in the views of counterterrorism experts, to the call for jihad. Since the early 1990s, the mosques of Mombasa and other towns have resonated with militant Islamic rhetoric. Radical imams have preached violence against Westerners, attacked the Kenyan government as the lackey of the United States and Israel and called for the implementation of Shariah. Members of the Qaeda cells that blew up the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on Aug. 7, 1998, were recruited in mosques near the Indian Ocean beaches where hundreds of thousands of Western tourists flock each year. Kenya is “a good place” for militant Islamists to blend in, I was told by Al Amin Kimathi, the director of the Muslim Human Rights Forum in Nairobi, which accuses the Kenyan government of discrimination against the country’s roughly four million Muslims (in a total population of 37 million). He added, only half in jest: “Even Osama bin Laden could hang around here. He could land at the airport, spread some money around and he’d be walking.”
This Islamization of politics cuts more than one way. When I caught up with Lekuton in Nairobi, he had just finished a two-week fund-raising tour of the United States, where he played up the threat of Engineer Harugura at cocktail parties attended by wealthy businessmen and old African hands. Reluctantly at first, but with more conviction as the tour progressed, he raised alarms about the prospect of a devout Islamist taking charge of a remote corner of the country filled with jobless, poor youths — and not far from the border with Somalia, with its tattered militia operating under the banner of the fundamentalist Islamic Courts Union. Could backing Lekuton be a preventive move, fending off the Talibanization of an otherwise obscure corner of Africa?
“The area is poor, rural, forgotten, and that makes it vulnerable,” I was told by Kathleen Colson, a Vermonter who first met Lekuton at a summer program run by St. Lawrence University in 1990 and who frequently visits his district as director of a U.S.-based nonprofit that does microenterprise development there. Colson says that U.S. fund-raisers encouraged Lekuton to focus on his opponent’s Islamic identity in order to appeal to Jewish communities, among other potential donors. “He has been hesitant,” she added, “but now he says, ‘Bring it on.’ ” Whitney Tilson, a New York money manager who spent part of his childhood in Tanzania and who introduced Lekuton to friends and colleagues in Manhattan, says that Lekuton, while not at all hostile to Islam, was quite specific about the threat posed by Harugura. “He said: ‘Here’s what I know. He’s pretty hard-core. He won’t shake hands with women. I’ve seen food trucks going up to my district saying, ‘Gift from the Embassy of Saudi Arabia.’ In Kenya people will vote for whoever gives you your last meal, and I could have a bigger fight on my hands than I anticipated.’ ”
But it was not clear in Nairobi whether the alarms were solidly grounded or more a bit of marketing. (Lekuton said he hoped to raise $120,000 in the U.S. for his re-election campaign but fell about $20,000 short; he raised $200,000 for his 2006 run.) Harugura and his supporters insist that he is a victim of the post-9/11 syndrome: the fear that anyone with a beard who wears a skullcap and prays five times a day is a potential terrorist. They deny that he has raised any money from Middle Eastern Islamic organizations, say he has put together a strong plan for economic development in the constituency and point out that a large number of Christians support him. And since more than three-quarters of the population is Christian, Harugura contends that his Islamic identity is not going to win him many extra votes. Lekuton, they charge, was manipulating American fears about the “Islamic threat” to raise cash — and Harugura was an innocent victim of religious profiling.
One morning just before the campaign began, I dropped by Lekuton’s spartan apartment in the Hurlingham neighborhood of Nairobi, which was filled with two dozen constituents who had camped there. Lekuton keeps the place as a pied-à-terre for days when Parliament is in session; he spends most of his time in north Kenya, and the apartment had the feel of an undergraduate crash pad. A Samburu tribeswoman swathed in bracelets and beaded necklaces sat on a battered couch, chatting with a camel-herding Rendille tribesman with distended earlobes. Three shabbily dressed college students clutched tuition bills; they were hoping that Lekuton would pay their school fees, which, for all three, totaled 73,000 Kenyan shillings — about $1,100 — for the winter semester. (After Lekuton’s parents lost their cattle herd in a drought, his high-school tuition was picked up by President Daniel arap Moi, who was in the stands when Lekuton kicked the winning goal in a soccer match. Lekuton explained to me that he pays poor students’ fees routinely: “Without education, you can’t have democracy.”) A pair of would-be councilmen seeking Lekuton’s endorsement sprawled in front of the TV, channel-surfing between Al Jazeera and “The King of Queens.” Lekuton’s wife, Sophia — whom he met in the early 1990s while he was working in a Kenyan bank before college and she was attending high school — had just arrived from a month’s visit to the United States and held the couple’s 6-month-old son, Keena, in her lap. (They also have twin 14-year-olds, Biko and his sister Janice, and a 10-year-old daughter, Sharon, all of whom attend private schools in Kenya.)
Lekuton was fast asleep in his bedroom, trying to recover from a bad cold he picked up during days of round-the-clock meetings with the leaders of the Kenyan African National Union Party, a key part of the government coalition, run by Uhuru Kenyatta, the son of Kenya’s founding president. Presiding over the scene in his absence was Ahmed Kura — a short, stocky man of 24, Muslim by birth, who serves as Lekuton’s driver, aide-de-camp and principal spokesman. (He is also Lekuton’s brother-in-law.) Kura has been close to Lekuton for more than a decade, during which time, he told me, he has watched alarming changes creep into Kenya’s far north. Kura recalled that when the news of 9/11 arrived in Marsabit, the main town in Lekuton’s district, “people were celebrating. Some Muslims were saying, ‘They deserved that.’ They felt that so many Muslims are being harassed in the world. This was a taste of revenge.” The imams in the area, he told me, “had the sense that Americans are our enemies. I argued with them after 9/11. I said: ‘Not every person in America is bad. How many died that day? Do you think God loves such a thing? If that is what Islam is, then I don’t think that God can be fair.’ Their response was, ‘You are not a strong Muslim.’ ”
It wasn’t always like this, Kura insisted. Religious identities in the northern bush have tended to be both relaxed and fluid; Kura’s parents were raised as Muslims, descendants of herdsmen from the Rendille tribe who were introduced to Islam by Somali traders before Kenya gained independence in 1963. Kura grew up a Muslim, though he liked to drink a Tusker beer or two with his dinner, and he seldom prayed or attended mosque. His sister, Sophia, became a Christian after attending a missionary school near Marsabit. “In our community almost nobody identifies himself according to religion,” he told me. The defining loyalties, he said, were to “clan and tribe.”
That was changing, he said, and he partly blamed Engineer Harugura for the hardening of attitudes. Harugura first attracted attention in the area a decade ago, when he began constructing roads as the chief district officer for the Ministry of Roads and Public Works, based in Marsabit. “He’d be working there in his Land Rover, going out on the roads,” Kura told me. “He gave out a lot of jobs.” Harugura’s ascetic behavior rankled many people, Kura said. He wouldn’t shake women’s hands; he refused to allow people into his car who were smoking cigarettes or chewing khat — the leafy stimulant that is widely chewed in Somalia and northern Kenya. Besides encouraging local youth to attend madrassas and overseeing the construction of mosques, he had reportedly bankrolled a so-called Muslim village, near Kargi, where 20 families had settled. It was unclear where the money came from, though Kura claimed that the source was a Saudi charity. “He’s trying to create a Muslim society up there,” he said. Last year, the Engineer moved to Hardera, a gritty town on the Somali border, to become the region’s public-works chief. The area is populated almost entirely by ethnic Somalis, many of whom supported the radical Islamists who had just seized control of Mogadishu and who were angry at what they regard as U.S. machinations to unseat them with Ethiopian help. After announcing his candidacy for Kenya’s Parliament, Kura told me, Harugura addressed an outdoor gathering of Somali Muslims in Hardera. “He told the Somalis: ‘There is a Christian I am fighting against. I want to bring about an environment where all are Islamic, because our people are lost.’ ” Kura put me on his cellphone with Aron Lesiantam, a Lekuton supporter who worked for Food for the Hungry, a Christian aid agency in Marsabit. He supported Kura’s claim that Harugura was being financed by Somalis from the Northeastern Province. “They believe that Harugura is the person to bring back the Rendille tribe from Christianity,” Lesiantam said. “And he has promised that during the first five years, he will have mosques built in every urban center we have in this constituency.”
It was the simultaneous bombings in 1998 of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam — attacks that killed 224 Kenyans, Tanzanians and Americans and injured 4,000 more — that awakened U.S. officials to the dangers posed by militant Islam in East Africa. In the years since, the Horn of Africa, and Kenya in particular, has become a locus of U.S. counterterrorism. The programs include the East African Counter-Terrorism Initiative, set up in 2003 at a cost of $100 million, and the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa, a contingent of U.S. Marines and Special Forces based at Camp Lemonier in the coastal African nation of Djibouti. The area has also become, perhaps partly in response, a centerpiece of the global strategy of Osama bin Laden, who last year urged jihadis to take over Somalia.
One prime target of U.S. counterterrorism forces in the region for nearly a decade — and an example of just how virulent locally brewed jihadism has become — is Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, who was indicted for planning the 1998 embassy bombings and, according to the F.B.I., has had a hand in nearly every terrorist act in the Horn of Africa since. A native of the Comoros Islands, Mohammed received training in Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and Somalia in the 1990s and settled on the Swahili coast of Kenya. After the embassy attacks, Mohammed regrouped with other terrorist cell members on the island of Paté, married into a local family, taught at a madrassa and started a local soccer team called Kabul. (It competed with the island’s other team, known as Al Qaeda.) During this period, he recruited a cell of eight other militants from mosques along the Swahili coast. On Nov. 28, 2002, two suicide bombers from Mohammed’s cell, according to the F.B.I. and the Kenyan police, attacked the Paradise Hotel near Mombasa, killing 13 people; almost simultaneously, other cell members tried to shoot down an Israeli chartered jetliner with shoulder-fired missiles. The attackers purportedly took refuge in the immediate area, then fled by motorized dhow, a traditional sailing craft, to Somalia.
By early 2004, the Kenya Anti-Terrorist Police, trained and financed by the United States, were raiding mosques and detaining suspected radicals all along the Swahili coast. Fazul Abdullah Mohammed’s next stop was Somalia, where radical Islam was establishing its strongest beachhead in the Horn of Africa. Mohammed reportedly became a high official in the Islamic Courts Union, a loose affiliation of Shariah courts that were in control of much of the southern part of the country in 2005. In 2006, the Islamic Courts Union militia defeated a coalition of U.S.-backed secular warlords in the capital, Mogadishu, began implementing Shariah law there and subsequently consolidated control across most of Somalia. Ethiopia, which shares American alarm about the spread of fundamentalist Islam in Africa, moved troops into Somalia and, late in December 2006, backed by U.S. Special Forces, sent 4,000 troops into Mogadishu. Fazul Abdullah Mohammed escaped the onslaught and fled. Hundreds of fighters and other supporters of the I.C.U. crossed the border into Kenya; between Jan. 2 and 31, 2007, Kenyan police officers rounded up 152 of these men and women from 21 countries, including the United States, Great Britain, Yemen and Sudan. Then, in the controversial practice known as extraordinary rendition, 85 were placed on three chartered aircraft and flown to Mogadishu and Baidoa, where they were turned over to the Ethiopian Army. According to Muslim human rights groups in Kenya, those flown out of Kenya included 18 native-born Kenyans, one of whom was transferred to Guantánamo; the rest remain under house arrest in Addis Ababa. The renditions have become a rallying cry for Kenya’s opposition parties and, for many Kenyan Muslims, a symbol of how their government has grown beholden to American policy. (“We are held to have been intimately involved in all of this, which we were not,” a U.S. diplomat told me.)
Anti-Western sentiment had begun creeping into the mosques of northern Kenya well before 9/11, Ahmed Kura told me. In the 1990s, the Kuwaiti-backed African Muslim Agency financed the construction of mosques throughout the countryside, including one in Kargi, Harugura’s home village, and in Korr, a trading town near Lake Turkana. The African Muslim Agency’s stated agenda has been to strengthen Islam by spreading the teachings of the Koran, as well as to build hospitals, schools and mosques. But terrorism experts have seen a darker agenda in the group’s good works: according to U.S. investigators, money raised by the charity has gone to finance jihadi groups, including Al Itihaad al Islamiya (A.I.A.I.), a radical Islamic organization, now defunct, that was based in Somalia and led by Sheik Hassan Dahir Aweys (who was linked to Al Qaeda and later became a leader of the Islamic Courts Union). A.I.A.I. was declared a terrorist organization by President Bush two weeks after 9/11.
At 3 one afternoon, Godana Harugura entered the lobby of the slightly down-at-the-heels Hotel Boulevard, a popular spot for young American backpackers and budget tourists. Harugura looked youthful, with a white knit cap and a wispy black beard, his dark eyes framed behind square, wire-rimmed glasses. Unsmiling, he offered me a limp handshake, then suggested we sit in the hotel’s outdoor coffee shop. He had assembled eight supporters to join us, including Al Amin Kimathi, the Human Rights Forum director, an imposing man in his 40s with a white skullcap, gray beard and white dishdasha.
Harugura told me that he became a devout Muslim during his four years at college in Nairobi in the 1990s, when an Islamic-consciousness movement was sweeping the youth of a number of African cities. “At the university they have a library, when you sit and you read and you learn about how to practice your religion — how to fast, how to pray, how to improve your character,” he told me. “With the student union, Muslim student groups, sometimes you meet, you attend rallies, and if you have free time, you slowly build up. I could interact with Muslim students, and slowly I started practicing the religion. Now my father is praying five times a day, too.”
Harugura told me that my conversations with Lekuton’s people had filtered back to him, and he was angry about what he had heard. He denied that people in the area had associated him with Al Qaeda, jokingly or otherwise, calling it part of Lekuton’s disinformation campaign. “Only Joseph Lekuton does this,” Harugura said. “He’ll tell one of his former supporters, ‘Oh, so you’ve gone over to work for that Al Qaeda fellow.’ ” He said that simply mentioning his name in conjunction with the terrorist group was inflaming passions among his supporters. “This is hurting me as an individual and at the national level,” Harugura went on. “Coming on the heels of these rendition issues, it is very sensitive. Next time maybe somebody will be stopping me and picking me up for being Al Qaeda.” I asked Harugura whether it was true that he was accepting money from Somalis or from fundamentalist Islamic groups, including the Kuwaitis and Saudis, and he shook his head vigorously. “You know very well that no Muslim organization can give a shilling. Even children’s aid programs have been shut down by the Americans since 9/11. No shilling can come from the Arab world to Kenya. It’s so difficult to even have collected 500 shillings.” Five hundred Kenyan shillings is about $8.
“So how do you plan to fund your campaign?” I asked.
He shrugged. “It’s a campaign based on words, not finances. Politics is mainly speaking and visiting people. That’s what I do. I talk to the elders on the ground, and they go around in my absence and talk for me. I’ll get somebody who has a car, and perhaps I can contribute a little petrol to go around.” Lekuton, he charged, was ignoring the area’s economic problems — the barter-based pastoral system had been devastated by chronic drought and was no longer viable, he told me — and relying on handouts to win people’s votes. The Engineer had little doubt about where the bulk of Lekuton’s cash was coming from: “Lekuton is a teacher at Langley School. That is C.I.A. headquarters. He’s raising funds right in the heartland of the U.S. intelligence community.” There is no connection between the Langley School and the C.I.A., although they are near each other in Virginia.
One of Harugura’s supporters, a young man who identified himself only as Sakapo, weighed in with his own account of how Lekuton had exploited his Americanized identity to win over his consituency’s naïve, uneducated population. “He was staying in America all his life, he was moving around in a convoy of vehicles and he portrayed himself as a multimillionaire,” the man said. “He created an impression that he is a moving World Bank, and he told the Rendille people that once he is elected the whole American financial world will develop the area. ‘I will make your village New York’ is what he said.”
Later I met with Al Amin Kimathi in his office on the second floor of the Jamia Mosque, Kenya’s largest, a multidomed complex in the heart of the congested city center. An affable former journalist for Kenya’s Nation newspaper and a member of the dominant Kikuyu tribe, Kimathi converted to Islam about 15 years ago. “The Muslim community has never been given a fair shake in this country,” he told me. Kimathi had just returned to his office after an overnight vigil at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, where he’d been fighting the deportation of a Dutch Somali who was “one of the big guns” in the Islamic Courts Union. (Kimathi lost that battle — Kenyan immigration officers shoved the man aboard a charter flight back to Somalia before dawn.) In Kimathi’s view, “only some of the leaders” of the Islamic Courts Union were Al Qaeda sympathizers. The renditions — along with frequent police sweeps on the Swahili coast — had become an emotional issue in the presidential race. Islamic outrage had placed the incumbent, Kibaki, on the defensive and provided Raila Odinga with a tool to rally the support of Kenya’s Muslims — who, traditionally, have not voted as a bloc but may now begin doing so. Earlier in the week, the national papers had front-page photographs of both presidential candidates wearing traditional Muslim dress and attending Eid al-Fitr celebrations marking the end of Ramadan.
Kimathi told me that he’d met Harugura a few years back when he “tried to identify Muslim professionals who would work on human rights issues — enlightening people about Islam, eliminating pressure. I brought in Harugura.” Kimathi acknowledged that Harugura was trying to spread Islam through northern Kenya. But, he asked, what was wrong with that? Harugura was no jihadi, he insisted. Moreover, he claimed, several ethnographers had established that the Rendille tribe — to which both Harugura and Lekuton belonged — was “originally” Muslim settlers from Somalia or Ethiopia. Now many were yearning to return to their Islamic roots. “There has been that hunger,” Kimathi told me, adding that his aim is to “reclaim the population.”
Muslims’ anger toward America can only help. “What is creeping into Kenyan psyche is [anger] at American people themselves,” he said. “We wonder, How they can go on supporting this regime that is brutalizing people like this?” I asked Kimathi if Americans have reason to fear an Islamic awakening in the Kenyan north. “They have reason to fear,” he replied. “But their means of combating the awakening is wrong. The hard manner with which they come down on so-called ‘radical Islam’ does not quell it; it actually propels it higher.”
Both Harugura and Lekuton gave the impression of being caught up, not unlike Kenya itself, in a political narrative that didn’t entirely make sense to them or fit their reality but that they were nonetheless unable to escape. Soon I was caught in it, too, as rumors spread in the north claiming, among other things, that I was representing the C.I.A. and that Harugura had been arrested and taken from the country. There was no truth in any of it, but clearly the introduction of an American reporter into an already volatile election campaign had unanticipated effects. Back in the States, Lekuton had skillfully played to American insecurities to raise cash for his campaign. But what played so effectively there had backfired badly in Kenya, with its vulnerable and already agitated Muslim population. Harugura had then exploited Lekuton’s own quasi-Western identity to rally his supporters.
It all seems likely to get worse. Lekuton had decided to run with the governing coalition — which was coming under greater pressure for not standing up more to the American anti-terror agenda. President Kibaki was facing a tide of anger over renditions and falling further behind in the polls. The government’s unpopularity would only play into the hands of the opposition, and Harugura’s campaign was growing stronger.
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