| KENYAN church leaders have acknowledged that clergy took partisan positions during the country’s electoral process in late December 2007 They were thus not able to play a full part in mediation after the inter-ethnic post-election violence and lawlessness.
Canon Peter Karanja, general secretary of the National Council of Churches of Kenya (NCCK), told a four-day meeting of the council last week that it must continue to rebuild confidence.
It is not the first time that Canon Karanja, a former Provost of All Saints’ Cathedral, Nairobi, has made a public apology. At a meeting with an international ecumenical delegation from the World Council of Churches in February, he spoke of the embarrassment felt by church leaders. Speaking in July, he said that if clergy had adopted biblical values, church leaders would not have acted “as nothing more than youth wingers for the politicians they supported”.
The Kenyan Daily Nation reported that clergy had “admitted to blessing warriors to engage in violence and inviting politicians to disseminate hate messages that incited people against members of various communities”.
The Churches will come up with a five-year reconciliation plan. The former President, Daniel Arap Moi, has described religion as “still the best mechanism [for] addressing hatred and violence”.
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