It is widely agreed that many African countries are on the right trajectory as far as peace and development are concerned. But it is also a fact that goes without mentioning that peace and development in many of these African countries, with few exceptions, have been destabilized by conflicts, especially the kind of conflicts emanating from elections that leave people polarized along political, religious, and tribal lines. In most cases, the electoral violence in Africa comes as a result of disputed elections in which lives are lost, property lost and many people displaced.

In Kenya, for instance, its past elections have been characterized by repeated elections related violence – the worst in its history being in 2007/8 when more than 1,000 people lost their lives. This year 2022, Kenya was once again warming up for yet another hotly contested General Elections in 9th August and the country’s National Cohesion and Integration Commission moved to map out high-risk and potential hotspots where electoral violence was likely to erupt.

It is for this reason that the Programme for Christian-Muslim Relations in Africa (PROCMURA) joined other peace actors in Kenya to call for peaceful elections as the country prepared to go into the polls. PROCMURA devised and implemented a rigorous three-pronged peace campaign dubbed ‘Chai Na Amani’ to help avert any possible elections violence, especially in the mapped-out hotspots. The ‘Chai Na Amani’, which is a Kiswahili tagline coined for the PROCMURA’s campaign for peaceful elections in Kenya in 2022, loosely translates to ‘having conversations of peace over a cup of tea’.

The first level of the PROCMURA peace campaign for peaceful elections in Kenya involved the ‘meet the people’ peace caravans in the likely hotspots in the country’s capital, Nairobi, and sharing a cup of tea and snacks right in their neighborhood as the various stakeholders, including the general public of various age groups, engaged on guided conversations on the need and importance of maintaining peace before, during and after the General Elections.

The informal settlements around Nairobi, which is also the capital of political contestation with ripple effects to the other parts of the country, have a long history of suffering longstanding effects of elections related violence. This informed the calendar of peace campaign caravans in the ‘Chai Na Amani’ initiative. The Chai Na Amani caravans which snaked through the Kawangware, Kibera, and Mathare slums, especially engaging the young people, radiated hope and optimism among the general public in terms of having a peaceful elections, which finally did.

Apart from the informal settlements where the Chai Na Amani campaign met the public and other stakeholders in the electoral processes, the peace campaign caravan visited other targeted stakeholders in the Kenyan elections including members of the police service and the youth. History has it that the police and the youth have previously clashed during election seasons, whether in violent demonstrations or political campaigns. The young people are mostly manipulated by politicians to fan electoral violence with studies attributing that to high poverty and joblessness levels among the youth, the more reason the Chai Na Amani campaign mainly targeted this section of the population.

The second level of the PROCMURA’s campaign for peaceful elections in Kenya deployed PROCMURA Peace Ambassadors to push the campaign in the online spaces, especially on social media. The social media space has, for a long time, been used to drive hatred along political, religious, and tribal lines, especially during election seasons.

The amount of propaganda, misinformation, and political and tribal hatred spread on social media platforms is, without a doubt, fodder for electoral violence, and PROCMURA fully alive to that fact, deployed its peace ambassadors, especially young people, to take and spread messages of peace in these platforms. The online campaign reached far and wide with responses and messages of peace and goodwill streaming in even from those following the situation from outside Kenya.

The signing of the PROCMURA online peace petition formed another layer of the larger ‘Chai Na Amani’ peace campaign. Here, Kenyans pledged to keep peace before, during, and after the General Elections. Those from outside Kenya left messages of goodwill to Kenyans as they prepared to go into the polls to elect their next set of leaders. By the time of closing the petition, close to 1,300 people had signed.

The Chai Na Amani peace campaign which officially started on July 25, 2055 with fact-finding missions earlier on in Kibera informal settlements, climaxed with a Peace Concert that included a ‘Chai Na Amani’ football challenge match in which winners were awarded, recognition of PROCMURA Peace ambassadors, and the performance of fifty (50) young artists in one of the informal settlements in the outskirts on Nairobi.

The performances in the Peace Concerts spoke to the need and importance of Kenyans remaining one as a people, as a nation even with the tight elections. The PROCMURA peace campaign for peaceful elections in Kenya was informed by several reports that had mapped out several areas in Kenya that were likely to experience elections-related violence.