In Kenya, Presidential and Parliamentary elections have resulted in a return to power for President Daniel arap Moi, the country's leader for the past 19 years. The victory was not unexpected. But the manner in which it was achieved has once again raised eyebrows among Kenya's international critics who highlight serious flaws in the democratic process. Greg Barrow, who covered the elections for the BBC, visited an outlying constituency to sample the experience of a rural community during the vote.

I began to lose faith in the Kenyan elections after talking to Father Josiah, a Catholic Priest I'd met outside a polling booth beside a coffee plantation in Kenya's Central Highlands. It was day two of the elections - in some places votes were still being cast, in others, counting had just begun, and in yet more, the whole election had been cancelled because of heavy rainfall and flooding. But Father Josiah was happy - the voting he'd witnessed in a tiny village in the heartland of Kenya's largest tribe, the Kikuyu, had in his words been "free and fair".

Father Josiah was one of 28,000 independent electoral observers who'd been recruited by church groups and non-governmental organisations to oversee the elections. In his horn-rimmed glasses, and slightly grubby dog collar, he had the appearance of a man you could trust - but like many Kenyans I met, he had a rather confused idea about the definition of free and fair elections.

Before concluding that the elections had been "free and fair", Father Josiah had told me a story about the election campaign, and the activities of the governing KANU candidate. The character in question was a close associate of President Daniel arap Moi, and a torchbearer for the KANU party. This man was desperate to win the seat in his constituency. So desperate that he'd arranged a little boundary changing before the elections. Now, gerrymandering can come in all shapes and sizes, but when a candidate creates Kenya's newest and smallest constituency around his home village, this is gerrymandering on a large scale.

Not satisfied with this alone, the governing candidate then sought to buy votes. I asked Father Josiah how much it cost to buy a vote. "60 shillings", he said - about one US dollar. And what did the recipients do with the money? "Mostly, they bought beer", he said. With just over 30,000 voters in this tiny constituency, it wouldn't have been beyond the means of the governing KANU party to dip into its bulging coffers and buy up every voter. The constituency would be secured for the government, and the electorate would be happily drunk on Tusker beer, Kenya's favourite brew.

But as Father Josiah told me, things weren't going terribly well for the governing candidate by the eve of the election. With just hours before polls opened, he started panicking. Had he greased enough palms? Could he bear the shame of losing the election in his home village? And this is where the real drama began.

In the cold dark hours of that early morning before the quick equatorial sun leapt into the sky above the polling booths, the government candidate went to work. If gentle persuasion couldn't help his cause, then intimidation certainly would. He gathered his family about him, and hatched up a plan to use his government bodyguards in an attack on his rival candidate. They set out down the winding roads that snake around the verdant hills of the area in search of his political opponent.

Father Josiah grew animated as he recounted the confrontation that ensued. In a narrow lane a short distance from the polling booth, the government candidate is said to have blocked the path of his rival's car. A scuffle broke out in which stones were thrown, and the opposition candidate was hit over the head with a crowbar. The government candidate is then alleged to have raised a small pistol and fired shots in the air. It all ended with the opposition candidate's car being doused in petrol and set ablaze.

Another normal day in the rough and tumble world of Kenyan politics - or was it more than that? I asked Father Josiah whether as an independent electoral observer, he had been at all concerned about his violent incident. "Yes", he said. "It had been highly irregular, but despite this," he continued, "voting had gone ahead without any major incident."

"In my eyes," he said, "we've have seen a level-playing field in this election." I glanced sideways down to the valley below us and saw a swampy football pitch with humps, bumps and mangy patches of grass - between the goalposts at one end of the pitch a thorny bush had been allowed to grow untended. It was a living manifestation of the "level playing field" that had been Kenya's elections.

Kenyan democracy is like a game, in which all manner of rule-breaking is allowed or ignored until the polling booths are finally opened. Voters, whether they have been manipulated, bribed, or even intimidated to the extent that they are in fear of their lives, can then freely and fairly place a folded piece of paper inside a ballot box.

The words, "free and fair", are relative to what you have experienced before. And compared to the one party system which President Moi was forced to abandon at the beginning of this decade, things are more free and fair. But Kenya remains a country on a knife edge. Its population has once again played the game of democracy, only to find that the goalposts have been moved. And the referees in this complex game, are too frightened to demand a rematch.
 

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