Tema: Al-Qaeda estableció una célula en Kenia a inicios de los 90. Al-Shabab se formó posteriormente en Somalia. Pero la relación entre ambas es muy estrecha, constituyendo una amenaza terrorista para la región del Este de África y más allá.

Resumen: El Este de África es desde el inicio de la década de los 90 un escenario particularmente significativo del terrorismo yihadista, aunque sea en estos momentos cuando adquiera una especial relevancia. Al-Qaeda estableció una célula en Kenia al poco de dar comienzo aquella década y desde entonces no ha dejado de constituir una amenaza para la estabilidad del país y su economía nacional. Al-Shabab, por su parte, surgida con posterioridad, es una amenaza existencial para el ya de por sí fallido Estado de Somalia, desde donde aquella célula de miembros de la estructura terrorista fundada por Osama bin Laden ha venido también operando. Pero los nexos entre ésta y al-Shabab llegan al solapamiento entre ambas entidades, que incluso comparten en cierta medida sus directorios. A partir de aquí se entiende mejor la naturaleza y el alcance de la amenaza terrorista que conjuntamente representan para Somalia, Kenia y otros países de la región, e incluso para algunos occidentales.

Análisis: A 10 años de los atentados del 11 de septiembre, cuando los principales escenarios del terrorismo yihadista siguen localizándose en el sur de Asia y Oriente Medio, el curso de los acontecimientos en Somalia, donde actúa al-Shabab y desde donde opera también en buena medida la célula de al-Qaeda en Kenia, hace que adquiera un renovado interés el ámbito del Este de África, donde se desenvuelven esos actores colectivos relacionados entre sí y con la urdimbre del terrorismo global en su conjunto. Pero, ¿cuándo y cómo se estableció una célula de al-Qaeda en Kenia? ¿Cuál es la dinámica reciente de la violencia de al-Shabab en Somalia? ¿En qué medida puede hablarse de nexos entre aquella célula y esta última organización? Responder a estas preguntas, siquiera de manera sucinta, permite una aproximación a la amenaza que la violencia yihadista supone actualmente para Somalia, Kenia y otros países de la región, como pusieron de manifiesto los atentados suicidas del 11 de julio de 2010 en Kampala, la capital de Uganda. Sin olvidar aquellos indicios cuya evidencia permite conjeturar que el Este de África es asimismo un foco de amenaza terrorista para algunos países de Europa Occidental y Estados Unidos.

Una célula de al-Qaeda en Kenia

Poco después de haber sido fundada, cuando al-Qaeda había conseguido asentarse en Sudán, concretamente entre 1991 y 1996, antes de reubicarse en Afganistán, extendió también su influencia hacia otros países del Este de África. Individuos relacionados con al-Qaeda con origen libio, egipcio, libanés y jordano, por ejemplo, se desenvolvían en Nairobi o Mombasa desde inicios de los 90. Su propósito inicial era el de establecer una infraestructura que facilitara el tránsito por la región a miembros de aquella organización terrorista, pero también desarrollar actividades de financiación mediante la constitución de pequeñas empresas. Todo ello se enmascaraba a menudo mediante supuestas entidades caritativas. Asimismo, llevaban a cabo actividades de entrenamiento en el uso de armas y explosivos. En Kenia, de hecho, se adiestraron individuos que, ya en 1993, combatieron contra tropas estadounidenses en Somalia.

Pronto, los miembros de al-Qaeda que actuaban en Kenia se vieron en la necesidad de contar con miembros locales, pertenecientes a la población musulmana del país, para mejor desarrollar sus tareas. Así es como fueron reclutados, tras un proceso de radicalización que a menudo incluía viajes a Afganistán, Pakistán o Yemen, Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, Faid Mohammed Ally Msalam, Issa Oman Isa y Ahmed Salim Swedan, ciudadanos kenianos que pasaron a conformar el núcleo de lo que será la célula de al-Qaeda en el Este de África. En 1996 disponía ya de bases en Lamu y Ras Kiambuli, a lo largo de la frontera entre Kenia y Somalia. Para granjearse la hospitalidad de los con frecuencia pauperizados habitantes de esas áreas, donaban dinero y en ocasiones contraían matrimonio con mujeres pertenecientes a las comunidades en cuyo seno se introducían.

Como en tantos otros casos, esa célula pasó de labores logísticas y económicas a otras de índole operativa. Así, el primero de los actos de terrorismo cometidos por integrantes de la misma tuvo lugar antes del 11-S, el 7 de agosto de 1998. Se trató de una serie concatenada de atentados suicidas, ejecutados junto a las embajadas de EEUU en Nairobi y Dar es Salaam, la capital de Tanzania. En conjunto, algo más de 200 personas perdieron la vida como consecuencia de las explosiones y se registraron alrededor de 5.000 heridos. Estos fueron los primeros atentados ideados, planificados, preparados y ejecutados por al-Qaeda desde que su líder, actualmente fallecido, Osama bin Laden, anunciara poco más de cinco meses antes y desde Pakistán, la constitución del Frente Islámico Mundial para Yihad contra Judíos y Cruzados, por el que algunos grupos armados islamistas norteafricanos y asiáticos quedaban asociados a al-Qaeda en una común agenda global.

Será después del 11-S, concretamente en noviembre de 2002, cuando Kenia vuelva a ser escenario de otra secuencia de actos de terrorismo ejecutados por miembros de la célula de al-Qaeda en el Este de África. Ese día, un terrorista suicida atentó contra un hotel turístico de Kikambala, ocasionando la muerte a 15 personas y lesiones a más de 40. Los terroristas fracasaron sin embargo en derribar, mediante un misil, una aeronave israelí de pasajeros cuando despegaba en el aeropuerto de Mombasa. Esa misma célula, todavía liderada por Fazul Abdullah Mohammed y conectada con el directorio de al-Qaeda, intervendrá, aunque no en exclusiva, en los atentados suicidas perpetrados en Kampala el 11 de julio de 2010. Fazul Abdullah Mohammed murió el 8 de junio de 2011, no en Kenia sino en Mogadiscio, la capital de Somalia, el territorio de al-Shabab.

Evolución reciente de al-Shabab

Al-Shabab, o para ser más precisos al-Shabab al-Mujahidin, se forma después de la derrota, en 1997, por parte de las fuerzas armadas procedentes de Etiopía y del territorio somalí de Putlandia, de al-Ittihad al-Islamiyya. Algunos miembros de esta última organización se trasladaron a Afganistán con el fin de recibir entrenamiento en el uso de armas y explosivos. Allí fue donde entablaron relación con al-Qaeda y constituyeron al-Shabab. Tras los atentados del 11-S regresaron a Somalia, estableciendo un campo de entrenamiento en Mogadiscio. Al-Shabab era una de las organizaciones integrantes de la heterogénea coalición de entidades islamistas somalíes, Ittihad al-mahakim al-islamiya, conocida como Unión de Tribunales Islámicos, que en 2006 se hizo con el poder en Mogadiscio, imponiéndose a la denominada Alianza para la Restauración de la Paz y Contra el Terrorismo.

Ese mismo año, la invasión etíope de Somalia, respaldada por EEUU, con el propósito de detener el avance de la Unión de los Tribunales Islámicos, proporcionó a al-Shabab una nueva oportunidad para desarrollar sus actividades yihadistas. El 18 de septiembre de 2006 se produjo, de hecho, el primer atentado suicida registrado en Somalia, en las cercanías del edificio del Parlamento en Somalia, cuyo blanco principal era el presidente del Gobierno Federal de Transición. Al mismo tiempo, la presencia de tropas de Etiopía en Somalia suscitó una revulsión entre la diáspora somalí en todo el mundo. Al-Shabab comenzó entonces a utilizar Internet como medio para diseminar propaganda, algo que permitió a la organización yihadista inducir procesos de radicalización en el seno de aquella diáspora y reclutar militantes, lo que continuó haciendo incluso después de la retirada etíope de Somalia en enero de 2009. El posterior despliegue de soldados de Uganda y Burundi en Somalia, como resultado de una resolución de la Unión Africana, fue utilizado por al-Qaeda y por al-Shabab.

Así, un buen número de expatriados somalíes residentes en EEUU y algún país de Europa Occidental, como por ejemplo Dinamarca, empezaron a trasladarse a Somalia con el propósito de combatir contra la presencia de soldados infieles en el territorio de su país. No pocos de ellos han intervenido directamente, desde al menos 2008, en la ejecución de importantes atentados suicidas, en ocasiones muy letales –como el que fue perpetrado en un conocido hotel de Mogadiscio mientras se celebraba la ceremonia de graduación de estudiantes de una institución universitaria de la ciudad–, cuya autoría fue asumida por al-Shabab. Importa recordar que esta organización yihadista atenta principalmente contra segmentos no afines de la población somalí –el pasado 4 de octubre, un atentado contra estudiantes en Mogadiscio causó cerca de 100 muertos– y contra las fuerzas gubernamentales. Este mismo mes de octubre, un mando de al-Shabab de origen estadounidense, Omar Hammami, aparecía en un conocido foro yihadista en lengua inglesa, Shumukh al-Islam, dirigiéndose a jóvenes musulmanes que viven en países occidentales para que viajen a Somalia y se unan a su misma organización.

El día 5 del pasado mes de agosto, al-Shabab, que entonces controlaba amplias zonas de Mogadiscio, decidió una retirada táctica de las mismas, tras una ofensiva iniciada en febrero por fuerzas de la misión de la Unión Africana y del propio Gobierno Federal de Transición. Ante una situación adversa, los dirigentes de al-Shabab renunciaron a su dominio sobre dichas áreas para plantearse una confrontación armada de características diferentes al enfrentamiento entre partidas más o menos numerosas de activistas propios y soldados de aquellos contingentes. Pero esa retirada supuso asimismo una importante caída de los recursos económicos que al-Shabab conseguía de la población bajo su control, en especial de los derivados de la extorsión que ejercía sobre comerciantes de los mercados existentes en la capital somalí. Para una organización que necesita mantener sus estructuras y sostener su campaña de terrorismo, pagar a militantes que en gran número lo son a cambio de incentivos selectivos, e incluso a los clanes locales sin cuyo concurso es mucho más difícil operar, la reducción de ingresos es un muy grave contratiempo. De aquí que se haya inclinado, desde el pasado septiembre, por emular a al-Qaeda en el Magreb Islámico, llevando a cabo secuestros con propósitos de financiación.

Nexos entre al-Qaeda y al-Shabab

Desde finales de los 90 había importantes miembros de la célula de al-Qaeda en Kenia que se habían instalado en Somalia, entre los que se encontraba Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, dirigente de la misma. Al-Qaeda y la Unión de los Tribunales Islámicos mantenían vínculos antes de 2006, año en el que destacados integrantes de al-Shabab empiezan a relacionar sus actividades en Mogadiscio con el llamamiento a los musulmanes de todo el mundo para que se unieran a la yihad global y contra lo que definían como enemigos del islam. En esos pronunciamientos alineaban el llamamiento a una yihad en Somalia con los que, con finalidad similar, se llevaban a cabo en Irak, Afganistán, Palestina, Chechenia y el Magreb. Así las cosas, en noviembre de 2008 Ayman al Zawahiri, entonces número dos en la jerarquía de al-Qaeda, hizo un reconocimiento explícito de al-Shabab, a cuyos militantes denominaba “leones del Islam en Somalia” e instaba a instaurar un dominio salafista en su país.

Pocos meses después, en junio de 2009, desde el interior de al-Qaeda se transmitió que esta estructura terrorista, que contaba con presencia en Somalia, disponía de miembros que actuaban junto a al-Shabab. Al año siguiente, 2010, parecía ya evidente que la célula de al-Qaeda en el Este de África, al mando de Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, ejercía una notable influencia sobre al-Shabab, acentuando su alineamiento con al-Qaeda. Entre los cuadros y dirigentes de esa organización yihadista somalí se detectaban individuos originarios de otros países de la región, como Sudán, o incluso procedentes de Arabia Saudí y Pakistán. Por otra parte, en ese mismo sentido, la proximidad geográfica entre Somalia y Yemen propiciaba un acercamiento entre al-Shabab y al-Qaeda en la Península Arábiga, lo que a su vez fortalecía las conexiones con el núcleo central de al-Qaeda. Osama bin Laden, avanzado el año 2009, había estimulado a los yihadista somalíes, que a su vez se autoproclamaron soldados de aquel.

En septiembre de 2009 fue abatido el entonces líder de la célula de al-Qaeda en el Este de África. El propio emir de al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, designó como nuevo dirigente de su estructura terrorista en la región del Cuerno de África a Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, quien anunció que, desde Somalia, proyectarían sus actividades yihadistas hacia otros países de la zona como Kenia, Etiopía y Yibuti. Esta designación fue recibida con alborozo por el directorio de al-Shabab. En febrero de 2010, al-Shabab y un grupo yihadista de Kamboni emitieron un comunicado en el que declaraban expresamente haberse unido a la yihad internacional de al-Qaeda. La muerte de Nabhan fue lo que estimuló la preparación, como revancha, de la serie de atentados ocurridos en Kampala el 11 de julio de 2010, exactamente mientras las selecciones nacionales de España y los Países Bajos jugaban la final de la Copa del Mundo de fútbol. Más aún, la célula que los perpetró se denominaba precisamente Nabhan.

Tales atentados, perpetrados por dos terroristas suicidas –uno keniano y el otro somalí– en un restaurante de cocina etíope y un club local de rugby, en los que perdieron la vida 74 personas, en su mayoría ugandeses, pusieron de manifiesto la estrecha relación operativa, en el Este de África, entre al-Qaeda y al-Shabab. Además, fueron los primeros en que esta última se implicaba fuera de Somalia. Uganda fue seleccionada como blanco debido a que sus soldados constituyen buena parte de las fuerzas armadas de AMISOM (African Union Mission in Somalia) en Mogadiscio, que tanto al-Qaeda como al-Shabab consideran su principal obstáculo para imponer un dominio yihadista en Somalia. Por otra parte, al-Shabab había amenazado con atentar en Kampala y Burundi desde 2009. En el directorio de esta organización yihadista, que reclamó la autoría de tales atentados, estaba entonces Fazul Abdullah Mohammed. Además de al-Shabab estuvieron por tanto implicados miembros de al-Qaeda asentados en Somalia y Kenia. Por si cupieran dudas sobre el nexo entre estas entidades yihadistas, el pasado 14 de octubre, el portavoz de al-Shabab y un responsable de la célula de al-Qaeda en el Este de África aparecieron juntos, ante las cámaras de al-Yazira, en el campo de refugiados Aal Yasser, controlado por aquella primera organización, subrayando la conexión entre ambas mientras inauguraban una iniciativa asistencial denominada “Campaña de caridad el mártir Osama bin Laden para ayudar a los afectados por la sequía”.

Conclusiones: Poco antes de finalizar este análisis sobre los nexos del terrorismo yihadista en África del Este, la Embajada de EEUU en Kenia advertía sobre la posibilidad de un inminente atentado terrorista en este último país. Esta alerta se producía una semana después de que, el pasado 13 de octubre, tropas kenianas entraran en Somalia, con la aquiescencia de las autoridades de Mogadiscio y la complacencia de AMISOM, para perseguir a militantes de al-Shabab y atacar sus bases en el sur de ese país. La decisión fue adoptada tras el secuestro de dos cooperantes españolas en un campo de refugiados somalíes dentro del territorio de Kenia, que se sumaba al de otros dos turistas europeos llevados a cabo en septiembre. Estos hechos suponen un grave nuevo contratiempo para el sector turístico de Kenia, fundamental en su economía nacional, aunque la intervención militar en Somalia sucede a la ofensiva que los soldados de la Unión Africana y del Gobierno Federal de Transición vienen desarrollando desde el mes de febrero, produciéndose además cuando al-Shabab había sido forzada a abandonar casi en su totalidad Mogadiscio. Está por ver que las tropas kenianas consigan sus propósitos declarados, si bien al-Shabab se está viendo obligada a hacer frente, en suelo somalí, a soldados de otros tres países de la región.

Al-Shabab, que pese a haber conseguido asimilar recientemente a algún grupo rival, no atraviesa por su mejor momento y cuyos componentes también se han visto afectados tanto por las graves circunstancias que afectan a la población somalí en su conjunto como por el malestar de amplios sectores de esta con las severas prácticas impuestas por la organización yihadista en las demarcaciones que domina, reaccionó a la decisión del Gobierno de Kenia amenazando con perpetrar atentados en ciudades de este último país, donde la célula de al-Qaeda establecida hace casi dos décadas no ha dejado de existir. Y son los nexos entre al-Shabab y esta célula de al-Qaeda en el Este de África los que sitúan en su adecuada dimensión la verdadera amenaza del terrorismo yihadista en Kenia y otros países de la región. Sin olvidar que son ya un buen número los individuos de origen somalí que, procedentes de distintos países europeos y norteamericanos, se han unido en los últimos años a al-Shabab, lo que hace del Este de África un foco significativo de amenaza terrorista para algunas de esas naciones occidentales. Donde continúan existiendo ámbitos de la población musulmana en los que los acontecimientos que están teniendo lugar en Kenia van a adquirir especial atención como parte de la narrativa utilizada en los procesos de radicalización yihadista y reclutamiento terrorista.

Kenyans have just finished voting on whether to approve a new constitution that would limit presidential power and devolve power from the centre. I did not vote. Since the early 1990s when Kenya was emerging from a single-party, authoritarian period, I have mostly lived and worked abroad. Referendum day finds me watching CNN or the BBC, laptop at hand and my phone bill rising precipitously as I call for news of the mood, the winners and losers. I worry for the safety of family and friends since elections have almost invariably been followed by violent conflict. A complex politics pits ethnic blocks against one another in ever-shifting allegiances, led by the same class that has mostly been in control since independence.

Yet, from Washington DC, I am voting on the future of Kenya. This week I completed an application for a mortgage from a Nairobi bank to purchase a house in the city’s outskirts. The bank is also voting on Kenya’s future, and my future life there, every time its loan officer responds speedily and generously to my emails. We are joined in this effort by more than self-interest: we have a faith that the fragile experiment that is Kenya is heading to firmer ground.

A century ago there was no referendum on whether there would be a Kenya. It was the invention of a brutal colonialism that we took over and have fought to make our own. Our shortfalls are blared out on headlines the world over. Kenya is filled with injustice, poverty and a large dignity deficit. But what many foreign pundits too easily forget is that Kenyans cast millions of votes daily for a brighter future.

Every investment in a business or home represents a prediction that Kenya has a tomorrow worth investing in. The same is true of every book by increasingly ambitious Kenyan writers, by the tens of thousands of adults enrolled in evening classes, and those fighting to expand the reach and integrity of civil society with new, innovative NGOs. The dollar statistics cannot keep up with the many investments Kenyans make to build supportive communities alongside, and often in opposition to, the ethnic politicking that is the most malign inheritance from colonial rule.

In the aftermath of the post-election violence of 2008 I attended a fundraising event in a New York art gallery hosted by a group of Kenyan artists, academics and business people who had decided to “Re-imagine Kenya”. More than $50,000 was raised to assist the thousands violently ejected from their homes. Artworks were auctioned to an audience that turned up not only to raise money but to see how artistic and intellectual effort could add to the carving of a Kenyan space characterised by generosity and optimism.

The powers that be mostly speak of the two million-plus Kenyan diaspora in terms of remittances and investments; we send more than a billion dollars a year to Kenya and are its greatest source of foreign exchange. But this vision fails to see the networks of affiliation represented by the monetary flows.

I am buying that house to raise a family in, despite fears that the next election or some other will send flames its way. Like every other financial investment, it represents a powerful response to these fears. The constitutional referendum is critically important in its details and the political dispensation that will emerge from it, but the real vote is in: Kenya is a going concern. Faltering yes, struggling for sure, violent, tough and competitive – but persistently learning and growing.

Kenya’s parliament has an inexhaustible capacity to debate on an issue for days without reaching an agreement. But when it comes to an issue touching on their welfare, they can expedite it in an amazingly short time.

This week, they voted to award themselves a massive pay hike – at a time when everyone is feeling the pain of inflation and the weight of heavy tax burden. Currently, an MP takes home 851,000 Kenyan shillings (approximately £8,510) per month. The new salary will see them take home Sh 1.1m.

The issue of MPs’ salaries has been controversial for a long time. Quite apart from the fact that it has become a tradition for MPs to award themselves huge perks, the legislators have not been paying taxes on the huge allowances they get. When the minister for finance proposed in 2008 that MPs should be taxed, they all rose against the proposal arguing that they needed every penny of their money in order to serve their constituents well.

Even as other Kenyans, most of whom live on a dollar a day, were gasping under the yoke of heavy taxation, their well-paid legislators sat pretty with their untaxed perks.

Their new attractive pay package is, however, subject to taxation this time round. But even then, the increased pay cushions them against the effects of taxation and actually leaves them Sh 12,000 richer.

Kenyan MPs are the highest paid in east Africa. Their counterparts in Uganda earn an equivalent of Sh 333,000, while in Tanzania, MPs take home a total package equivalent to Sh 235,000. The Kenyan MP is the envy of many in this region.

Apart from this, the Kenyan prime minister will have a gross salary of Sh 3.2m plus other hefty allowances. The British prime minister, who takes home the equivalent of Sh 1.9m, can only perhaps dream of this figure. The vice president will take home Sh 2.4m.

Many Kenyans argue that the new salaries hinge on selfishness and a tinge of greed. But the legislators argue that they have every right to earn this much and more if they have to serve their people better. They say that it is Kenyans themselves who have created a culture of dependence, in which many depend on their MP for school fees and small handouts. In fact, many MPs themselves argue that to retain their seat in an election, they have to sacrifice all their salary to the needs of their people. You cannot become an MP if you are poor, they say, and if you are not careful, you can get poor after becoming an MP.

Whether this is true or not still does not explain why, in an economic recession, the MPs should award themselves such hefty perks. Other workers like teachers have to keep threatening to strike before they can get even a 10% rise. And doctors and nurses are running away to greener pastures because their salaries are still too low.

But then, MPs are the ones who make the law. It seems a classic case of the one who has the knife determining what share of the yam should be given out – and eating the better part of the whole thing.

Each morning Wambui Kamau, the personal assistant to a Nairobi-based entrepreneur, boards a matatu taxi bus to get to the city centre. This morning, like every other, it is flagged down at a police checkpoint, where the driver hands an officer 100 shillings.

At lunchtime, Wambui heads to the Ministry of Immigration to pick up a new passport. It miraculously surfaces when she offers the clerk 100 shillings. Heading home, the matatu is stopped at the same checkpoint and another bribe paid.

Bad news awaits. A deed allowing the family to sell part of a plot has not materialised. The certificate costs 500 shillings, but Wambui has spent six months and paid 10,000 shillings in bribes trying to extract it from Nairobi city council. “You go to the office and it’s always ‘so and so has the file’. It’s an endless chain of people wanting to ‘eat’.”

Wambui (not her real name) pays up to five bribes a week. The anti- corruption group Transparency International reports that kitu kidogo (a “little something”) features in 54per cent of the average Kenyan’s dealings with institutions. Six years after President Moi made way for an Administration sworn to clean government, Kenya is suffocating in sleaze. “The only difference in Moi’s time,” Wambui says, “was that no one tried to hide it. Now people feel ashamed, but do it anyway.”

In the West, where we would no more dream of pressing a £5 note into a policeman’s hand than we would tip our GP, we struggle to grasp the mundane reality of corruption in countries such as Kenya. The situation there bears out the saying that “a fish rots from the head down”. Generalised palm-greasing briefly halted after President Mwai Kibaki took power in 2003 promising that corruption would cease to be a way of life. Seated under signs reading “You have the right to free service”, petty officials no longer dared to make their usual demands. Since then, looting by their political masters has been so brazen that all restraint has gone. In the fight against graft, personal example matters.

And what a feeding frenzy there has been. John Githongo, the former anti-corruption chief and Kibaki appointee who made a permanent return to Kenya this month, fled in 2005 after realising that his ministerial colleagues were implicated in the $750 million Anglo Leasing affair, a scandal over inflated military contracts. Anglo Leasing almost seems distant history now, so thick and so fast have the fresh scams come.

A scandal over diverted maize reserves jacked up supermarket prices and emptied shelves, just when a drought put 10 million Kenyans at risk of starvation. A scam over fuel deliveries left petrol pumps dry and drove up transport costs. Members of the Kenyan diaspora, or anyone, like me, in regular contact with the country, will have experienced a sudden surge in e-mails and calls from friends and relatives begging for that Western Union transfer to ensure the family doesn’t go hungry.

There is a weary inevitability to this explosion of corruption. In a system where every well-connected conman goes scot free, what else was to be expected? Anglo Leasing was in many ways Kenya’s Watergate, only the Nixon character – Mwai Kibaki, who Mr Githongo says was fully aware of the corruption – refused to leave office, oversaw the rigging of the next election and reappointed corruption-tainted cronies to Cabinet.

Kenya was meant to have put such ruthless pillaging behind it. The coalition formed a year ago between Kibaki and Raila Odinga’s opposition movement represented recognition that the “it’s our tribe’s turn at the trough” approach adopted since the days of Jomo Kenyatta had brought this nation of 48 ethnic groups to the brink of disintegration. The ruling party’s crude vote-tampering after the 2007 polls convinced Mr Odinga’s supporters that Mr Kibaki’s Kikuyu people and their allies regarded the fruits of presidential office as indefinitely theirs.

At least 1,500 Kenyans died and 600,000 were displaced as mobs clashed with police and militias drove “foreign” tribes from coveted land. But all the wrong lessons have been learnt. As various commissions set up under Kofi Annan’s guidance grind out worthy reports, fundamental reform remains a distant dream.

So does justice: Britain’s Serious Fraud Office abandoned this month an attempt to probe Anglo Leasing, citing the Kenyan Government’s lack of co-operation. Politicians who paid the men with machetes will face no domestic reckoning after MPs refused to approve a Kenya-based tribunal, delegating the problem to the International Criminal Court.

Kenya’s rapacious elite is preoccupied with preparing for the next elections, almost guaranteed to be even more violent than the last. State resources are being plundered and every drop of available funding hoovered up as the parties build their war chests. Votes cost money, and so does arming militias to ensure that their funders’ candidates win.

What the election crisis proved is that Kenya’s “eating” culture, whether manifested in daily palm-greasing or the grand looting of the elite, does more than pour sand into the economy’s workings and blight the aspirations of millions. It represents a fundamental rejection of the concept of the state as expression of the common will. In that cynical lack of belief sprout the seeds of civil war. Corruption destabilises societies. This is a lesson that the country’s Western donors have yet to digest. Determined to keep aid flowing, increasingly anxious to find reliable regional partners, too often they minimise corruption, seeing it as a troublesome distraction.

Kenya was never the sepia-tinted paradise of colonial clubs and golden savannah that its Western visitors fondly supposed. Today it stands on the verge of a precipice.

This time last year Kenya was in flames, torn apart by ethnic violence triggered by a flawed election. About a thousand people were killed, and several hundred thousand fled their homes in response to ethnic cleansing. Even prior to the violence, politics was already ethnically polarised. The election pitted a Kikuyu against a Luo – President Mwai Kibaki against Raila Odinga – and about 98% of Luo people voted for Odinga. There was little faith in the elections: in the run-up a local joke was that there would be a Luo president of America before there was a Luo president of Kenya.

Escalating violence was arrested by an externally imposed power-sharing deal, the model for a similar agreement in Zimbabwe that yesterday saw Morgan Tsvangirai sworn in as prime minister. In both deals the incumbent remained dominant, with no sign of a genuine intention to share power. In Kenya the result has been policy stasis as each side manoeuvres in preparation for a further contest. According to a new opinion survey, only 20% of the population regard the election result as fair, and a majority no longer regard Kenya as a functioning democracy. The Zimbabwean arrangement seems to be even less likely to herald the radical policy changes that are so urgently needed. Without a large infusion of aid, real reform is unlikely, but such an infusion would probably strengthen the patronage network on which Mugabe depends for his survival. Although the opposition has the finance ministry, Mugabe continues to control both the central bank and the security services.

However, the parallel between Zimbabwe and Kenya cannot be taken too far. In Zimbabwe a deeply unpopular regime clings to power by corrupt means, whereas in Kenya the country is genuinely polarised. In a sense it is the Kenyan situation that is in the longer term more difficult.

Kenya is paying the price for more than 40 years of ethnic politics led from the top. There is no substitute for nationally unifying leadership, something Kenya has never had. In neighbouring Tanzania, President Julius Nyerere recognised the need for it. While his experiment with socialism failed, the deeper strategy of nation-building is a huge asset: Tanzania is rightly regarded as one of Africa’s most promising countries. It is an asset that Kenya desperately needs.

Any effort to build a sense of Kenyan nationhood has been blighted by ethnic violence, a polarised, continuing political contest and a discourse that denies reality. Kenyan society needs leadership which guides it to something better. At last it has found it. John Githongo, who blew the whistle on top-level corruption in Kenya, has just returned to Nairobi after three years of self-imposed exile. Appointed the permanent secretary to fight corruption, he had come to realise that those who had appointed him expected that, as someone born into the Kikuyu elite, he would not be excessively vigorous in pursuit of his colleagues. They had misjudged their man.

Githongo’s devastatingly detailed revelations, backed up by secretly taped meetings, became world news. But instead of triggering a general clean-up, the longer term response of the regime was to circle the wagons, and disgraced ministers have now been reappointed. (Fortuitously, his story has just been revealed in Michela Wrong’s Our Turn to Eat, a tremendous account that reads like a cross between Le Carré and Solzhenitsyn.)

Githongo – whose return is manifestly an act of personal bravery – is not trying to carve out a political role but to counter these fractures. He is a moralist, not a politician: Kenya’s Gandhi. His integrity has earned him an affectionate respect from across the spectrum of Kenyan society.

A political concept familiar to every Kenyan is “footsteps”, the notion extolled by President Daniel arap Moi that a leader should follow the approach of his predecessor. Moi, who succeeded Jomo Kenyatta, duly trod the well-worn path of ethnic favouritism. Githongo too will follow in someone’s footsteps, but they will be those of the if-only-Kenyan, President Barack Obama. But Obama is more than a role model of personal success: his campaign demonstrated how effectively disillusioned youth can be tapped to build a movement for transformation. While Githongo’s objectives are different, he has the opportunity to follow this potent precedent. Unsurprisingly, because he offers a more uplifting approach than the mentality of the ethnic bunker, he is already attracting a large, multi-ethnic group of young people wanting to help.

The new Africa will be built by people like Githongo. Forging a sense of social unity on the wreckage created by the Kenyan political elite will not be easy; but the alternative does not bear contemplation.

This morning I am going to Uhuru Park in Nairobi to plant a tree. A plaque on it will read: “This was planted to mark the moment Barack Obama was elected president of the United States of America.” It will stand next to the tree that Obama planted when he visited last year, and will be a lasting testament to this historic moment: a wonderful thing for America and the world.

Across Kenya, people are celebrating the fact that a son of this nation has become president. Many stayed up all night. There is such a feeling of connection with him that a national holiday has been declared. Kenyans know he is first and foremost American, but at the same time someone we can call a relative.

I was at the US embassy in our capital yesterday at 5am, when the announcement came in. There were so many people, many of them students or schoolchildren, feeling such excitement and happiness. Obama has demonstrated that America is a country where, if you are strong, committed and focused, you can reach your goals.

I hope that young Kenyans who see this can be inspired to raise the bar for themselves, to go beyond the barriers that have prevented so many from realising the dreams of America. And I hope other countries can give their own sons and daughters the same chances in life.

Similarly, I hope that African leaders can take advantage of the opportunities Obama’s administration is likely to create. It is important for African citizens to realise that he’s not directly going to feed them, clothe them, pay them, or take away their difficulties; what they need to do is roll up their sleeves and make the most of the new situation.

Earlier this year Kenya was riven by ethnic conflict. Now Obama has shown us all that a society can elect its best person as leader, and reject the ethnic labels we are so often stuck with. So many leaders across the world, in Africa especially, have exploited these differences to divide their people and bring misery and conflict. Right now that is happening on a catastrophic scale in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I hope that leaders across Africa will be inspired: here is a young man who could have been one of their own people, but who may have found it impossible to overcome his ethnicity in the continent of his father.

Kenyan pride, then, is offset by a certain amount of ethnic violence. We look to America and see a country that overcame those tensions and elected a black man. I hope Kenyans will raise their own sense of humanity and respect people’s talent rather than their ethnic background.

If there is one thing I would personally wish of Obama, it would be to fight for the environment. I would urge his administration to help Africa protect its forests and to adapt to the changing climate. We know that Africa will be very adversely affected. The post-Kyoto protocol negotiations are ongoing, and forests must be included as part of the solution. I hope America will support that.

I feel a further connection with Obama because, like his father, I was one of those chosen for the Kennedy airlift in the 1960s, in which the US gave scholarships for young people from Africa’s emerging nations to study at US universities. I was based in a small college in Atchison, Kansas, from 1960 to 1966. I remember travelling by Greyhound bus from New York to Kansas, shortly after arriving in the country. Trying to get soda in Indiana, we saw a cafe, and crossed the road. But we were refused a drink. When we asked why, we were told it was because we were black. We didn’t understand it – we were just kids. It was a completely new and confusing experience.

As I think of Obama’s victory, I also remember the demonstrations at the time led by Martin Luther King and others; in particular, his march on Washington. There was such great division between white and black.

I could not keep my eyes dry when I recalled Dr King’s words: “I have a dream.” So much of that dream has been echoed this week. I did not believe I would live to see that moment. At the time the dream seemed far into the future, hundreds of years. Just 40 years have passed. Amazing. I can only hope it is the beginning of a better world for our children and their children.

When you look at the people receiving Obama in Chicago, they are white, black, yellow – exactly as envisaged by Dr King. The US truly has overcome. And with the global reaction it seems like the whole world is joining in that overcoming. This is one of the most inspiring moments of my life. Americans have elected a person of extraordinary character and ability, who also happens to be black. It is a moment of greatness for all humanity.

Kenia ha ocupado las portadas de los medios internacionales en los últimos meses con imágenes de una violencia increíble para un país que durante años ha sido un modelo de éxito de democracia en África. La chispa de esta situación la encontramos en las discutidas elecciones del pasado noviembre, en las que el presidente anterior, Mwai Kibaki (del Partido de Unificación Nacional, PNU), se declaró ganador por un margen de 2,5%, dando la vuelta a unos sondeos que pocos meses antes apuntaban a una victoria del opositor Raila Odinga (del Partido Naranja, ODM).
A principios de mes tuve ocasión de pasar una semana en Kenia, invitado por la escuela de negocios de la Universidad de Strathmore, donde pude compartir experiencias con profesores y alumnos de diversas etnias. Frente a las prevenciones previas al iniciar mi viaje, encontré en Nairobi una ciudad tranquila con gente amable y sonriente, paseé por su centro, fui de compras al mercado masai callejero, hablé con muchas personas y solo encontré facilidades. Fui advertido de evitar ciertas zonas, pero no noté ninguna sensación de peligro superior a la que siento cuando visito grandes ciudades en otros países. En las aulas, se notaba la tensión, y si se tocaba el tema político, la discusión pronto se tornaba acalorada, pero siempre manteniendo la educación.

MI PERCEPCIÓN de tranquilidad no pudo hacerme olvidar los más de mil muertos y las 300.000 personas desplazadas por un conflicto cuya raíz, en el momento de escribir este artículo, tiene apariencia de acercarse a la solución gracias a las conversaciones lideradas por Kofi Annan. La economía está sufriendo, en particular el transporte, la agricultura y el turismo. Mombasa es el puerto de entrada más importante de mercan- cías para los países del este de África, y Kenia es el origen de muchas de las flores que compramos en Europa. Encontré los hoteles de Nairobi y de la zona de safari de Masai Mara muy vacíos en lo que debería ser su temporada alta. En otras zonas, el desplazamiento de personas por temor a la violencia hace que las empresas no dispongan de los trabajadores necesarios. En algunos restaurantes de la capital cuesta encontrar patatas, ya que en los campos no hay gente para recogerlas.
Los observadores internacionales parecen estar de acuerdo en que las elecciones no fueron limpias, pero también coinciden en que la suciedad afecta a ambos partidos. La discusión ahora no está en quién hizo trampa, sino más bien en quién hizo menos trampa, o quién la hizo con menor visibilidad.
El fraude electoral fue el detonante, pero son muchos otros problemas los que han permanecido latentes y han alimentado esta explosión. A pesar de ser considerado un país modélico en África, Kenia tiene más de la mitad de su población viviendo por debajo del nivel de pobreza. Con tan solo un 14% del suelo cultivable, y un 70% de la población activa dedicada a la agricultura, hay una gran presión por conseguir propiedad de suelo, lo que constituye una de sus reformas pendientes y explica buena parte del descontento actual. El acceso al suelo, tema recurrente desde la guerra de independencia contra los británicos, ya se había cobrado centenares de víctimas en los meses anteriores a las elecciones.
El problema de Kenia es mucho más que un enfrentamiento tribal, pero las etnias tienen también su importancia. La tribu de Kibaki es la kikuyu, la más numerosa, pero aún pequeña, con solo el 22% de los habitantes, quienes posiblemente se ha beneficiado de tener a uno de sus miembros como presidente. Pero las dos tribus que le siguen en número (luhyas y luos) juntas, alcanzan el 27% de la población. Esto significa que, desde el punto de vista de tribus, Kenia ha sido, y muy probablemente será también en el futuro, un país obligado a gestionar políticas de coaliciones. Las diferencias tribales no son obvias para un extranjero, o incluso para los locales, que tienen que oír el acento de la persona cuando habla o conocer su apellido para reconocer su tribu de origen. En algunos hoteles, los empleados han eliminado el apellido en los carteles con sus nombres para evitarse problemas.
El país precisa reformas profundas. Hay déficits muy importantes de infraestructuras, tales como electricidad, puertos y carreteras. Los atascos de tráfico son continuos. El puerto de Mombasa, que da servicio a los países vecinos, está sobresaturado. Sin embargo, estos temas no ocupan posiciones de prioridad en las agendas de los políticos, por lo que la mayoría de los ciudadanos han visto a la clase política más como parte del problema que de la solución.

LOS KENIANOS reconocen que, aunque la solución política puede llegar pronto, se tardarán muchos años en cerrar las heridas abiertas en estos meses de caos. Va a resultar difícil para los desplazados volver a habitar junto a los vecinos violentos que fueron la causa de su huida en las últimas semanas. La reconciliación puede necesitar toda una generación.
Lamentablemente, las personas no traemos incorporada la tecla deshacer como los ordenadores. Kenia sigue siendo un destino turístico excelente, que aconsejo visitar. Es, además, en estas circunstancias, una oportunidad de ayudar a un país a mantener su economía en marcha, base de toda futura estabilidad.

The post-election crisis in Kenya remains unresolved. The damage being done to the country’s economy is severe: tourism, horticulture, and other industries that depend on trade beyond the Kenyan border are reeling. Thousands of livelihoods, along with investments throughout the region, are threatened and collapsing.

As the situation in Kenya escalated – with murders, rapes, burning of property, looting, and the displacement of thousands of people throughout the country – the international community was urged to help. Many countries responded, providing essential humanitarian assistance and logistical support. For this, I and many other Kenyans are very grateful.

The international community has also endeavoured to persuade the two rivals, Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga, to negotiate a political settlement in the wake of the contested presidential election. But a resolution still eludes Kenya, despite the efforts of Kofi Anan, the former UN secretary general, and his team, which includes the former Mozambiquan first lady, Graça Machel, and the former president of Tanzania, Benjamin Mkapa. Over the past weeks a number of other prominent Africans have participated in the mediation efforts, including Ghana’s president and African Union chairman John Kufour, President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

However some Kenyan politicians claim these efforts represent an unwarranted meddling in the country’s affairs. According to them, Kenyans should be left alone to solve their problems. While this may appear to be patriotic, it is just the opposite. These politicians know how dependent Kenya is on the international community – and the degree to which other nation states in the region depend on Kenya.

Moreover, to be worthy leaders of an independent and sovereign state, Kenya’s politicians should have demonstrated a capacity to manage the crisis. Leaders of the business community, civil society and religious organisations, among others, appealed to politicians to end the violence. But they would not budge, even as the carnage escalated.

In Rwanda, the international community in large part left politicians to sort out the mess they had created, only for a horrific genocide to take place in which close to a million people were killed. When it was over, the world wondered why it had taken so long to react.

Today, millions of people are urging intervention in crises in Darfur, Somalia, Chad, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, to name only a few. In the 21st century, the world should not stand and watch as citizens are incited to kill and maim each other because politicians cannot agree on how to manage the state. The international community has a moral responsibility to intervene when life and human rights are threatened on such a scale.

To allow our egos as Kenyans to be offended by international involvement is a misrepresentation that can only give comfort to the hardliners in Kibaki’s and Odinga’s camps. As US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said while visiting Nairobi earlier this week: “The time for a political settlement was yesterday.”

The focus must now be on and support given to the UN’s Kenya national dialogue and reconciliation team so that a lasting solution is found. Responsibility for resolution lies in the hands of the rival presidential mediation teams. It is up to these leaders to put Kenya first. I, along with millions of other Kenyans, urge them to find an enduring settlement based on justice, fairness and the common good.

This is a tale of two neighbours: one on the brink of national disaster, unless mediation can prevent a new wave of ethnic killing; the other already in full-scale collapse, with no functioning government or basic services, and 700,000 people driven from their homes. The first is being watched attentively by foreign governments; the second has dropped off the radar, abandoned by those same governments because it all seems so difficult.

I refer to Kenya and Somalia, countries that illustrate the inconsistencies in international policy-making David Miliband failed to reflect in his speech on interventionism this week. Long-standing economic injustices, grievances over land and water, ethnic and clan discrimination, and chronic under-development cannot be corrected by sudden surges of interest and moral fervour. They need decades of subtle care and unflagging attention.

Kenya’s case is the more hopeful. Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary general, and a team of UN advisers have been talking to both sides in a secluded safari lodge to find a power-sharing formula after December’s flawed presidential election. This is intelligent intervention, impartial and headline-avoiding. Foreign governments are taking a back seat. The US initially favoured President Mwai Kibaki on the false grounds that the Kikuyu have always been the best motor for Kenya’s progress. It also disliked the fact that Raila Odinga, the opposition leader, condemned the way suspects in the “war on terror” were subject to “extraordinary rendition”. But now Washington is standing aside, Britain too is lying low, wary of the charge of neocolonial interference.

Whether Annan can get agreement when the talks resume next week remains to be seen. Though the evidence points to Odinga winning the election – his party won two-thirds of the seats in the simultaneous and less riggable parliamentary elections – his side has made the larger concessions. It has dropped its insistence on Kibaki standing down, and its demands for an early re-run of the stolen election, and is considering the Annan proposal for a two-year pause. It has hinted at readiness to split the ministries in a coalition cabinet 50-50.

A deal on these lines will be tough for Odinga to sell, especially as Kibaki reneged on a 2002 deal to reduce the power of the presidency and create a prime minister. “Kibaki’s problem is with his elite, Odinga’s is with his base,” as one observer put it this week. Any agreement Annan comes up with must be anchored in law and some form of continuing UN supervision. The anti-Kikuyu anger and killings that swept through parts of the Rift Valley last month could explode again if people feel Odinga has given up too much. So another part of the deal should be a carefully monitored role for the Kenyan army to forestall rioting – a necessary but risky proposition, since the army is poorly trained for crowd control.

If Kenya’s eruption into violence shocked the world by being unexpected, Somalia’s collapse was fully foreseen. As many experts warned, US collusion with Ethiopia a year ago to send Ethiopian troops into Mogadishu to topple the Islamic Courts regime has backfired as badly as the invasion of Iraq. According to reports from UN and other aid workers in Somalia, almost three-quarters of a million people have fled since the Ethiopians arrived. Far from eliminating the Islamic Courts, the invasion attracted waves of new recruits, motivated by resentment at the presence of foreign troops and not just by jihadi ideology. The Ethiopians installed one of the worst Somali warlords as mayor of Mogadishu, allowing him to turn his militia into the police. Most of the capital’s people are from a different clan.

Resistance has intensified in the past months as the occupation shows no sign of ending, and Islamist insurgents now operate well beyond Mogadishu. Indiscriminate mortaring and machine-gun fire by all sides is said by aid workers to be horrendous, though there are no TV cameras to raise international alarm. Adding to the chaos, insurgent groups are splitting – with the same erosion of discipline and clan rivalry that have divided rebel movements in Darfur. This reduces the chance of holding successful peace talks. Banditry is on the rise with aid workers increasingly targets, as last month’s killing of three staff for Médecins sans Frontières demonstrates. MSF has now withdrawn all its international doctors, leaving hospitals without surgeons.

Meanwhile, Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government (TFG) still sits in the town of Baidoa, with no presence in the capital except for a fortified and symbolic mini-green zone. What little support the TFG had in Mogadishu has disappeared. In November, fighting prompted another 200,000 people to escape into the desert, meaning that more than half the capital’s population has left. In a grim reversal of urbanisation, they know it is safer to live outside Mogadishu. Only the poorest and weakest remain inside the ruined city.

Here is a catastrophe crying out for sustained and well-funded UN intervention. It would not be a case of overthrowing a government, since there is none. It is not an issue of using “soft power” or sanctions against a bad regime. It is a blatant example of a massive humanitarian emergency, to which the so-called international community is content to turn a blind eye. The TFG was cobbled together by foreign governments, knowing its legitimacy was thin. They tolerated the Ethiopian invasion because Washington wanted it. Now these governments stumble on, bereft of ideas, privately glad that the media do not highlight the issue so their inaction can continue.

Under an African Union mandate, Uganda and Burundi have sent a few hundred troops (their airlift paid in part by Britain), but Rwanda pulled out and Nigeria stalled. Now Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, has sent a mission to assess if a more powerful UN force can replace the discredited invaders. But will the big powers back him in urgently alleviating the present misery? Will they recognise their earlier mistake and find a political compromise? Demonising all the Islamists as terror-mongers makes no sense and will not bring peace. Talks between the TFG and the Islamists are the only way out. In Kenya, there is at least mediation and a chance of compromise. In Somalia, there is nothing on offer because the security council got it wrong and has all but given up.

Until December, Kenya was the most stable nation in East Africa. It has long been a willing partner in the Bush administration’s war on terrorism. Yet the United States has mostly stood by as our country has descended into chaos.

More than 800 people have been killed and at least 250,000 driven from their homes since rigged presidential elections on Dec. 27. Two opposition members of Parliament have been gunned down, and human rights defenders have received death threats.

Thankfully, for the first time since the election, there is a glimmer of hope. On Friday, Kofi Annan, who has led an African Union mediation effort, announced that President Mwai Kibaki and his opponent in the presidential election, Raila Odinga, have agreed to negotiate a power-sharing agreement. Levels of tension in the country have already abated.

But Kenya will not be able to take the crucial steps to stability alone. We need sustained international pressure for as long as it takes to get the country back on track. Washington must refrain from simplistic characterizations of the violence as a matter of ethnic cleansing or tribal conflict, when in fact the roots of the problem are political.

To play an effective role, the United States must maintain consistent and strong pressure to ensure that Kenya’s leaders treat the mediation with utmost seriousness. Kenyans welcome American leadership on Kenya at the United Nations Security Council. The recent decision to bar hard-line politicians and their families from entering the United States is another step in the right direction. It appears to have been a decisive factor in prompting the parties to finally sit at the table.

Washington should continue to work in concert with other strong voices, like the European Union, to push for the restoration of democracy in Kenya. Additionally, the personal assets of the hard-liners and the leaders of the violence should be traced and frozen.

Congress should call for the International Republican Institute, an elections-monitoring organization that conducted an exit poll on the presidential vote, to release its findings. Suspicions that the institute has suppressed its results not because they were flawed but because they showed that Mr. Odinga won have fueled mistrust.

Finally, the United States can use another pressure point. It must freeze the millions of dollars of military assistance Kenya receives each year, pending a successful outcome to the negotiations. Some of the security forces benefiting from this aid and equipment have been killing Kenyan civilians with impunity. The United States must not be an accessory to their brutality.

The Annan agreement presents an opportunity for Kenya to step back from the brink of disaster. Kenya can now fix the “winner take all” political system that prompted the recent election rigging, and end the impunity for human rights violations that has dogged our country since independence.

The Annan mediation effort must push the parties to agree to a one- to two-year transitional government, with both sides exercising equal powers. This government’s chief tasks, besides keeping the country running, must be to carry out badly needed constitutional reforms around presidential powers, and to create the conditions for new free and fair elections.

Restructuring the electoral commission, the police and the judiciary is also critical. The perpetrators of the election fraud and the violence must be prosecuted to restore Kenyans’ faith in the power of the vote. Only then can new presidential elections be held.

The current calm must not be mistaken for peace. A critical opportunity will be lost if the mediation effort results only in political horse-trading between Mr. Kibaki and Mr. Odinga. Without these critical reforms, the gains made in the last few days will secure only a short-lived truce.

Above all, the United States and the world must ensure that the Kenyan people’s vote is respected. If we cannot uphold our democratic choice, the future of Kenya will be lost.

When you find yourself at a wedding discussing how more than 800 people have been killed and more than 250,000 kicked out of their homes for having certain ethnic origins, you know there is something terribly wrong with your country. Living in Nairobi the past few months has been like living in a relatively comfortable glass cave in the middle of hell.

What began in late December as protests against election irregularities has spiraled into killings based on which tribe your identity card and speech indicate you belong to. English and Swahili, the languages that were supposed to unite us, have now been rendered useless. In these times, when belonging or not belonging to a particular tribe can be the difference between not being dead or being seriously dead, what chance does a person like me have? I was born to a Luhya father and a Taita mother, but I speak the Kikuyu language of Kiambu, where I was raised.

The politicians no longer have the ability to stop the violence, despite their posturing that they could do so at the snap of their fingers. We see Kofi Annan, the former secretary general of the United Nations, posing with the rival contenders, President Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga, in photo sessions where the two antagonists shake hands and smile and call for peace. But the political rhetoric seems a joke; we know that revenge and counter-revenge are what the various ethnic groups really seek — to “do to what they did to our tribe mates.”

Daily life is a constant kaleidoscope of languages for those of us who are of mixed ethnic heritage. We must gauge what sort of street or village we are in and, like a chameleon, speak the “correct” tongue.

My sister Rozi, a health worker, was recently taking a patient to a hospital in western Kenya when their ambulance was forced to stop by youths who demanded to know what tribe she came from. The youths were hunting members of Mr. Kibaki’s Kikuyu tribe. When they saw that her ID card showed a mixed Taita-Luhya name, they asked her to speak in Luhya to prove she wasn’t a Kikuyu.

“I really can’t speak it because my mother is a Taita!” she pleaded, explaining that our father had never taught us his language. In desperation, staring at the freshly chopped corpses around her, she showed them a photocopy of my mother’s national identity card, which she had had the foresight to put in her purse. This apparently convinced them, and she was let go.

Never before has it been important in our family to know which tribe we should belong to. My sisters and brothers have names from both of our parents’ communities. I know no tribe. I know only languages.

Supposedly cosmopolitan Nairobi has now been Balkanized, with whole neighborhoods turned into exclusive reserves of certain tribes. Some have imported murderous thugs from rural areas to protect their own — the Mungiki street gang for the Kikuyus; the Chingororo for the Gusii tribe; and groups taking the names Baghdad Boys and Taliban for the Luo people.

Where can those of us of mixed heritage, who do not know their tribes’ war cries, find refuge? My Luhya name is problematic in itself: The Kikuyus, who support Mr. Kibaki, are hunting Luhyas, whom they claim voted for Mr. Odinga, a Luo. And the Luos are hunting Luhyas as well, claiming they voted for President Kibaki. Such is my fate for having a father belonging to a tribe that apparently voted 50-50!

Virtually all the major police stations and church compounds in Central, Rift Valley, Western, Nyanza and Nairobi Provinces have been turned into camps for internal refugees. These people’s laments are all the same: We were born here; we don’t even know any relatives in our so-called ancestral lands; we are Kenyans, not people of whatever tribe you want to pin on us. Yet the government now says that it will relocate them to their ancestral homes. For many, this means ethnic cleansing and death.

Many of my friends have now resorted to taking crash courses in the dialects of the tribes indicated on their identity cards, “just in case it comes in handy.” We sit in groups and laugh morbidly at the e-mail messages from our former classmates who are now abroad asking us if we are safe. After we graduated from high school, many of our friends faked bank-account statements to get student visas and fled to the United States, to wash toilets between university courses. Not me: I proudly swore to them that I was sticking here because I am an Africanist, a believer in the African dream. Now my faith in my countrymen has faded faster than the newness of the New Year.

In this climate, inter-tribal marriages have become so rare that they are the subject of TV news reports. This is greatly upsetting to those of us who — thinking about our parents marrying all those years ago — never felt that living a life outside your clan was a significant matter. We love Kenya, without thinking of our neighbors’ lineage. It is from us that Kenya will rise afresh.

By now, the question of who won the election is almost beside the point. Neither “President” Kibaki nor Raila Odinga should be allowed within sniffing distance of the presidency. The country is imploding, people are dying and destitute, and these two great men have to be coaxed to the negotiating table.The idea of Kenya belonging to all Kenyans and Kenyans having the right to live where they like is dead in the water. For some of the victims of the violence in the Rift Valley, this is the second or third time they have lost everything. Many have vowed never to come back. The message being telegraphed by the violence is that the only really safe place to put down any roots is among your own kind. Rift Valley for the Kalenjins, Central Province for the Kikuyus, and so on.

As a child, my family and I travelled at least once a year to visit my grandparents via the western reaches of the A104, the road from Mombasa to the border with Uganda. The journey was a bone-jarring eight hours, but pleasant enough, through the Rift Valley province. We would stop periodically for bathroom breaks or food in Naivasha, Nakuru, Kericho and finally Kisumu. My parents would buy produce from local farmers, all of which ended up in the cabin of the pick-up truck. And so we would continue, ankle-deep in potatoes, carrots and cabbage.

In 1992, when the violence in the Rift Valley first reared its head in the run-up to the elections, the signs of trouble were everywhere. There were burned-out houses all along the road. The farmers who sold produce by the roadside were gone – at least the Kikuyu ones were. Long stretches of the countryside were emptied out.

The Rift Valley is the largest of Kenya’s eight provinces and, bar Nairobi, the most populous and ethnically diverse. People from all over the country have flocked to its urban areas and rural plantations. So in addition to the indigenous Kalenjin, there are large numbers of Kikuyu, Luhya, Luo, Kisii and others. Nothing wrong with that. Kenya, we were told over and over, was for all Kenyans. We were free to go where we wanted, live where we wanted.

For years this rhetoric concealed abiding anger surrounding land and its distribution: who had it, who didn’t, why some had so little and others so much, how the land-rich had come to own what they did. But the lid was mostly kept on this disaffection until, in 1992, with the real possibility of losing power, Arap Moi cynically gave that anger a murderous outlet. Non-Kalenjin, we were told, were only visitors in the Rift Valley. They were welcome to stay as long as they toed the line, which meant voting for the right candidates.

In the event, few “outsiders” got a chance to vote in the Rift. Most were driven out in an outbreak of slashing and burning and killing that shocked us to our core. With the elections over and Moi back in office, the violence lost its intensity. The “visitors” trickled back to rebuild their lives and homes, although many did not return, and in some places it was years before things returned to normality. But that Pandora’s box of violence has never been successfully shut. It has simmered under the surface with occasional outbreaks and has now exploded once again into life.

Fool me once, goes the saying, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. There must be a lot of Rift Valley Kikuyu ruing their lack of sense in returning to live among people who had so violently communicated their dislike. And there are, no doubt, many Kenyans watching and wondering what it all means.

Will any “outsiders” ever again stake their livelihoods on the existence of a country called Kenya and buy land in the Rift – or anywhere outside their districts of origin? Will we all retreat to the safety of our homogenous ethnic enclaves? Will we ever again be able to look each other in the eyes, to suppress the knowledge of the things we have done and are capable of doing to each other? And if not, what kind of country will we become?

The national memory is very long, and injuries are not easily forgotten or forgiven. The Rift is evidence of that. But now we are sowing a bitter wind of grievance, and unless we handle this cataclysm judiciously and with more courage and honesty than we have ever before mustered, we will certainly reap the whirlwind. National memory is long indeed. Let us never forget that our so-called leaders sold us all down the river.

Blurry video of a policeman beating a demonstrator; a photograph of angry slum-dwellers storming a food depot; headlines featuring the word “violence.” That, more or less, sums up the news from Kenya, or at least the news that has filtered into the general consciousness over the past few weeks. Unless you were paying very close attention, you were probably tempted, as I was at first, to dismiss these events as yet more evidence of Africa‘s ungovernability. Uganda, Rwanda, Liberia, Somalia, Sudan, Sierra Leone; tribal enmity plus poverty equals violence; another country evolving into a “failed state.” Doesn’t it prove, once again, that Africa is an exception to all of the rules about global development, democratization, “progress”?

Actually, it doesn’t. In fact, the closer one looks at Kenya, the less exceptional Africa seems. What was most striking to me about the violence in Kenya in recent weeks was not how much the country resembles Rwanda but, rather, how much it resembles, say, Ukraine in 2004 or South Korea in the 1980s. Perhaps the real story here is not, as one headline had it, about ” The Demons That Still Haunt Africa” but about how Africa is no different from anywhere else.

I am exaggerating here, somewhat, to make a point. Of course Kenya is special, as all countries are special, and of course there are some notably bloody Kenyan ethnic conflicts. The Kikuyu tribe, which constitutes about a fifth of Kenya’s population, has dominated the country’s politics and economics since independence — and is profoundly resented for it. Among other things, the disturbances of recent weeks have included a wave of attacks on the Kikuyu sections of a Nairobi slum, and cross-tribal violence, with the Luo, in the Rift Valley.

But step back a few paces, and look at the broader picture. The immediate cause of the current unrest was not ancient ethnic hatred. The immediate cause was political. As happened in Ukraine, an election was held and one of the candidates appears to have stolen it. This was no piece of subtle fakery, nor did it involve anything so legalistic as a supreme court. On the contrary, with television cameras rolling, Kenyan paramilitary police stormed the conference center where votes were being counted — and where the challenger, Raila Odinga, was said to be ahead of the incumbent, President Mwai Kibaki — and expelled journalists and foreign observers. Soon afterward, an election official emerged to declare Kibaki the winner. Violence, apparently prepared well in advance, broke out immediately. There will be many explanations for the viciousness of what followed, but one of them, surely, is that this particular election fraud took place at a crucial moment in Kenyan history.

As any student of revolution knows, popular uprisings generally take place not in the poorest countries but in those that have recently grown richer. In 2007, Kenya’s economy grew 6.4 percent, a figure that will rapidly translate into fewer infant deaths, better nutrition and steadier jobs — as well as increased ambitions, both personal and political. The more hope you have for the future, the more frustrating it is to be badly governed.

And Kenya, famously, is extraordinarily badly governed. On the international “perceived corruption” rankings put together by the anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International, Kenya came in 150th, alongside Liberia and Sierra Leone, countries that are recovering from long-term civil wars. Year on year, Kenyans told the organization that they pay more and more bribes, too. Judges are for sale, lawmaking is arbitrary, government jobs are doled out according to ethnicity, not merit. No wonder there is widespread frustration.

Thus there is nothing mysterious about the anger or the unrest, nothing that requires more Live Aid concerts or global outpourings of emotion, nothing especially “African” about Kenya’s problems at all. Kenya needs a cleaner, more democratic, more rule-abiding government; it needs to eliminate the licenses and regulations that create opportunities for bribery; it needs to apply the law equally to all citizens. The West can help Kenya change these things by encouraging these values through the nature of the aid it gives and the strings attached to that aid. Ultimately, though, Kenya’s political elite will have to decide what kind of country they want their children to live in. Yes, there are cultural factors, and, yes, Kenya is unique, but in the end politics, not culture, lies at the heart of the country’s current problems.

Other people’s violence is not a deep concern for most of us, particularly if it occurs in remote Africa or overpopulated Asia. But the outbreak of tribal killings and widespread rioting in Kenya hits me where I live.

Rather, it hits me where I lived. The upheaval threatens to put Nairobi on a list of foreign capitals where I once resided or visited regularly but which have become dangerous ground for foreign tourists or business people, journalists and, in many cases, the local population. A curtain of violence and of hostility toward outsiders has fallen over many parts of my journalistic history.

So when Kenya seems to be collapsing, I take it personally. It revives memories of seeing Lebanon tear itself apart around me, or watching from a distance as Algiers, Tehran, Baghdad, Mogadishu, Khartoum, Harare and a few of the other places I traveled to as a young foreign correspondent have been enveloped by long nights of horrific destruction, xenophobic revolution or both.

The list is not exhaustive, nor, as you may have suspected, is it truly just about my own experiences living or working in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. I cite it to make the point that the world increasingly needs to take the number of failing capitals personally — and to commit more international resources and energy to helping struggling nations right themselves.

The forces of globalization and of immediate, intrusive electronic communication have connected the lives of Americans and Europeans much more closely to the people of the developing world — on the surface. But the increase in communication has not been matched by an increase in understanding of the Third World’s dilemmas or a commitment to help resolve them.

As my own accounting of “lost” places suggests, the march toward stability and prosperity that the end of the colonial era seemed to promise has lagged or disappeared in many areas. Colleagues would add Kabul and Rangoon to the inventory of turmoil in parts previously known. Islamabad is racing toward making the roll call of dysfunction and despair.

It is premature to compare Nairobi at this point to those other, more tumultuous capitals. But most of them — as Nairobi certainly did — originally had serious chances to succeed as workable or even important regional or international centers of governance, and they failed. Nairobi must now avoid their mistakes if it is to avoid their fate.

Kenya heralded the bright outlook of the post-colonial era by gaining independence from Britain in 1963 and adopting pragmatic economic policies that attracted foreign investors and persuaded white settlers to keep their money, skills and families there.

When I arrived in Kenya six years later on my first foreign assignment for The Post, Jomo Kenyatta presided over a country blessed with not only great natural beauty but also a relatively efficient national infrastructure.

But violence ran just beneath the surface of Kenyan politics. Kenyatta’s Kikuyu tribesmen spearheaded the Mau Mau rebellion and gained a political dominance after independence that they have never been willing to share with the Luo, the country’s other large tribe. (Or with dissident Kikuyu politicians for that matter, who were either assassinated or silenced by the Kikuyu establishment.) This month’s revenge killings and violent street protests by Luo mobs were sparked by what independent accounts portray as the theft of the national election by President Mwai Kibaki‘s government, which appeared to be losing to a Luo-backed opposition party. Luo anger has been stoked by brutal police repression and the failure of foreign governments or the United Nations to bring pressure on Kibaki to deal in good faith with the Luos to resolve the crisis or to seek national reconciliation.

Unfortunately for aggrieved Kenyans, the nation’s most serious troubles in its brief modern history arrive at a moment when international outrage is spread thin in Darfur, the Middle East, Iraq and elsewhere. The United Nations’ unsuccessful struggle with Sudan to send into Darfur peacekeeping units that can protect themselves suggests that the once proudly proclaimed “duty to protect” abused citizens from their own governments is degenerating into something like the duty to scold.

This time developments in Kenya may herald the onset of a new, much unhappier era — one that will be marked by the total breakdown of the post-colonial structures that attempted to recognize African, Arab and Asian nationalism while protecting Western economic and political interests. If the Kenyans cannot make this formula work, it is hard to see how other, less prosperous nations can.

It will be Kofi Annan’s turn tomorrow to arrive in a tense Nairobi, following in the steps of Archbishop Desmond Tutu and John Kufuor, the Ghanian president and head of the African Union, last week, and US diplomats and the former Sierra Leonean president the week before. As the tourists abandon Kenya’s beaches, the country has tragically become the premier destination for a new type of visitor – the international mediator. But so far, all of them have managed no more than what could be described as a minibreak, hastily repacking their overnight bags with nothing to show for their efforts.

Kenya is stuck in a dangerous stalemate, with no point of agreement between Mwai Kibaki, who has claimed presidency in the recent contested election, and his opponent, Raila Odinga, from which to start negotiations on power-sharing. The country is bracing itself this week, when the newly elected MPs are due to take their seats, and there are fears fisticuffs could break out in parliament. Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement is poised to rally its supporters back on to the streets in protest at what they believe was a rigged election by Kibaki.

In London and Washington, not to mention Kampala and Kigali, there is close to panic. London needs Kenya to be an African success story; it gives the country £175m in aid a year. The US badly needs Kenya as a stable ally for its post 9/11 strategy – it is a vital intelligence base for the Horn, Yemen, the Gulf and east Africa. Meanwhile, Africa’s landlocked neighbours need Kenya as their link to the world economy; already fuel supplies are running short in Uganda and trade through the port of Mombasa has ground to a halt. No one is underestimating the scale of this crisis.

While western diplomats and aid officials are quietly gritting their teeth with a combination of frustration and anxiety, the media story – with a few exceptions such as Peter Kimani, a Kenyan journalist on openDemocracy.net – has been simple: utter bewilderment. Here is how the story has been framed: the peaceful Kenya we know and love from our holiday snaps has suddenly erupted in senseless, tribal barbarism.

There are two old elements underlying this perspective. There is the persistent western fantasy of the exotic that we project on to Africa, but the peaceful, palm-fringed beaches of our holiday albums (I have them too) are the creation of our tourist imagination, which strips out what we can’t or don’t want to understand. They have nothing to do with the tumultuous, violent, rapidly changing reality of Kenya in recent years.

Secondly, the coverage shows how quickly the west reverts to racism. Why is the word “tribal” only used to refer to Africa? Why don’t we talk of Belgian tribes or Middle Eastern tribes? No, only in Africa is inter-ethnic violence cast as “ancient”, immutable tribalism, associated in the European mindset with barbarism and irrationality. It’s a language of self-congratulation – we are civilised, Africans are not. How else could the ludicrous analogies with Rwanda have popped up? Kenya and Rwanda have completely different histories, ethnic relations and political economies. But that is swept aside as irrelevant, and the implication is that African violence is all basically the same. It’s as if someone had claimed the blazing Paris suburbs of 2005 were the new Bosnia.

The bewilderment is born from ignorance. In Britain, a glamorous melange of White Mischief, Elspeth Huxley’s The Flame Trees of Thika and a safari trip has passed for “knowing” the country. But Kenya is a complex society with 48 different ethnic groups and the highest internally displaced population in Africa, largely consisting of Somalis and Sudanese. It has some of the biggest shanty towns in Africa and its burgeoning, largely unemployed, population struggles to secure some of the gains of the recent economic boom. It’s hard to imagine any country negotiating such chronic insecurity and rapid social and economic dislocation without conflicts of interest flaring up. It’s why a close Kenya watcher like David Anderson, professor of African politics at Oxford University, is not particularly surprised by the violence of recent weeks.

Anderson’s most important work recently has been the analysis of how violence has become a part of Kenyan economic and political life. In poorer suburbs where crime is endemic and the police ineffectual and corrupt, gangs have proliferated. They demand bribes from local businesses and how they work is not much different from the police or private security companies.

Just as the success of your business depends on paying off such gangs, so in politics your success depends on your ability to mobilise the support of “youth wingers”. Unemployed young men are used to protect supporters and intimidate opponents. Their tasks can run from ripping down posters of an opponent to torching a neighbourhood. As the price of Kenyan politics has soared, politicians literally can’t afford to lose and gangs are part of the strategy to ensure they don’t. Always, there is the possibility the gangs will use the screen of politics to settle their own scores.

This “economy of violence”, as Anderson describes it, can mobilise deep resentments along ethnic lines. Eldoret, the scene of the horrific church massacre earlier this month, is famous as a flashpoint. This is the region where Kikuyu, the biggest ethnic group who have done the best since independence, acquired land in the 60s dispossessing the Kalenjin – a grievance that has festered unresolved ever since.

What you end up with in Kenyan politics is a combination of the local and the global – Odinga was already planning to copy Ukrainian-style mass demonstrations in the case of electoral defeat back in November. But calling his supporters (and his gangs) on to the streets unleashes its own momentum of frustration and anger, some of which goes back to generations-old land disputes, while some is much more recent, provoked by the Kikuyu middle class who have done so well under Kibaki.

The violence that results is certainly barbaric – children were reported to have been thrown back into the burning church in Eldoret – but it is not about a primordial African capacity for savagery. In a study of the appalling violence in Africa in recent years, Civil War is Not a Stupid Thing, the author, Professor Christopher Cramer, argues that, on a continent that has seen more wars since 1990 than in the whole of the previous century, violence can be a form of communication of last resort. When all other channels of seeking justice for embittered grievances in a corrupt regime appear to have been exhausted, some will see violence as the only way to protect their interests. That doesn’t make the violence right, but neither does it make it necessarily senseless. It can have its own awful rationality.

What we are seeing in Kenya – and in other unstable developing countries – is how human beings behave when faced with the kind of chronic insecurity that globalisation is incubating the world over. Dislocation breeds fear in which old, buried identities become an insurance policy – who looks out for you? – or make you a victim. The outcome is always tragic, and that is what is making so many Kenyans so anxious.

As I write this, the crackle of gunfire is audible from the veranda of our farmhouse. Warriors of the Pokot and Samburu tribes are fighting a mile away. A bush fire engulfs the horizon. I hear the tally in blood so far is three Samburu warriors killed, while the Pokot have rustled 750 of their cattle.

Today I hope our farm and its workers will be spared the violence. But this was not the case two weeks ago on Boxing Day, the eve of Kenya’s elections, when Samburu rustlers armed with AK-47’s made off with 22 steers. The police were unable to respond, as they had to guard ballot boxes. So our neighbor Charles saved our cattle by charging his car at the raiders in a hail of bullets, which forced them to cut and run.

The world knows of Kenya’s vote-rigging scandal — of the rioting in Nairobi; the police assaults on the supporters of the opposition leader, Raila Odinga; the pogroms against traders and farmers of President Mwai Kibaki’s Kikuyu tribe. But we’ve watched it unfold in real time in our corner of central Kenya.

When the Kikuyus fled the village up the road from us, local food supplies quickly dried up, hunger set in among the mob and rioting flared again. Then a Samburu witch doctor announced that it was time for his warriors, supporters of Mr. Odinga, to advance on the Pokot tribesmen, who had backed Mr. Kibaki. He said he had found a way to turn Pokot bullets into rain — a promise that evidently precipitated the clashes erupting around me.

Over the last two weeks, we’ve stuck to our daily routines, as if it somehow might make the nightmare of what was unfolding over the horizon recede. Still, I devised an evacuation plan for our workers who were from the “wrong” tribes. We dug up the lawn to plant extra vegetables, not knowing how much livestock we’ll have down the road.

Still, and despite all the talk of another Rwanda, I think Kenya will pull back from the brink. This is mainly thanks to the basic decency of ordinary Kenyans — whose priorities are to work hard, educate their children, fear God and enjoy a few Tusker beers.

Nobody wants to believe Kenya is a typical African basket case. Nor is anybody banking on the swift intervention of the world community: not from Washington, with its string of disastrous foreign policies, or the African Union, which has had unmitigated diplomatic failures in Darfur and Somalia. Kenyans know only they themselves can prevent fresh chaos. Despite all the claims and counterclaims among the candidates, ordinary citizens also know the entire class of Kenyan political leaders is to blame. The African saying that “when elephants fight, the grass suffers” applies tragically. Kenyan politicians are paid more money than many of their counterparts in the West — though they rarely bother to turn up at Parliament.

Kenyan democracy has failed because ordinary people were encouraged to believe that the process in and of itself could bring change. So Kenya’s leaders — and often international observers — interpret democracy simply in terms of the ceremony of multiparty elections. Polls bestow legitimacy on politicians to pillage for five years until the next depressing cycle begins.

In the campaign rallies I attended, I saw no debate about policies, despite the country’s immense health, education, crime and poverty problems. The Big Men arrived by helicopter to address the voters in slums and forest clearings. When they spoke English for the Western news media’s benefit, they talked of human rights and democracy. But when they switched to local languages, it was pure venom and ethnic chauvinism. Praise-singers kowtowed to the candidates, who dozed, talked on their mobile phones and then waddled back to their helicopters, which blew dust into the faces of the poor on takeoff.

Mr. Odinga campaigned on a policy of federal decentralization known as majimboism. On paper, devolution of power in an African nation led by corrupt politicians seems to make sense. But on a local level, majimboism is interpreted another way: without functioning national institutions, decentralization becomes synonymous with mob rule. A few months ago a drunken power broker in a village wagged his finger and declared that after the elections all “outsiders” — meaning Kikuyus and whites — would be kicked out and their farms taken.

In any case, we can be certain that the violence will simply worsen the poverty that is itself the root cause of all Kenyan crises. Already we are seeing layoffs and a potential collapse of the tourism and agricultural industries. On the political front, perhaps the best we can hope is that Big Men will reach a deal and the tribes will put away their machetes and rifles. Then the Western press will trickle home, content that democracy has been re-established, while the people of Laikipia return to their daily struggle to survive.

Kenya‘s recent presidential election unleashed turmoil that has so far claimed more than 500 lives and displaced thousands of people. Blame has been pinned on Kenya’s ethnic divisions: The Luo tribe of challenger Raila Odinga has disputed the electoral victory claimed by incumbent President Mwai Kibaki of the Kikuyu tribe. Since the election, the Kikuyu have been targeted by the Luo and other groups, while the Luo and their fellow oppositionists have been brutalized by the police.

But although this conflict does indeed run along ethnic lines, ethnic diversity is not to blame for the disaster. The key culprit is, rather, a serious flaw in Kenya’s governance: the weakness of its national legislature.

Many observers assume that ethnic divisions cause civil war. According to such thinking, ethnic rivalries lurk below the surface, ever ready to erupt if sparked by a galvanizing event.

This view seems to fit Kenya. A hotly contested and probably fraudulent election fueled festering resentment against the dominant Kikuyu tribe, prompting the Luo and other tribes to attack. Government forces, led by President Kibaki, a Kikuyu, responded with repressive measures against their tribal adversaries.

But this story is misleading. In fact, political scientists have found that there is no statistical correlation between ethnic diversity and civil war. Some ethnically diverse countries experience civil war, but many more are pacific. After all, Kenya has always been ethnically divided but is generally touted as a bastion of stability, democracy and prosperity in East Africa.

If ethnic diversity didn’t cause the recent round of violence in Kenya, what did? The answer: a feeble parliament.

We recently conducted statistical analyses showing that countries with weak legislatures are at greater risk of civil war. It’s easy to see why. Where the legislature is strong, opposition groups can hope to affect policy through their representatives in parliament, without the need to resort to violence.

But Kenya’s parliament is anemic. In our global survey of the power of national legislatures, Kenya ranks only 126th out of 158 countries, well behind other developing nations such as India (44th), South Africa (48th), Benin (59th), Brazil (60th) and Ghana (82nd).

In Kenya and other countries with weak legislatures, the presidential contest is a winner-take-all affair. The Luo know that they cannot hope to constrain President Kibaki with the checks and balances to be found in a system with a powerful parliament. Instead, they face a frustrating choice between subordination to the president and violently contesting his rule in the streets. The Kikuyu, Kibaki’s tribe, know that they cannot relinquish the presidency peacefully without forfeiting control over policy and patronage. Tragically, in the presidential election, everything seems to be at stake.

It didn’t have to be this way. Like Kenya, Benin and Ghana are ethnically divided countries that have experienced closely fought and possibly flawed presidential elections in recent years. But Benin and Ghana have stronger legislatures, so the losers in presidential elections have less fear of being politically excluded. They have reacted to defeat by using their sway in parliament to control the president, and they have not resorted to mass violence.

American and European efforts to advance peace and democracy in developing countries have focused on building civil society, but the United States and Europe have, unfortunately, underinvested in bolstering formal institutions such as national legislatures. Stemming the mayhem in Kenya and preventing presidential elections from igniting civil wars elsewhere requires strengthening parliaments. Peacemakers and democrats in the developing world, as well as aid agencies in the West, face no more urgent imperative.

This thing called Kenya is a strange animal. In the 1960s, the bright young nationalists who took over the country when we got independence from the British believed that their first job was to eradicate “tribalism.” What they really meant, in a way, was that they wanted to eradicate the nations that made up Kenya. It was assumed that the process would end with the birth of a brand-new being: the Kenyan.

Compared with other African nations, Kenya has had significant success with this experiment. But it has not been without its contradictions, though they had never really turned lethal until now.

Our Kenyan identity, so deliberately formed in the test tube of nationalist effort, has over the years been undermined, subtly and not so subtly, by our leaders — men who appealed to our histories and loyalties to win our votes.

You see, the burning houses and the bloody attacks here do not reflect primordial hatreds. They reflect the manipulation of identity for political gain.

So what was different about this election? What brought Kenya’s equilibrium to an end?

Five years ago, we voted for a broad and nationally representative government. Inside this vehicle were the country’s major tribes: the Luo, the Luhya, the Kikuyu, many Kalenjin — all the people now killing one another.

We wanted this arrangement to quickly introduce a new and more inclusive Constitution, deal firmly with corruption and start a process of defining the nation in terms that include everybody.

Tragically, President Mwai Kibaki instead steered a course away from the coalition and cultivated the support of his Kikuyu community. He did a good job rebuilding the civil service and managing the economy, but he did it within a framework that was not sustainable.

When it came time to conduct our most recent election, Raila Odinga had built a movement on the back of President Kibaki’s betrayal of the spirit of 2002. His political party, the Orange Democratic Movement, was the big ethnic tent similar to the one that had first brought President Kibaki to office.

On the day we cast our vote, we thought that our optimism and desire for an inclusive and broad government would prevail. Instead, three days later — after reports that votes were being “cooked” in Kikuyu strongholds, after skirmishes in the room where the results were being announced, after the news media were ejected — Mr. Kibaki was announced the winner and a haphazard swearing-in took place. And Kenya exploded.

Mr. Odinga and President Kibaki are not really ethnic leaders, but in the days since the disputed election they have stoked tribal paranoia and used it to cement electoral loyalty.

Mr. Odinga and his fellow party leaders are now determined to avenge the wrong they believe they have suffered. Sadly, this leadership now appears to believe that the violence spreading across the country might be a valuable bargaining chip.

My further suspicion is that Mr. Odinga wants to sell to Kenyans and the world a sort of Ukrainian “people’s revolution” — where protesters take to the streets and change the order of things, and are seen to be throwing happy pink petals on television, so America can say, ah, the people have spoken.

But rather than matters leading to a popular but peaceful uprising against a flawed election, we are likelier to suffer an escalation of retaliations and a descent to that special machete place that nations rarely recover from.

Yet all is not lost. Nations are built on crises like this. If there is such a thing as Kenya, it should be gathering energy right now. Two leaders can sit down, form a power-sharing agreement and put together a system to handle elections and transition. A Constitution that names and recognizes the tribal nations within our nation, that decentralizes some power and that includes us all in the process is possible.

For 40 years we have been dancing around each other, a gaseous nation circling and tightening. The moment is now to make a solid thing called Kenya.

I was in Lamu 10 days ago, a slow gentle place, cut off from most of the muscular and modern tempers of the rest of Kenya. I was telling off Patrick, a young Giriama man, for vanishing with my money for a whole day while I remained without mobile phone credit. He was partying somewhere. He finds it very difficult to understand why such a thing would make me so upset. There is a rhythm to things in Lamu, and why do you upcountry people and white people, who to us are really the same people, move so aggressively against the tide of things?

While we were talking, a young Kenyan woman, a doctor, came and joined us for a beer and we started talking politics. When she left, he asked me if the woman was a Gikuyu (often spelled Kikuyu). I said no. He said, “Yeye ni mjanja sana”. I told him she was a Luo. He was confused for a second. Then he nodded, and said again, “Ni mjanja kama mzungu.”

What he was saying was, “She is very ‘cunning’ or ‘clever’, like a white person”. And his association with this “cunning” is that this is a very Gikuyu thing, and a very upcountry thing. He did not say, or mean, “wise”, or “educated” or even “intelligent”.

In the 1960s, when the coastal strip was parcelled out to Kenyatta’s cronies, the Giriama – Patrick’s people – found themselves squatters in their own land, as Swahili families took over their traditional lands. As the coast stagnated, the flood of upcountry people began: educated, aggressive and entrepreneurial, they have come to dominate the economy of the region. Now things are rumbling, as the Orange Democratic Movement proposes a more devolved government – and people in the area interpret this as upcountry people being sent back home, so they can occupy the economy. When Mwai Kibaki rigged himself into power last Sunday as we watched on television, the violence began, against Gikuyu and other upcountry tribes, as people took their political aspirations into their own hands.

A few days later I try to buy some more credit for my phone. I stop at a Gikuyu woman’s shop, and she does not have enough mobile phone credit. Her assistant laughs at me when I ask for a cold coke. “Have you any idea how we got supplies today? People were landing here shell-shocked with bicycles stacked up with bread and sodas … don’t even ask how they got them.” He turns to chat with the small group of customers around him, talking about the day, sharing really, in a very warm way, a thing we are all involved with. There was nothing partisan in his talk.

He turned to his boss, a woman in her fifties, conservative with an angular face and a no-nonsense expression, and says to her: “He! Mama, kesho nitakimbia town mzima nitafute Celtel yaa ndugu yangu hapa.” (“Mama, tomorrow I will run around all over town to find Celtel credit for our brother here.”)

There is something jarring. I don’t know what for a moment, then I realise he is speaking to his boss, a fellow Gikuyu, in Kiswahili. She replies to him in Kiswahili. This is unusual. They both laugh at something, nervously. She turns to me and says something she has never said before. She tells me, in Kiswahili, to go to our neighbour, he has some Celtel credit. She says this, as we all know Gikuyus are being killed in Rift Valley and Kisumu. ODM and Kibaki’s PNU – the protagonists who have split the country in half after a close and badly counted election – have removed all goodwill, and we find we are tentative with each other.

I try to examine some of these interactions. Different languages represent different aspects of the national character. Every Kenyan is a split personality: authority, trajectory, international citizen in English; national brother, in Kiswahili; and content villager or nostalgic urbanite in our mother tongues. Our mother tongues live in an imagined past and occupy an incoherent present, and when a threat seems to come, and the state seems to be part of the threat, we are able only to activate other nationhoods as acts of war – the Gikuyu, my ethnic group, do not meet as a nation to examine their economy; they start to agitate, often provoked by the political elite to get the “nation” ready to encounter “the other” out there. In this part of town, all kinds of Kenyans live – city English people making their way home, villagers and their produce on the streets, and the crowds of people being gentle to each other in Kiswahili.

So many times you hear about somebody who was living another life in another language, and when he died, whole families came crawling out of the woodwork. Widows fighting next to the lowering coffin.

In the future, when we are looking back to this short season of hell, and are either relieved or in exile, we will ask ourselves if the shutdown of all media was the right thing. For more even than the symbolic beheading of the state by Kibaki on live television, the ceasing of live broadcasts on all our media was an announcement that Kenya was closed. And the text messages that followed were announcing that we are on our own, and that in the dark, your neighbour is coming to get you.

What we are seeing is simple. The state as we know it has run out of steam. The winner-takes-all Westminster system we have cannot carry our aspirations. Even as blood is shed in Eldoret and Mombasa, Kenya’s various ethnicities are now stranded in their own paranoia for lack of a viable national structure and process. We have known it for years. This is why a new constitution has been on the top of the list of political priorities for most Kenyans for 10 years and more.

We are 45 years old this year. Like many nations, this is our moment of truth. There is a way out of this – if both leaders act like statesmen, sit together and do what is necessary legally to have an interim power-sharing arrangement whose sole task is to create a structure that can carry us along into a new election, with a new or amended constitution that ensures that, whoever wins or loses, the whole country and all its minorities and interests are carried.

We are a strong economy in this continent. We have a well-trained army, and police force and civil service. We have some of the most competent technocrats in any developing country. We even have a lot of goodwill across ethnic and class lines, and if we act now, things will improve quickly. All the foreign correspondent stuff about “atavistic hatreds” and such is not true. For every place where there are things burning, there is a recent historical problem that has got to do with big political games, by big political leaders.

We all want peace, and all civil leaders should speak loudly to their own constituencies. Baying from across the bridge does not do much. Nations are forged through situations like this. Leaders are made. We have maybe been play-acting nationhood. Do we want a common state? Do we really want this? The time has come to decide.

I have visited few places more peaceful than Eldoret in Western Kenya. To white settlers, this sleepy corner of Africa was “64”, because it was 64 miles from the railhead of the new Uganda railway. Before colonial times, the area had been occupied by the “Sirikwa” tribe, then the Maasai, then the Nandi. Voortrekkers from South Africa put down roots here, followed by other white settlers, and Asian traders. My memory of a visit to the town many years ago is of a picturesque and placid intermingling of tribes, races and colours.

Earlier this week, a murderous mob from the Kalenjin tribe drove a group of terrified Kikuyu, including children, into a church near Eldoret, and set fire to it. At least 30 people were killed.

That such violence could erupt in such a gentle place seems almost unimaginable. Kenya has long been seen as Africa’s success story, a place of democratic stability where holidaymakers could travel in safety to see abundant wildlife in some of the most beautiful landscape in the world. Kenya was the African haven where aid organisations and international corporations could operate; more recently, the country has become a useful bulwark against Islamic terrorism.

Yet the world’s astonishment at the violence engulfing Kenya is itself a measure of the West’s failure to understand and respond to a crisis that has been brewing for years, if not decades. Just as we tend to view so much of Africa through dark glasses, as a place of violence and corruption, so Kenya has too often been seen though rose-tinted spectacles, as the African exception, a bright spot on the dark continent.

Britain has always been prone to a romanticised view of Kenya. In the early part of the last century thousands of British settlers were drawn to its beauties and weather. With clear trout streams, abundant game and fertile soil, here was a place to reinvent Britain in a particular image. The settlement of Kenya by whites was Britain’s last, doomed colonial dream: Lord Delamere, settler-in-chief, declared this “white man’s country”, despite the presence then of two million Africans.

Where West Africa was dangerous and threatening (“Beware and take heed of the Bight of Benin/ For few come out, although many go in.”), East Africa was different: many went in, and many stayed. On a visit in 1907, Winston Churchill enjoyed the “cool and buoyant breezes, and temperate unchanging climate”.

The country became, for many, an imagined Eden, a place of limitless sunsets, powerful cocktails and biddable African servants. The Happy Valley image still persists, backed up by such light cultural fare as White Mischief and Out of Africa.

When Kenya has failed to fit into the simple, peaceful character prescribed for it (in the past, as much as today) the British reaction has tended to be astonishment, followed by fury. The Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s was a complicated upheaval, something close to a civil war involving issues of race but also of tribalism, nationalism and economic inequality. Most British officials, however, saw merely an atavistic revolt by terrorist savages. Mau Mau became shorthand for barbarism, and the revolt was crushed, often with extreme brutality.

Kenya won independence soon after, but the tendency to view Kenya as somehow distinct from the rest of Africa has continued. If the West had not inherited such an idealised vision, then perhaps the current horror might have been prevented.

While Kenya seems clean and comfortable from the outside, its politics have grown steadily more corrupt, riven and driven by ethnic tensions and personal graft. Since the introduction of a multiparty system in 1991, every election has had irregularities, although never quite on the current scale.

Kenya may look comparatively prosperous. Yet massive population growth (from 13.5 million in 1975 to more than 33 million today), pressure on land, rising unemployment, and increasing economic disparity between the Kikuyu and other tribes paint a picture very different from

the placid images of the safari brochures.

Western leaders can hardly claim ignorance of what was happening in Kenya beneath the surface. In 2005, the anti-corruption chief appointed by the new, “clean” Government fled to Britain bringing grim evidence of official sleaze. Instead of bringing pressure to bear on the Kenyan Government, international donors, led by the World Bank, continued to write the cheques. Between 2003 and 2006 Britain’s aid to Kenya rose from £30 million to £50 million.

As always, from the days of white settlement, through Mau Mau, to the astonishingly corrupt presidency of Daniel arap Moi, the West has chosen to see in Kenya what it hopes to see. Immediately before the latest election, some observers were predicting the country would remain an oasis of calm, despite mounting evidence to the contrary.

Kenya was never the simple place imagined; just as the Eldoret I once visited was not the tranquil backwater it seemed. Today, far too late, Gordon Brown wags his finger at Kenya’s leaders for failing to live up to our expectations, but it takes a rare British politician to see the reality behind the wishful thinking.

Churchill was one such. Back in 1907, while admiring the climate, he noted that the question of ethnic tensions in Kenya was one of a “herd of rhinoceros questions — awkward, thick-skinned and horned, with a short sight and an evil temper, and a tendency to rush blindly upwind on any alarm”.

The Kenyan rhino is now on the rampage with tragic consequences, and we should have seen it coming.

These were meant to be Kenya’s golden days. A booming economy, a mobile phone for every man, woman and child, a robust and lively press. It is a tragedy for the country and the whole of Africa that a few days after Kenya’s elections, curfews are being imposed, gangs of young men are fighting on the streets, security police are storming through slums looking for agitators, and disfigured corpses are being discovered around the country. As ever, there is a sense that all this bloodshed could have been averted if only politicians had stepped down when their time has passed.

Kenya had high hopes when Mwai Kibaki moved into the presidential office in December 2002. Kenyan politics is still defined by tribe, and although Kibaki belonged to the dominant Kikuyu tribe, he had formed an alliance with Raila Odinga, who delivered the votes of the rival Luo and promised a new era of post-tribal politics in Kenya.

But corruption, the disease that has blighted Kenyan politics, crept back in as ministers began siphoning off public funds and awarding contracts to suspect companies, confident that their president was too weak or ineffectual to stop them. And with corruption came the desire to stay in power.

In 2005, the government held a referendum to strengthen the role of president. Enraged, Odinga left the cabinet and set up a rival coalition to campaign for a no vote, and won. In the euphoria of the victory, he set up a rival party, the Orange Democratic Movement, to compete in last week’s elections.

He is now right to be furious about the way the election has been run. The irresponsibility and cynicism of Kenya’s leaders over the last year is a betrayal of the people who voted them in five years ago with glad hearts.

Shocked by pictures of death and mayhem on the streets of Kenyan towns, a Kenyan friend in Britain called me to express her shock. “But these things don’t happen in Kenya!” she exclaimed, as if Kenya – or Keenya as she pronounced it – was immune from the political ills that have plagued Africa in the past 50 years.

She is wrong. Kenya has been a catastrophe waiting to happen. Every election since multiparty politics was reintroduced in 1991 has involved rigging. So far the margin of victory has always been so great that Western diplomats – keen to maintain “stability” – could claim that the cheating would not have made a difference to the result. “Voting broadly reflected the will of the people” was their duplicitous phrase that allowed the ruling elite to play their quinquennial charade.

Now the margin of victory is too thin. The cheating did make a difference and Raila Odinga, the leader of the main opposition party that has won the largest number of seats in parliament and six out of eight provinces, is not going to accept defeat.

Kenya is not just another African country. Suffering only one – failed – coup attempt in 45 years of independence, its stability makes Nairobi, the capital, the base for transnational corporations, the United Nations and scores of NGOs for East and Central Africa. It is also a beautiful country with well-run game parks for tourists, mountains, lakes and gorgeous Indian Ocean beaches. Unlike many African countries, Kenya’s strong professional class has never fled and have driven economic growth at about 5 per cent in the past four years. Kenyans are lucky. The country has no single natural resource, such as oil, to enrich the elite and impoverish everyone else. Kenyans have to work for their money and recently they have done well.

Yet in 2005 a poll found that more than half of Kenyans thought the economy was doing badly. According to Afrobarometer, a continent-wide research project, the most important issue for most Kenyans was equality, both of opportunity and availability of resources. That was an indirect way of saying that the Kikuyu, the ethnic group of President Mwai Kibaki and Kenya’s largest, was getting everything to the exclusion of everyone else. Mr Kibaki came in on an anti-corruption ticket but approval of the Government’s anti-corruption programme fell in his first three years from 85 per cent to 40 per cent. The reason was simple. Intense internal and international pressure forced Mr Kibaki to appoint John Githongo, a former journalist and corruption campaigner, as anti-corruption czar.

He also commissioned a public inquiry into the Goldenberg scam, through which some $600 million was stolen from the Treasury in the 1990s. Thousands of Kenyans attended the hearings, sitting quietly but bug-eyed as they heard an extraordinary tale of theft and deceit. Meanwhile, Mr Githongo commissioned Kroll, a private security firm, to trace, freeze and return the money lodged in accounts all over the world.

Kroll reported that much of the money was in accounts owned by sons of President Moi, but once these details became available to senior figures in Kibaki’s Government, the second and third stages of the process, freezing and recovery, were abandoned. A deal was done. Shortly afterwards Mr Githongo fled for his life and, even in a British haven, was given an armed bodyguard. With good reason. The Kenyan elite have a history of killing people who ask questions about corruption.

Kenyan politics are more than a lucrative game of musical chairs for the elite. They are the most vicious and tribalised on the continent. Politicians often address their own people in coded language. “It is our turn to eat!” is a phrase they often use. It means that it is the turn of our ethnic group to rule — and loot as much as we can.

In 2002 Mr Odinga left Moi’s Government and delivered his Luo ethnic group to Mr Kibaki’s newly formed Rainbow Alliance. The agreement — in writing — was that Mr Kibaki would change the constitution, create a powerful post of prime minister and appoint Mr Odinga. Once in power Mr Kibaki changed his mind. He presented a new constitution that retained a powerful presidency. Mr Odinga, given the minor transport ministry, left the government in disgust. A brilliant orator and campaigner, he whipped up opposition to Mr Kibaki’s new constitution and defeated it in a referendum.

The voting figures showed just how ethnically divided the country had become. The Kikuyu voted for it. Most of the rest against.

Riding the wave, Mr Odinga forged the Orange coalition for this election that brought together four other leading politicians and their communities. Only the Kikuyu were missing. They were convinced they would win. Now aged 62, Raila (his name means stinging nettle) Odinga has been in opposition politics most of his life. He is not a man to throw in the towel. The gang around Mr Kibaki have too much to lose if Mr Odinga comes to power. The scene is set for all-out war between the Kikuyu and the rest, a war that kicked off on Sunday afternoon as Luo and Kikuyu attacked each other in towns in Nairobi and elsewhere.

Are Kenya’s institutions strong enough to withstand this near civil war? The police will do the President’s bidding but there are doubts about the Army, one of the most professional in Africa. Many of its senior officers are reported to be unhappy about soldiers shooting down demonstrators on behalf of a politician who may not be around for long.

America has accepted the result; European election observers said the process was not convincing. With South Africa’s leadership in turmoil and Nigeria also suffering from a failed election earlier this year, it is hard to see who in Africa could bring both sides together. Without concerted international diplomatic intervention, Kenyans may be left to fight it out.

When John Githongo, Kenya’s anti-corruption tsar, suddenly went to ground during an official visit to Europe last year, the Kenyan and international media launched a frantic man-hunt to establish why “the big man” had abandoned his post. That interest did not die away when Githongo eventually resurfaced at an Oxford college. It didn’t take a genius, after all, to guess that when the official responsible for policing an African government’s finances flees, something is seriously amiss.

Given that the international community each year supplies Kenya with nearly $500m in aid, you might expect the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and western governments to share that curiosity. As one of Kenya’s three biggest donors, Britain would surely be particularly concerned.

Not so. Githongo, as it happens, has never been debriefed by the Department for International Development, whose boss Hilary Benn recently announced £55m in new funding for Kenya. Benn’s gesture of approval was echoed by the World Bank, which last week shocked many by unveiling $120m in loans for the east African state.

The astonishment springs from the fact that in the very week the loan was unveiled, the Kenyan press began publishing Githongo’s explanation of why he resigned. The contents of a 36-page dossier compiled in exile are being drip-fed to a transfixed audience. His dossier accuses a clutch of key ministers, including the finance minister, of setting up bogus contracts designed to steal hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds. The scandal stretches to the top, for, despite being briefed by Githongo, President Mwai Kibaki took no action. All those named protest their innocence. But if the claims are true – and few whistleblowers come with more credibility than Githongo – Kenya’s three-year-old government has not so much broken with the sleazy practices of Daniel arap Moi’s administration as raised them to new levels of sophistication.

Given the seriousness of the claims, the new loans have triggered apoplexy in many quarters. Sir Edward Clay, Britain’s former high commissioner to Nairobi, has written to Paul Wolfowitz, the new World Bank head, to protest at its “blind and offensive blundering” that makes a mockery of “the brave men and women taking risks to ensure that the scourge of corruption is banished”.

Analysts wonder what to make, now, of Wolfowitz’s declarations that fighting graft is a priority. His actions, including the suspension of a $124m loan to Chad for reneging on a deal aimed at ensuring oil revenues reached the poor, had suggested an era of tough engagement lay ahead. The Kenya loan smacks of a return to the bank’s traditional way of doing business in Africa, which kept the likes of Zaire’s Mobutu flush with funds.

Why are western donors effectively conspiring in top-level fraud? DfID officials, when challenged, argue that aid cut-offs “only hurt the poorest of the poor” and insist that on-the-ground policing ensures DfID money itself is never filched. But this is naive. An administration bent on plunder simply focuses its energies on parts of the budget not policed by foreign donors. The “poorest of the poor” may end up with first-rate schools at the end of roads too potholed to be passable: development cannot be delivered in self-contained parcels. The notion that aid can sidestep shoddy government to reach the base is threadbare.

But there are pragmatic reasons why lenders are reluctant to admit as much. In Britain’s case, having pushed for a doubling of aid and less conditionality for “progressive” African governments, London is finding it embarrassingly difficult to disburse. In Ethiopia, it recently cut direct budgetary support after a brutal post-election crackdown, and in Uganda it has frozen aid because of the government’s backsliding on democracy. With two African favourites already in trouble, there’s no appetite for adding Kenya, bound to London by an emotional and historical umbilical cord, to the list of African “problem cases”. And let’s not forget how the war on terror has boosted the vision in London and Washington of Kenya as a stable ally in a stormy region.

Both DfID and the World Bank have sought to put a positive spin on their actions. Announcing the new loan, the World Bank made much of the fact that $25m would go on improving financial management in Kenyan ministries – a gesture described as “hilarious” by Sir Edward Clay. DfID stresses that Benn told Kibaki to clean up his act during their meeting. One can imagine just how seriously that admonition went down, delivered alongside a £55m cheque.

The issues raised by this scandal stretch well beyond east Africa, going to the heart of the more-aid-and-less-questions formula for the continent’s recovery embraced last year at Gleneagles. Donors should be asking themselves whether their aid, rather than helping, is contributing to the decline of countries such as Kenya. Determined to engage with the continent, western governments seem all too ready to acquiesce in massive cons perpetrated on both western taxpayers and African voters. Having been repeatedly asked by Kenyans why my government insists on funding crooks, I can assure both DfID and the World Bank that the “poorest of the poor” will not thank them for it.