Be cautious. John Burnett’s terrible reporting for NPR on elephant poaching not too long ago set me ablaze. He fouled up the numbers completely, came from the wrong perspectives and reduced a complicated issue to hardly a cartoon.

PBS was just as bad, but had redeeming parts. The February production that included Aiden Hartley going undercover in Dar-es-Salaam to document that trade in illegal ivory was brilliant, but their numbers and back stories that introduced the stealth section were poor if not patently untrue.

So why am I directing you to another American public media production about animal poaching?

Because the synopsis presented over the weekend by reporters Frank Langfitt and Gregory Warner sounds good. Both reporters are more experienced than the reporters assigned to the elephant story.

Because many, many bloggers and experts – not just me – were highly critical of the elephant reporting by NPR and PBS earlier. Some of that noise had to get through.

Because basic facts, which have been buried in scandalization for years, are already out in the story and look good: In the whole summary, I did not hear once any reference to rhino horn being used as an aphrodisiac. It isn’t, but this reference has peppered stories of rhino poaching since time immemorial, a racist and horrible injustice to the bigger story.

Rhino horn is in demand — as with ivory — in Asia but for medicinal, holistic beliefs in its curative powers. Used for centuries as a fever reducer, newly rich Asians (mostly Vietnamese) buy tiny erasure-size blocks of compressed horn to cure everything from diabetes to hangovers.

For the poacher in East Africa, though, the main market is Yemen, Djibouti, Eritrea and thereabouts, where rich businessmen buy the horn to polish it as a dagger handle.

In the ATC story summary we heard this weekend, Langfitt and Warner conceded that even after poaching there are still enough rhino births annually to continue increasing the population.

(Media that they are, however, they’re unable to avoid teasing us with scandal, claiming that at current rates this will not be the case by 2017. I doubt that.)

And they have drilled into the attempts at real solutions, including horn cutting and controlled rhino farming and harvesting.

So unlike the huge bulk of elephant reporting these last several years which has been terribly incorrect, and of which NPR and PBS have contributed to messing up, this one might be different.

Stay tuned.

The phrase is not mine, but Richard Dowden’s, one of the world’s most respected African analysts, Director of Britain’s Royal African Society.

Dowden’s brilliant summary and analysis of the Kenyan Mess published today is required reading for anyone who’s trying to understand this incredible “mess.”

And his conclusion is “Right”-on: the minority (in the world as in Kenya) who are “elite … simply do not recognize that they are subject to the law. Politically powerful, exceedingly wealthy and above the law,” people like Kenyatta, Cameron or Limbaugh just ignore legal and social realities, carving a world in their selfish images.

(Read Dowden. I do not intend to quote him out of context, and the quote above he wrote strictly with regards to the Kenyan leaders on trial, but I think it a fair if liberal extraction of his meaning.)

Dowden’s analysis is no more brilliant than his summary, which is a tough nut to crack. Before I further try to summarize Dowden you must have an understanding of the ICC (International Criminal Court) which has indicted the President and Vice-President of Kenya for crimes against humanity.

The U.S. does not recognize the ICC. Nor does China, India and 38 other countries. But the majority of the world does: 122 countries including Canada, Australia, all of South America and almost all of Europe.

Another 28 countries, including Russia, have “signed on” to the ICC Treaty while not yet ratifying it. In so doing they agree to the abide by the treaty (including arresting indicted criminals on behalf of the Treaty who are not their own citizens) without yet allowing prosecution of their own citizens.

The Court was only formed in 2002. There is a much older cousin, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) formed in 1945 and designed strictly to adjudicate disputes between countries. All countries that belong to the UN automatically accept the ICJ.

Both courts are located in The Hague and share some facilities.

In 2007 Kenya blew up after a contentious end-of-year election. About 1300 people were killed and a quarter million displaced (of which more than a 100,000 remain so). The violence threatened Kenya’s relative stability and the west’s toehold in the continent:

Kenya was and probably remains the closest African ally to both Britain and the U.S. Strategically critical to the War on Terror (especially in Somali) and to both countries’ defense posture in the Red Sea (bases and warships in Mombasa), Kenya was the platform on which democracy and western capitalism were and are being promoted by the west onto the continent as a whole.

Britain, the U.S. and recently retired UN Secretary General Kofi Annan formulated a brilliant peace agreement that after a troubling six weeks brought Kenyan society back to peace, resulted in five years of growth and stability and the creation of one of the world’s best, new constitutions.

Part of that lengthy and complicated agreement was that those responsible for the killings and massacres should be brought to trial. The agreement gave Kenya the option of running the trials itself, or if it didn’t want to, allowed the ICC to run them.

Kenya through its parliament decided to wave its right to hold the trial and agreed to cooperate with the ICC.

Lo and behold, guess what the ICC found?

That two of its rising political stars, who recently became the country’s President and Vice President, were principally responsible for the killings and massacre.

Oops.

You know it’s interesting. In the old days what tangled up the west in its own ideology was its support of South American and Mideast dictators who held none of the west’s lofty morals. And these guys often used the west’s weaponry freely given them back on the west!

But now what you have is the west denying its own lofty morals!

David Cameron, Prime Minister of Britain, and Jacob Zuma, President of South Africa, both lead countries who have signed on to the ICC. President Zuma traveled to Nairobi to be an honored guest at Kenyatta’s inauguration.

This week Cameron welcomed indicted Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta to a conference about Somali in London.

There was local “outrage” but it didn’t seem to matter.

Today Kenyatta announced in a wildly aggressive press conference that the UN Security Council better vacate his indictment with the ICC.

Also today, Fox Newser Stephen Hayes, given a platform in U.S. News and World Report, says that the ICC should drop the charges against Kenyatta.

I think that says it all. The Right Worldwide is unified, but why? You can argue that Cameron is hamstrung by Kenya’s importance in the Somali situation, and you can argue that Zuma is crazy.

But why would Stephen Hayes take a position?

Because The Right (Kenyatta + Cameron + Zuma + Hayes, let me also add Sanford) are all miserable failures who through “elitism” and (likely unscrupulous) wealth have manipulated elections to become powerful men. And The Right does not unlock its jaw once clamped.

They are all also in minorities, but there seems to be no organized majority to defeat them.

Back to unedited Dowden:

“The fact is that the Kenyan elite … simply do not recognize that they are subject to the law. Politically powerful, exceedingly wealthy and above the law, no state official would dare touch them.”

Equally applied to miscreant U.S. bankers and right-wing U.S. politicians. How many bankers have gone to jail? Or even lost their job? Which man was yesterday elected a Congressman who is indicted for having misused public funds for his affair in South America?

Good grief. They just can’t be gotten rid of. And so what happens when Vice-President Ruto decides not to go to The Hague for his trial on May 28, or when President Kenyatta decides to take a pass on his date of July 9?

Dowden: “a major diplomatic earthquake.”

In neither incident do I believe there is any kind of organized group involvement, despite FOX News, Representative Stephen King or the other crazies on Meet the Press yesterday. Both cases seem to me to be engineered and implemented by wayward souls.

Wayward souls that have access in Boston to deadly technologies from Google searches. Wayward souls in Arusha who can trade a bushel of tomatoes for a grenade at practically any market in Africa.

It’s all the same. Neither is worse or more terrifying than the other. The higher tech move by the Boston duo was more deadly, just because American society is more sophisticated than Tanzanian.

Escalating religious and ideological tensions in America and Tanzania have been evident for years, and I agree with Arusha’s MP Godbless Lema that governments need to proactively address the schisms growing in their societies:

“”Religious fundamentalism is a reality in this country, but the government does nothing,” Lema said angrily outside the church, as police cordoned off the area.

Lema is one of the few honest, aggressive stars of Tanzanian politics. Like the minority of American politicians who want to address the Boston massacre with better schools and counseling and more jobs, rather than creating more fictitious global enemies, Lema knows the media speculation of the cause is absurd.

The ideologically bankrupt in a society will always point to the outside to explain a cancer within.

Since colonial times Tanzania has been one of the most Catholic countries of Africa, a product of King Leopold’s mid 19th Century conference that divided the colonial African world up by religion, so that missionaries didn’t duplicate their work.

One of the greatest historical ironies of Africa was that during the socialist policies of early independent Tanzanian in the 1970s to be a member of the Tanzanian communist party you also had to be a Catholic.

The amalgamation of Zanzibar with mainland Tanganyika in 1964 was like mixing holy water with myrrh. Since time immemorial Zanzibar was ruled by the radical Islamists of Oman, and even though it’s been given considerable autonomy, tensions have never fully eased with the mostly Christian mainland.

In October a respected Sheik in Arusha was hospitalized after an explosive device was set in his home. That was followed by church bombings in Zanzibar.

And so the cycle goes on and on, individual anger and want having found a convenient battle.

The Tanzanian government today arrested five Saudis, conveniently of a Muslim sect that is mostly disliked in Zanzibar, and charged them with terrorism.

Absurd, of course. This was the same Tanzanian government who employs the Arusha police commissioner who took 2½ hours to get to the church that was bombed Sunday morning, a half hour after the Vatican’s emissary attending the ceremony had been whisked out of the country.

The Honorable Lema is right. Governments do little today, in either America or Tanzania, to mend social schisms. Let’s just blame outsiders.

The clear consensus by much more scholarly analysts who have rushed out their initial impressions is pretty negative, that the detailed decision is “disappointing.”

But quite to the contrary, it helps me understand how insidiously deceptive a political system is where the final say presumably rests with a collection of appointed sage elders with so little obligation to anyone or anything that they can neutrally discern the facts and subsequently convey justice.

Or in other words: Finalismo.

By the way, there was nothing very revealing in the 113 pages, and a little bit for everyone including the critics of democratic methodology and the critics of corruption. I’m no legal scholar, but let me paraphrase the decision this way: don’t rock the boat.

The “rule of law” sounds good, but over America’s much longer history than Kenya we can often find definitive failed justice from the top. And that’s not wholly unexpected since it’s usually the most contentious and/or complicated issues that rise to the top, and it’s just statistically unlikely that the right decision will always be made.

And an incorrect Dred Scott decision foments war. The incorrect decision of our own Supreme Court in Bush vs. Gore arguably paved the way for two prolonged, unbelievably expensive and totally unjust wars.

America has a long enough history that it just seems statistically inevitable that some pretty horrible top court decisions would be made. But this, in effect, was Kenya’s first major decision.

And like America in Bush vs. Gore, the justices’ action put the man who likely lost the election in the winner’s seat: In Kenya by not altering the decision by the election authority (despite massive illegalities) and in America by stopping a recount of votes.

In Kenya it was passive justice; in America it was active justice; but in both it put the wrong man in power, invalidating democracy.

As in Bush vs. Gore, there were plenty of tidbits the justices couldn’t ignore: like the wanton corruption acquiring voting technology and the inability of the corroborating registration system to affirm exactly who had voted.

They even encouraged the Kenyan prosecutors to indict the “tender team” that designed and acquired the voting technologies that massively failed.

Just as the justices in Bush vs. Gore acknowledge that hanging chads if reconciled could alter the outcome.

So I don’t think we can rack this one up to the “statistical” likelihood that all profound decisions will not always be correct. There’s more to it.

In Kenya it means one of two things:

1. The justices were biased towards the flawed outcome, however wrong it was; or

2. The justices felt their meaning for existence was not sufficient enough to alter the status quo.

In America it was clearly Number 1, because they did alter the status quo by stopping the recount. In Kenya it’s hard to say.

But both situations demonstrate how weak the “rule of law” is in Kenya and America towards assuring a just outcome. Because the “rule of law” in both cases wasn’t. Law didn’t rule. Something else did.

And don’t be fooled by rationalists who argue that green is black, that intonation is meaning, that interpretation rather than implementation governed the situations. Legal opinions coming out of the whazoo drown in semantics. Get yourself into that clear air of what’s right and what’s wrong.

I believe that the “rule of law” achieves justice.

There was not “rule of law” in either Kenya or America. In both cases the justice system failed. And not just “statistically” so; intentionally so. Something else prevailed over justice. It’s called…

Power. And unlike the very essence of justice, it has no limits.

The dispute is over a Tanzania government decision to evict 30,000 Maasai from traditional grazing lands near the Serengeti National Park so that the area can be leased to a Dubai Hunting Company.

The story was first reported globally by the Christian Science Monitor earlier this month and went viral, mobilizing Maasai throughout the area.

The company, the Ortello Business Corporation (OBC), is a gigantic, jet-setter hunting company that has set up a mini city in northern Tanzania each mid-year for the last 20, for high profile hunting clients including Prince Andrew and most of the royal families of the Emirates and Jordan.

When I move near the area while still in the Serengeti National Park, my Tanzania cell phone beeps then displays the message, “Welcome to the Emirates.” They even bring cell towers.

The Arab operators of the area get free, undisputed access into and out of Tanzania. They have built a private airstrip on which modified 747s land direct from Dubai. Private security disallows anyone – including Tanzanian officials – from crossing their perimeter.

Until now, the under-the-table operation which has undoubtedly made many Tanzanian politicians very rich, has been slow to gain public attention. The Maasai have been battling the operation for years, although until now it’s been seen as the classic hunting/non-hunting battle over wilderness lands.

That changed dramatically when the government announced last year that it was adding about 580 sq. miles to an area still not fully surveyed but presumed to be around the same size. The doubling of the area is particularly aggravating to conservationists, because it would be a closed portal between the hunting area directly into the protected Serengeti National Park.

But more importantly to the Maasai, it means up to 30,000 will be evicted. Some claim as many as 48,000. The evictions more than 20 years ago that first set up the hunting block did not provoke a Maasai outcry.

That was probably because the Maasai were not as educated, not linked into social media and were at the time in their own battles with other Maasai just across the border in Kenya in internecine land disputes.

Until this incident, the controversy was confined mostly to photography safari tourists accidentally entering the Arab-held lands. Tourists at the prestigious &Beyond Klein’s Camp, for instance, would occasionally come across shot animals.

Community Based Tourism companies, including Dorobo, Hoopoe and Kibo Safaris that attempted to establish ventures with the Maasai often ran afoul of the Arabs.

But today it’s quite different. “There is no government in the world that can just let an area so important to conservation to be wasted away by overgrazing,” Khamis Kagasheki, the Minister of Tourism told the press last month.

The public nature of the government’s battle with activist Maasai is new. It seems to me they think they’ll win, either in the arena of public opinion, or against the Maasai spears.

The government is still reeling from the defeat to build the Serengeti Highway.

The characterization of the government action as enhancing conservation by protecting land that is currently being misused (over grazed) I see an indication the government feels that hunting is no longer as anathema to the public as it was just a while ago.

The activist NGO, avaaz, is promoting a world-wide petition with 2 million signatures to convince President Kikwete to nullify the decision. But based on public ministerial statements over the last month, the government will not be moved this time.

Maasai evictions from wilderness lands are not new. Likely the reason for the greatest spectacle on earth, the Great Wildebeest Migration, is that nearly 20,000 Maasai were evicted from the Moru Kopjes in 1972 that is now an essential wildebeest corridor within the Serengeti National Park.

I personally had a very educated and articulate Maasai friend killed in a battle with Tanzanian rangers two decades ago. So battle with the Maasai is not new, either.

But there’s something much different this time. Perhaps global awareness, perhaps the power of the social media – I’m not sure. But I am sure that if the government persists…

..the Maasai will fight.

Left: President Uhuru Kenyatta, scheduled to go on trial for crimes against humanity in July. Next in line: Vice-President William Ruto, scheduled to go on trial in May.

As a businessman in tourism I wait for more signs. As a devoted student of Kenya, I’m depressed and frightened. Like everyone in the world who knows Kenya, we wait with baited breath for the start of the scheduled May and July trials of the Vice-President and President.

Kenyans are polite and on edge. They are proud that they didn’t devolve into violence as during the last election, proud of the new judicial system that validated the election, but on pins and needles waiting like everyone in the world for the next chapter in this country’s history.

That comes next month when Vice-President William Ruto is scheduled to begin his trial for having arranged and financed killer squads following the 2007 elecetion. President Kenyatta’s trial is set to begin in July.

“If the International Criminal Court is right,” writes Daily Nation columnist Makau Mutua, “the two funded death squads to kill, maim, and loot each other’s folks. Mr Ruto only subordinated himself to Mr Kenyatta because he couldn’t win [the national election] on his own.”

Mutua goes on – as many others have – that this unlikely team of arch enemies is together for only one reason: they are both alleged organizers of mass murder.

There’s nothing particularly sensational in this thriller, the Joker elected mayor. It struck me as a storyline that would likely be rejected by Hollywood for being sorely uncreative. The difference, of course, is that this is real.

And the sad part is not the fates of these two men. The sad part is that Kenyans elected them, freely and fairly.

Incredibly, Kenyans couldn’t come up with anyone else. And although it’s true I supported Kenyatta’s principal rival, Raila Odinga, nearly anyone of the other 6 challengers who contested the election would have been infinitely better.

Anyone who watched even a snippet of either of the two election debates would see what great people Kenya has as potential leaders. But none but Uhuru and Raila had the financing (and ethnic support) to be viable candidates.

That was the main reason I (and many, many others) supported Raila: none of the other challengers had a chance, and the outcome proved it. The remaining six challengers got less than 8% of the vote.

Kenya is peaceful. In fact as Somalia improves, Kenya becomes more and more peaceful. Raila has met with Kenyatta. They are photographed laughing together, working to “keep Kenya peaceful.”

I received an email from an owner of a lodge near Mt. Kenya, Sunday, which implores me to write good things about Kenya, to beef up its tourism:

“Would it not be a good idea to now send out a positive email concerning Kenya? It seems to me that people prefer to spread bad news all the time.

“Kenya is an amazing country with lovely people and I am sure if you compared the crime rate with the UK and considered the poverty people combat every day here in Kenya, the UK would not come out looking too rosy itself!”

UK leaders are not accused of crimes against humanity. The Kenyan president and vice-president are.

The country’s tension is building, its currency is falling, and protests are being prepared not just to follow the court’s decision, but right now to protest strict measures the government has imposed to ban public demonstrations.

But despite all this tension, Willy Mutunga can legitimately claim to have the trust of most Kenyans.

The Chief Justice has a long history of democratic activism, including a long stint in jail under the former dictator, Daniel arap Moi. His choice by Parliament was one of the easiest and least contentious of all appointments mandated by the new constitution.

His demeanor throughout the proceedings contesting the March 4 election has been exemplary. He’s been transparent, ordering live broadcasts of the deliberations.

And he’s given himself and the other five justices of the high court five days of full deliberations to make a decision.

Many would argue that is hardly enough to wade through the hundreds of petitions, reaves of evidence and uncountable allegations flinging between the two camps of president-elect Uhuru Kenyatta and aggrieved challenger, Raila Odinga.

And while that may be true, Mutunga knows all too well that this episode in Kenya must be brought to a conclusion.

Every day that passes without a court decision affirming Kenyatta’s election, confusion and complexity builds. Who is running the government? It’s not clearly known, as the former president Kibaki is dead silent.

Office holders under the last regime, which supposedly has ended, are becoming more and more vocal and partisan. Today, the attorney general petitioned Mutunga to consider that the “government” believes Kenyatta is the president.

If too much time passes whatever is left of the Kenyan government will be replaced by anarchy. Mutunga knows this, so he specifically advised the nation when the decision will be made: Saturday morning.

“I have given most of my life to a better Kenya and if taking it is what will be required to consolidate and secure our democratic gains … that is a price I am not afraid to pay,” Mutunga said recently, revealing the many death threats he’s received.

It may be this widely disseminated statement that has elicited the public trust. Death rates are rampant. Social media is beyond the pale. It is hard to underestimate the vitriol and anger in Kenya, today.

And frankly, I don’t think Mutunga and his court will render a decision on the evidence. The evidence is too voluminous, too contentious, too imperfect. It would take months to determine the ballots that were mismarked or miscounted. This will have be a ruling from the hip.

The ruling will be on whether the election authority which pronounced Kenyatta the victor with less than 10,000 votes of 12.2 million cast should be honored, or whether it should be denied and a new election process started.

The easiest thing to do is simply affirm the outcome. After all, all the parties in the election had expressed unqualified support for the election body which made the call. The Constitution gives this body wide latitudes of decision-making.

But not affirming the outcome seems more rational. Ballot counting was an unqualified mess; all sides agree on this. The .07% margin of victory is therefore a ridiculous conclusion.

But not affirming the outcome requires the court to suggest a remedy, a new election or run-off, all within its power but which then essentially emasculates all the months and years of institutional preparation Kenyans had invested in the election.

I predict the court will rule the election invalid. But I’ve been sorely wrong predicting events associated with this election, and no matter what the court does, Kenya’s greatest challenges are yet to come.

My blog yesterday about the election went viral and the hate, death threats, invective and dirty speech publically thrown back at me as comments on the blog and Facebook are chilling.

For the first time ever I changed something that I had written – or rather, photoshopped. I worried that the photoshopped picture was being misconstrued, that I was suggesting that the current election had experienced violence.

It didn’t. There was an incident in Mombasa on election morning that left six dead, but that was it. The rest of the day, and up to this very moment as I write, has been peaceful, and as I wrote on the day after the election, joyously so.

So I have changed yesterday’s blog picture to eliminate the possible connotation otherwise. In Facebook I post twice: once for the full picture and once for the link to the blog. Facebook entries cannot be edited, only removed, so I simply removed the full-size picture. But the other has to remain, so if you wish to see what the picture was that worried me, go to AfricaAnswerman on Facebook.

I do not want to contribute to the growing anger. But as Mwirigi posting the first comment to the respected columnist Macharia Gaitho in today’s Daily Nation says, “I am against any attempt to muzzle free speech. This is how it starts, we have come from a time where it was a crime to imagine the death of the president. Many people have fought long and hard for us to have the ability to express ourselves freely.”

I read Gaitho religiously. He’s an outstanding columnist. Today he says, “The level of malevolent hate, ethnic bigotry, incendiary words and totally criminal incitement [on social media] would put to shame the infamous hate media outlets of the Rwanda Genocide, the newspaper, Kangura, and Radio Télévision Libre Mille-Collines.”

So I am hardly alone. In fact, my few thousands of hits and comments are minuscule compared to the extraordinary traffic on Kenyan sites.

The second comment on Gaitho’s column by Njamba says, “We should differentiate between freedom of speech and abusive and hate speech.” But she continues to incorrectly conclude this means we as individuals can’t come to conclusions or predictions about the future.

And therein Njamba and thousands other Kenyans hit the slippery slope, giving only lip service to free speech by inhibiting it from reasoning to points of view. Unless, of course, it’s their point of view.

“Right now I feel let down,” Gaitho continues today, “and very ashamed to be a Kenyan, for the level of post-election violence assaulting my eyes and ears every day is worse now than it was before and during the elections.”

Words cut ideas. Machetes cut throats. How close are we today to the latter?

My opinion: too close to plan a trip there. As a safari broker professional, I cannot let anyone go to Kenya, now. If the Kenyan Supreme Court invalidates Kenyatta/Ruto winning the election, as I think it will, and calls for a run-off election, all hell could break lose.

Gaitho: “Any time there is bloodshed in Kenya, you will never see Raila Odinga, Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto or their families in the line of fire… They will be swilling champagne and cutting business deals in … members’ clubs.

“Their children and grandchildren will not be wielding weapons in the battlegrounds, but will be safely squirreled away in some posh boarding schools in England, Switzerland or South Africa; or if of age, gambling and drinking away a fraction of daddy’s fortune.

“A cursory look at the social media war will indicate that the “principals” are not typing out a single word in anger. They leave that to their rabid followers and hired guns who… will throw all caution to the wind and put their bodies on the line.”

I so hope this doesn’t happen. But how can I feel otherwise, now, than it might?

Africans have an art of patience that far exceeds ours. As travelers and brokers of travel, we now have to be patient. We have to wait before returning to Kenya. We have to wait for a certain peace.

“An uncomfortable silence pervades the public sphere,” Godwin Murunga wrote this weekend in Kenya’s largest newspaper, the Daily Nation. “We are afraid of our feelings.”

So the country waits on pins and needles and does so by being quiet. A once robust media discusses fashion and school tests while the Joker and his prime assistant prepare a government of iniquity. A fabulous new constitution sits like an butterfly in a cocoon waiting for a dictator to roast it before it hatches.

And the world holds its breath, so happy there’s not another war or revolution, hoping perhaps beyond hope that the New Kenya will right itself.

But how?

The mistake came long ago when in the many wonderful and difficult things the country was doing to recreate itself, it allowed indicted international criminals to become candidates. What else could it do? Does not democracy revere the right of the accused to be considered innocent until proven guilty?

And, in fact, multiple accused by the World Court in The Hague have been ultimately released or original charges dropped before trial.

But I think the more important fact is that the World Court’s standards for irrefutable evidence is so great – so much more substantial than country courts around the world including the U.S. – that just to be indicted is at the very least reason to prohibit the indicted from assuming national office or responsibility.

Even as a contradiction to democracy and the purity of law that governs it. The interlude between indictment and conviction was the loophole that put Kenya in the mess it finds itself, today.

And that’s the point. So even while people like myself are convinced that Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto will be convicted by The World Court, their simple indictment should have prevented Kenya from allowing them to become candidates.

Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto, the current president-elect and vice-president-elect, are not nice guys. They are greedy, conniving politicians whose families have looted the poor Kenyan for generations.

Their success was brilliantly created. Singly they couldn’t survive, because they come from tribes that are historical arch enemies. Together they combined their enmity to defeat all that was good in Kenya.

Raila Odinga, the challenger who lost, is not purity incarnate, but he is considerably less corrupt, untainted by scandals, and was not the least bit implicated in engineering the violence of 2007 as the ICC has charged Kenyatta and his running mate, William Ruto, were.

Odinga’s challenge of the outcome of the election in the Kenyan courts is substantial. Kenyatta was declared the winner by less than 8,000 votes of more than 12 million cast. The election was bungled. One of Kenya’s finest analysts called the election “shambolic.”

The list of counting grievances includes districts whose vote tally exceeded the number of people registered there. It includes up to a half million votes that were declared spoiled by incorrect marking, even while the intention of the voter was clear.

It includes thousands of discrepancies between parallel methods of counting that were intended to confirm one another.

It is, in a nutshell, a mess. And it is that mess that even if too complicated to untangle stands as a powerful reason to claim that .07% of the votes cast might not be legitimate.

Yet at the same time peace has been sustained and security prevails, today. “Many Kenyans… have spent the last 5 years trying to avoid a repetition” of the violence of 2007, writes Magnus Taylor, a South African who reported daily from Nairobi on the election. But he adds:

“Kenya is far from being over the nightmare.”

I was in Kenya when the polls closed, for just a few hours on my way to guiding my first Great Migration Safari.

The whole world watched as Kenya masterfully pulled off the first national election under its new and fabulous constitution. Final results will be some time in coming, because the constitution mandated that the winners achieve minimum support from all of Kenya’s 47 counties, denying any victory based exclusively on ethnicity.

This means despite Kenyatta’s lead another election between the leaders could well occur within 30 days in order to finalize the results. But based on last night I’m already creating a “Celebrate Kenya Safari” return trip!

Kenya knew that it had to prove to the world that the debacle that followed the last election in 2007 would never happen, again, and that it has truly emerged into the modern world. Moreover, it displayed a transparent democracy I don’t even think America could rival.

It wasn’t perfect, but no election is. In fact, it began ominously with an early morning attack on police poll watchers in the troubled second city of Mombasa, and 4 policemen and 2 poll workers were gunned to death.

The authority governing the election had assured that anyone in line before 5 p.m. would be allowed to vote, no matter how long the line was, and in some places it stretched for nearly a mile. But in Kilifi, north of Mombasa, election authorities ended the process at 5 p.m. even with a long line waiting, because of reports of imminent attack.

The coast remains a troubled area for a number of reasons, most importantly that it’s mostly Muslim and seriously impacted by Kenya’s occupation of neighboring Somalia.

There were long lines in many places, and some polls didn’t close until 10 p.m. In a number of areas poll officials with legislated authority simply kept the polls open even for late comers.

Kenya has more cell phones per capita than the U.S. and a free app was available that voters would use to report irregularities. And needless to say, with 10+ million voters there were many. It will take many weeks to sort them all out, but ???

I’m sure that many tour operators like EWT were waiting with baited breath. We could not restart Kenyan safaris without a positive result, and it was beyond our best hopes.

There were 14.4 million registered voters. In addition to the executive president, the election chooses governors and one senator from each of the new 47 counties, 290 national assemblypersons, 1450 county representatives and 47 “women’s representatives” who have a remarkably unique role in the new constitution.

There were 53 political parties, of which there are 8 major contenders, that fielded 12,752 candidates. The country managed 33, 400 polling places with 6-10 poll workers each, secured by 99,721 security personnel including police and … even rangers from the Kenya Wildlife Service!

Voter ID – a contentious issue in the U.S. – was mandatory, and there were two steps checking it. Approximately 20,000 fraudulent voters were stopped from voting, and although that’s insignificant statistically, it underscored how important Kenya felt legitimate democracy must be.

Elderly, disabled and pregnant women could immediately go to the front of the line. Anyone at all who wished assistance could vote with an assistant who pledged “secrecy” regarding the person’s vote. This is a brilliant addition to a country still not yet at 100% literacy.

Voting machines were high-tech, but there were parallel methods of hand counting when the machines failed, which inevitably some did.

So we won’t know for a while the final outcome, but the start is nothing less than stupendous! In a way, the fact that the process worked is what achieves the real victory.