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.

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.

Uhuru Kenyatta is the country’s new president. William Ruto is vice president. The two are indicted for crimes against humanity. Whether it be the poor judgment of Kenyan voters or its manipulation by evil leaders, doesn’t really matter anymore. It’s done.

Five years ago when 1300 people were killed and nearly a half million displaced (a quarter of which remain so) Kenyatta and Ruto according to the World Court indictment used their vast fortunes and complex communication network to organize thugs and criminals to kill and terrorize.

They no longer command thugs and criminals. Today, they command the Kenyan army.

A generation or more of Kenya’s social progress has been lost.

It’s the ultimate prerogative of democracy to install in power those who should not be: To make liars, cheaters, crooks and even murderers Heads of State. And in this case in Kenya, I honestly believe as did its exemplary Supreme Court, that if not the majority at least the plurality of Kenyan voters truly wanted this outcome.

And the insult to righteousness is that not even a tiny minority of Kenyans ought to have voted for Uhuru Kenyatta. Kenyatta is the richest man in East Africa, now the 4th president of Kenya and son of the first, and one of six unique Kenya individuals indicted by the World Court for crimes against humanity.

On April 9 he becomes the second sitting African Head of State (after Omar al-Bashir of The Sudan) to be on trial for the gravest sins against his fellow men.

How could Kenyans have elected him?

There are two widely accepted reasons. The first is Kenya’s horrid tribalism, which perhaps I wrongly thought its youth had all but discarded. Kikuyu Kenyatta’s chief rival in this election was Raila Odinga, a Luo from western Kenya.

The Kikuyu and Luo are the arch enemies that define Kenya tribalism. It was Raila’s father, Oginga Odinga, and Kenyatta’s father, Jomo Kenyatta, who fought one another in the bush then in Parliament to be the first to rule an independent Kenya. Jomo prevailed then jailed Oginga.

That was a half century ago. Most of us simply could not believe that the last half century of human development in Kenya, which outperformed all historical standards, would not produce a new generation of Kenyans who would emerge from these hateful trapping of tribalism.

Now nothing seems to have changed. Each tribe so fears the other that they will do anything to achieve power over the other. There are more than 40 tribes in Kenya, and Uhuru’s deft manipulation of democracy in this exercise was to choose his vice president from a third tribe that ensured a solid plurality against the Luo.

It mattered little that his choice was one of the most evil and corrupt men in Kenya, William Ruto, a fellow indicted by The Hague as well. The Kikuyu Kenyatta/Kalenjin Ruto team, bedeviled as historical enemies nevertheless controlled the numbers, and the numbers make democracy.

The second reason seems less likely to me, but Kenyan analysts seem sure of it:

There may have been a popular backlash against the World Court’s indictments and of western nations’ not so subtle messages to Kenya that they better not elect a criminal.

The U.S. was particularly blunt: Obama said he hoped Kenyatta wouldn’t win. The U.K. – Kenya’s national mother and principal benefactor – said it would not allow Kenyatta or Ruto to visit Britain. (Both have now congratulated the new leaders.)

So Kenyatta crafted an election strategy, replete with his billions of carefully placed media shillings, charging “foreign interference,” a phrase guaranteed to garner votes.

I may be just as naive about this as I was about the presumption that tribalism was water over the dam, but frankly the Kenyans I know are heartsick with the outcome. These are Kenyans that are young, well educated and truly a rainbow of tribes.

But like the courageous kids who started the revolution in Egypt, or the intellectuals who thought they crafted the New South Africa, or any of the bloodied stakeholders dedicated to good change in places like Tunisia much less Russia or Broward County, democracy has a wicked way of exploiting change by crushing it.

Revolution is no certain remedy. And democracy is often little more than a facilitator for the evil that provokes revolution in the first place.

Peace, maybe.

Kenya’s new constitution, its youthful society and progressive economy, is 100% 21st century. This election is the failure of that new generation to manifest itself, take control. It is a government of a society of the 1960s.

Kenyatta’s government will be in power for at least the five years given it by the new constitution. But some think it’s in for the generations that were just lost.

Officialdom in Tanzania is rarely much more than organized crime, but even that can be better than the mayhem currently being reported in and around the crater.

Tuesday one of the “good” committees in Tanzania’s mostly corrupt parliament called on the government for “urgent action” to resolve a crisis that jeopardizes tourism and the environment in ways we’ve seen before, and in ways that are getting tiring and tedious.

There are no principal government officials left at Ngorongoro Crater National Park. The Director, Conservator of the National Park, the Chief of Security and many important chairman of various committees have all … left. This was prompted last month when the Tourism Minister basically told them to scram:

In a diatribe reminiscent of Mitt Romney’s disavowal of Massachusetts Heath Care, tourism minister Khamis Kagasheki warned last month that Ngorongoro officials would all be sacked.

So instead of waiting to get the boot, they left with the entire wardrobe.

Two immediate problems are likely. The first is that collection of fees is turning dirty. Many driver/guides will have more trouble getting in and out of the crater without excessive bribing. The second is that the local Maasai – stressed by a couple years of near drought – will flood the crater floor with cattle and the rangers – absent of a master – will do little about this illegal action.

If the trend isn’t stopped, then it will ultimately develop into a third more serious affront to this beautiful place: Poaching. Whenever the crater loses its shawl of organization, poaching skyrockets and often organized by the rangers.

This all started several years ago when Tanzania’s president organized several NGOs to look into helping the Maasai at the crater organize their cattle farming in a better way.

Suggesting something similar to a giant co-op, the President’s plan was grand on mission and scant on details. The mission was OK: vets and stockades and abattoirs and everything else that modern cattle farming needs.

And a ton of money was thrown at the project. And it has all evaporated.

This is nothing new in Tanzania, of course, and last month’s diatribe by Minister Kagasheki suggests there’s a still in his pocket. But it’s quite unusual that such an important tourist destination would be left completely rudderless, and this is Tanzania’s main tourist destination!

It’s another woeful sign that while many of Tanzania’s African neighbors are moving steadfastly towards more modern, transparent governments, that Tanzania is still stuck in the mud of a crater rainy season.

“Paradise Lost” is not something the casual tourists visiting Ngorongoro, today, will notice. Tanzania has been so corrupt for so long that somehow it moves on in spite of it, and tourist professionals know better than any how to manage the system.

But the need for careful ecological management of the crater is real and right now is MIA. This means over time the biomass will suffer.

It’s one thing when we conservationists in Africa deal with the daunting problems of human/wildlife and wilderness/development conflicts. These are tough, real issues. It’s quite another to have to deal with the Keystone Cops in control of Ft. Knox.

My #5 Top Story of 2012 is the complex and very sad chronicle of Africa’s big game under enormously new onslaught. To see a list of all The Top Ten, click here.

First, a little perspective. Elephant being the biggest and least manageable of Africa’s big wild animals are understandably the barometer of poaching in general, even though virtually all types of African animals are poached. But as goes GM, so goes the economy; the metrics of elephant poaching more or less represent poaching in general.

And lacking good statistics it remains fair to say that the poaching today is nowhere near as massive as it was in the horrible 1970s and 1980s when elephant were almost extirpated. There are still lots more elephant, today, than at the end of the 1980s.

I’m very disturbed, though, by how the media has exaggerated the situation. There’s no need for exaggeration. The truth is bad enough. But it results in the media totally ignoring some fabulous successes with anti-poaching, especially with quelling the market for ivory.

And I have previously brought up the very uncomfortable idea that poaching in East Africa is the same as culling in South Africa. This complex notion can, indeed, be argued that there’s no better possible situation than the status quo. That doesn’t make it right, by the way.

So while the quantitative problem of poaching today pales in comparison to the 1970s and 1980s, and the public has been unnaturally jigged up by sensational media in particular, the qualitative aspect of poaching today is, indeed, much worse than before.

There are two main differences with the decimation of elephant in the 1980s and today: today a lot of poaching is by individuals, or small bands of unorganized friends, in very ad hoc ways as opposed to the large corporate poaching of the past. Secondly, there’s every indication that poaching is being used as a politically global football fully open to bargaining.

The involvement often at the global level of very powerful institutions … like banks is new and horrifying. In America in particular the “lay-off more bank regulation” which has followed the cavity they caused in the global economic order is allowing the important and rich middlemen that transit the animal part from its home country to its market country to flourish.

And on the more patent political level, “national security” is becoming a determinate in establishing a de facto level of poaching rather than the moral argument which prevailed in the past, so that the previous presumption that elephant poaching was immoral is being usurped by the argument that it contributes to terrorism.

It’s unfortunate we don’t have good summary numbers. Asia, especially Thailand and India, and South Africa compile good numbers on elephant populations and poaching. But no one else does.

We can scrape up numbers for individual ecosystems, like the Serengeti, but even simply combining the Serengeti with its Kenyan neighbor, the Mara, grows difficult to impossible.

The main reason for this is that most African countries do not want researchers to know the real numbers.

But there are enough “scraped up” numbers, anecdotal reports, public scandals and especially confiscated attempts at ivory shipments to give us a reasonable view of what’s happening.

In the last few years Tanzania has hired and fired more wildlife officials and Ministers with wildlife portfolios than Liz Taylor did with husbands: Researchers as well as local Tanzanians are growing increasingly fed up with corruption and obfuscation.

Because while most of Africa’s elephant population is happening in Tanzania, so is it the pinnacle of East African safari tourism. There is less empathy locally in non-South Africa Africa for wild animals than from us, outside. But when considered in the context of tourism, there is widespread consensus that poaching is bad.

So why, then, is it getting worse?

My opinion is that the global economic recession is principally to blame, but not for the evident reasons you might think.

Africa did fairly well overall during the recession. As did Asia. But the five years since the market collapse have nonetheless massively impacted African and Asian economies, most notably by increasing the gap between rich and poor.

Huge numbers of Tanzanians, like huge numbers of Chineese, have become extraordinarily rich over the last five years. Even as Dar’s slums have exploded in size and China’s rural populations have suffered a decline in standard of living.

Asia and China in particular is the principal market for poached game, especially ivory. And East Africa and Tanzanian in particular is the principal source. It’s a marriage made in hell.

According to the African Wildlife Trust, “The vast majority of the illegal ivory …is flowing to China… China’s economic boom has … push[ed] the price of ivory to a stratospheric $1,000 per pound on the streets of Beijing.”

We don’t know for sure how this devolves to the individual poacher trying to sell his illegal cut on the streets of Morogoro, but the best estimates is that a typical 20-kilo tusk nets the poacher 2-3 years annual wage. And most elephants have two tusks.

In an economic environment where the untrained, unskilled adult is struggling with farming in climate change and squeezed by increasing dry goods prices, the allure of poaching is real. Combine this with a growing sentiment among urbanized people worldwide that there are too many wild animals, a market in China controled by individuals with no empathy whatever for big game preservation, corrupt local officials on the take, and you have all the ingredients for tacit acceptance of this otherwise illegal trade.

So that’s my take: bad economic times with rich Asians richer wanting to buy ivory, and rich Tanzanians richer wanting to broker it. And a rapidly growing Africa that simply has too many elephant.

What to do?

Groan if you will, but there are no simple answers. We’ve entered an extraordinarily complex era in African development, particularly in East Africa. Increased poaching is a part of this, but understanding that as a complicated, nettled component of contemporary African society much less global capitalism is necessary before anything at all can be done.

South Africa’s African National Congress has run South Africa since the end of apartheid with its standard bearer and first president, Nelson Mandela. The ANC’s history goes back much further than Mandela, though, well back into South Africa’s racist history. And quite often the ANC vied with the much more radical communist party of South Africa for political control.

And it usually won. Nevertheless, over its century of existence the ANC was decidedly leftist and especially recently just before the end of apartheid. Its structural models are larger Chinese, its leaders having been trained in Tanzania by Chinese functionaries.

I think it’s a good model for a developing society, and it’s a model that societies thrust into democracy mode too early often collapse back into; ergo, Egypt. Democracy can’t work unless a good portion of the electorate vote their conscience and a good portion of that have a rational understanding of their own self-interest.

If you don’t know why there’s a drought, and you don’t know how much a pump costs or have any idea how it’s made, and have no clue as to what an aquifer or reservoir is, as a farmer you have no ways to guarantee your own security.

And easier than understanding global warming, or market economy or hydrology, is to find someone who looks nice and claims to know all these things, your neighborhood dictator, who can assume a softer image by pretending to be a cleric or other type of grandfatherly godhead. Stalin was affectionately referred to as Grandpa.

The ANC was traditionally a collection of South Africa’s most prestigious black intellectuals and its central committee, like communist parties everywhere, was the helm of the ship.

And when the ship became the state, so did the ANC. Although an election for president of South Africa happens regularly just like here at home, the choice of the ANC candidates is made at their convention, and since Mandela and the mid-90s, whoever the convention nominates wins nationally.

And that convention is anything but democratic. It has all the bells and whistles of democracy, including women’s groups and youth group’s and worker’s groups, but all these groups are carefully fashioned by the central committee and it’s basically just a reenforcing loop of a small group of powerful men.

All this works more or less tidily provided …

… the guy at the top is sane.

South Africa’s current president is a wacko. In a mature democracy, we tolerate wackos at the top with moderate difficulty, like George Bush, II. It gets harder to do so when their understudy, Dick Cheney, is even more a wacko, but democracy is not as top-heavy as more socialist forms of government, and you don’t have to drill down too far to get to people like Colin Powell and and the legions of good civil servants.

The problem in a top-heavy system like South Africa’s is that it there is no working grass roots. There is no Colin Powell under whom serve a lot of hard-working, dedicated citizens. What you see at the top is what you get at the bottom. And so these last few years in South Africa have been a mess.

While the rest of Africa was growing gangbusters, South Africa was muttering along. Social goals like housing for millions of displaced poor fell decades behind schedule. Labor strife, particularly in its crucial mining sector, continues to be near catastrophically violent.

And the personality of the current president is…. well, wacko. He has multiple wives, believes he can protect himself against AIDS by showering well after sex, unapologetically has pilfered public funds and then publically ranted against cartoonists who portrayed him as unsaintly for doing so.

He’s escaped numerous prosecutions for malfeasance and criminal misuse of federal funds only to flaunt his accusers by building personal mansions with public funds. And the with this top-heavy system, it means that corruption and clowning now occur on a daily basis in the smallest municipality.

And this week the ANC nominated Jacob Zuma to be president, again.

What a joke. But here’s the rub.

A good portion of the South African electorate is democracy savvy. And already local governments in Cape Town and a few other cities have thrown off their ANC shackles.

Maybe, South Africa is ready for democracy.

“God is good,” says Forbes magazine, “especially if you’re a Nigerian pastor.”

Two with special attachments to Texas and other blind congregations that vote against their medicare benefits, hate blacks and throw the last bits of money they have at these jokers, are David Oyedepo and Chris Oyakhilome.

They’ve most recently been ensnared in a loud African debate over why so many pastors own private jets.

Forbes estimates Oyedepo’s worth at $150 million and Oyakhilome’s at $30-50 million. Oyakhilome actually has a greater presence in the U.S. than Oyedepo and it totally befuddles me that people will write him checks.

Oyakhilome runs Christ Embassy. There are a number of affiliate churches in the U.S., many in Texas and almost all of them in the south, and many directed to American youth on college campuses.

“Oyakhilome’s diversified interests include newspapers, magazines, a local television station, a record label, satellite TV, hotels and extensive real estate. His Loveworld TV Network is the first Christian network to broadcast from Africa to the rest of the world on a 24 hour basis,“ Forbes revealed.

His regular “rivals” throughout America’s south garner millions and millions.

He recently plead no-contest to a $35 million money laundering scheme that siphoned cash from his network of churches into foreign bank accounts. The individual stories are beyond laughable. It’s absolutely incredulous that people believe him.

Take the most recent $5000 “disappearance” of church cash which he tries to pin on another jet-setting millionaire Nigerian pastor, Chris Okotie. (Forbes says Okotie’s estimated worth approaches $10 million. Guess that’s not enough.)

One American Christ Embassy church member “lamented” that these factitious warring evangelical pastors are “soiling our image.”

Why do so many people, in Africa and in the U.S., supports these crooks?

The question is really not so different from why do these same people vote against their own self-interest, deny that Obama was born in the U.S., disbelieve global warming and think evolution is a plot by bad men to deny the existence of god.

So it’s a fun exercise in exasperation, but there’s little to do about it. It isn’t as if these guys aren’t exposed. They’re exposed in all sorts of publications, and not just headliners in Forbes. The good Nigerian press is constantly on them.

But the attempt to unmask them is the very stuff they use to build their support. There is such distrust in the world of our given institutions, like government and the media, that clever artisans can twist allegations into alleged lies and be believed.

So I suppose in the end we are responsible. We’re responsible for allowing our established institutions to degrade to this point, and to having neglected social education to the point that good people are unable to see the obvious fraud for themselves.

I think Africans are awakening compared to Texans, though, and it may be why so many of them are redirecting their efforts here, out of Africa.

Why are Africans awakening and the citizens of Houston aren’t?

Send me your answers. Make them brief.

Angelo Ricci, a member of Kenya's Italian community, listens as a Kenyan judge acquits him of any crime for having 2,500 pounds of cocaine in his beach resort cabin. (AP)

This summer Brian Dabbs writing for The Atlantic unmasked the Italian cartel in Malindi, Kenya, that uses “Eden” as a likely place to headquarter a global mafia increasingly on the run from Europe.

Ten days ago Silvio Berlusconi joined billionaire friend and equally maligned Flavio Briatore in Malindi, Kenya, where they remain today cloaked in a secret “billionaires retreat” with much younger women, and many believe this is a don convention to divvy up the Joker’s World.

They are “holidaying” at the Lion in the Sun Resort, owned by Briatore, and which TripAdvisor ranks as #6 of 17 resorts in Malindi. E-Travel calls it a HotSpot hotel. (No mention in either TripAdvisor or E-Travel about money laundering or the drug trade.)

Berlusconi is the deposed and disgraced former Italian prime minister and now convicted felon. Briatore has a longer list of accomplishments including conviction for fixing Formula 1 racing.

When Italian billionaires convene like this in Malindi (this is hardly the first time), the Kenyan Post newspaper puts out this clarion call: “Nairobi ladies, there is a cash cow in Malindi, better hurry up!”

Two things really bother me about this.

Most troubling is that while Italian mafia, drugs and global crime is not news for Malindi, it is growing worse just as Kenya is about to turn a new page next March with its first election under a new and fabulous constitution.

While I see an increasing transparency and honesty with Kenyan politicians as a whole, the crew in Malindi has been totally corrupted by the Italian criminals.

Dabbs interviewed several Kenyans, including the local police boss, who essentially confirmed that they turn a blind eye to all the criminal goings-on among the Italian billionaires. Even local judges have acquitted the cartel of cocaine trafficking that excellent Kenyan investigators had all but proved.

Add to this the growing political instability of the coast, where a new political force called the “MRC” (Mombasa Republican Counsel” is increasingly linked to terrorism and many warriors fleeing Somalia, and you have all the ingredients for mob reign.

And secondly, travel tools used by so many people are doing nothing but white washing this horrible situation. It’s an incredible travesty, from my point of view a crime of its own:

Online travel portals like TripAdvisor, E-Travel, Luxist and get this, Conde Nast’s OnLine Tatler awarded it the Best Life Changing Spa – Tatler Spa Award Winner 2010. You can say that, again. And you won’t find that link leading you to Conde Nast or Tatler, because they’ve since discharged their noble duty of killing that award without explaining why.

But I guess the occasional legitimate guest Lion in the Sun gets irritates Briatore, anyway. He’s building a new exclusive “billionaire’s condominium” in Malindi, claims that half the units are already sold and that “For this project, I will choose who will come here.”

I guess that won’t be any clients I have.

Yesterday Kofi Annan and Ngugi wa’Thiongo focused on the upcoming Kenyan elections as a marker for world democracy and reflected on America’s distortion of elections as something to be avoided by younger countries.

Annan is a well-known world figure, one of the most prominent Secretary Generals the United Nations has ever had. Like Jimmy Carter who remained remarkably active after leaving office, Annan’s role in global negotiations has never ceased. In fact, it was Annan who led the Kenyans out of the mire of the violence following their last election in 2007.

Ngugi has adopted America as his home after a career as a professor at Yale and New York universities. He is currently the Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Univ. of California in Irvine. Until 2004 he lived intermittently between Kenya and the U.S., and in Kenya is heralded as a famous revolutionary and writer.

What Americans obsessed with their own election need to know is that huge new parts of the world, especially in Africa, are adopting democracy and America’s form of democracy to govern their young societies.

This is a major change from hardly a generation ago when just as many new countries were adopting forms of Chinese communism or heavily top-down managed socialism. It’s a testament of course to the end of the Cold War, but also of the preeminence of capitalism in the global economy.

Old countries like China might be able to fiddle with capitalism and not disrupt their mechanisms for governing, but new countries can’t. The power of the economy is so critical with emerging countries that it often trumps other moral and social issues.

A case in point was Ngugi’s violent condemnation yesterday of Kenya’s decision to use English as the predominant language for governance. Ngugi is Kikuyu, the main tribe in Kenya and was imprisoned as a freedom fighter under the British. He is himself a master of the English language but he has written scholarly novels in Kikuyu, and he believes preserving multiple languages is critical to an advanced society.

It is something of the inverse argument in America as to whether Latinos should be validated by a greater use of Spanish in government.

Arguing that the current Kenyan leaders are “child abusers” for denying “mother tongues” Ngugi says, “To have a mother tongue … and add other languages … is empowerment. But to know all the other languages and not one’s own is enslavement.

“The post-colonial government and the entire [Kenyan] elite have chosen enslavement over empowerment,” he concludes.

The problem, of course, is that the violence that followed the 2007 elections turned ethnic. It is completely understandable that current politicians wishing to avoid anything much beyond a dull election want to steer clear of languages that are specifically ethnic.

In America as in Kenya when one person speaks a language that another person doesn’t understand, enormous suspicions arise, conjecture becomes almost as credible as fact-checking, and literally all hell can break lose. Unlike in Canada or Belgium where multilingual democracy flourishes, in most of the world multiple languages breed distrust.

(N.B. What puzzles many in the Kenyan situation, though, is why English was chosen rather than Swahili. Swahili belongs to no specific tribe and so is clearly universal among East Africans. The problem is that Swahili is a lingua franca and suffers thereby from a sore lack of precision. Tanzania tried to use Swahili as the formal language for many years, slowly giving way to English. It’s near impossible in Swahili to say succinctly, “Federal zoning regulations with regards to clean and safe landfills will preempt county council laws with regards to individual ownership.”)

(N.B. continued: Swahili in my view, by the way, is one of man’s most wondrous cultural achievements of the last several centuries, creating poetry of nearly every statement while maintaining a universal morality far superior to many popular western notions about right and wrong. But that’s another blog, and in this case I think Ngugi is wrong.)

Annan didn’t mention language, but in virtually everything else the two scholars said yesterday there was agreement.

Annan who is Ghanian was in Kenya yesterday. He referred to his fears that money is buying power in Kenya, as in the world over. “The infusion of money in politics … threatens to hollow out democracy,” Annan told CNN in September.

Annan understands the importance of capitalism in the world, today, but he also sees it as a threat to democracy. Many of us wait expectantly for his treatise on how the twain should ever meet, but for the time being I suppose we should presume he simply wants aggressive regulation.

In Kenya today he sees a brazen challenge to its young democracy by its rich leaders. Four of Kenya’s richest men and political leaders, including the son of the first president Jomo Kenyatta, are on trial in The Hague for inciting the violence of 2007.

Yet two of them, Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto, are running for president. (Not yet officially, but in Kenya “officially” comes quite close to the actual election.)

Annan sees this occurring not because the Kenyan people want it to, but because these individuals are so powerful, and because they are so rich.

Ngugi concurs: “Unregulated money in politics undermines …confidence in democracy… The explosive growth in campaign expenditures … strengthens fears that wealth buys political influence.”

American politicans’ penchant for personal stories about their early impoverishment is mostly malarkey or at best irrelevant to their current control of wealth. The vast majority of successful American politicians are rich. The cost of entering politics defies many startups. Over $1 billion will be spent by candidates and their surrogates in the current U.S. election.

Both men see the poor, the less privileged, the disabled and geographically disenfranchised as likely a majority of African voters that can be deftly ignored in a modern election:

Ngugi: “Too often, women, young people, minorities and other marginalized groups are not given a full opportunity to exercise their democratic rights.”

Democracy is today widely popular throughout new African countries and embraced as the best way to protect and govern themselves. But the messages that Ngugi and Annan delivered yesterday to a promising young African country resonant here at home just as much.

Democracy is never achieved; it’s simply strived for. America has used democracy for nearly two and a half centuries, yet the corrupting power of money, the difficulties of implementing democracy to a multi-lingual population, and the ease with which the underprivileged can be disenfranchised are threats as great today as they were in the 18th century.

Nor any greater a threat in Kenya than here.

Working every day under the threat of massive censorship, South Africa’s still vibrant press has systematically reported both the corruption of its government and bumbling of its leaders. But until now it hasn’t seemed to matter much.

Last week the country went ballistic. Even ardent supporters of the government grew critical and those who defended it either lied or blushed.

News leaked that $22 million dollars (203 million Rand) had been spent to build a new home for the current president, Jacob Zuma. This was not the official residence, but a complex built in Zuma’s rural homeland that is not intended for official use.

Zuma is in trouble for a lot of things, and the ruling ANC party will meet in December to decide whether he should continue as president. The recent mining strikes which became quite violent set on edge many ANC members and lessened Zuma’s ability to stay in command.

The rapid building of a new resort home strikes everyone as what it probably is, a wounded politician trying to collect as much as he can before he’s booted out.

The public works minister lied exactly as Romney lied — no holes barred — claiming that the project was in perfect compliance with the “Ministerial Handbook” or rules of governing in South Africa.

It isn’t. The lie isn’t as boldfaced as Romney saying he won’t enact a $5 trillion tax cut despite his own website to the contrary, but it’s almost as clear:

“Although members can designate a privately-owned residence for use as an official residence at the seat of office, the handbook states that the public works department will only be responsible for making available general cleaning services in private residences used for official purposes,” Faranaaz Parker, a reporter at South Africa’s Mail & Guardian explained.

This is the leader, remember, who proudly displays multiple wives and claims that his extramarital sex with underage girls is both legal, and safe from HIV, because he showers afterwards.

South Africans have tolerated this buffoonery for too long. The patent misuse of public funds to create Zuma’s golden parachute into a resort paradise is a tipping point, and brings into sharp focus the ongoing corruption of the ANC.

That corruption manifests itself principally by the awarding of uncontested government contracts. Several days ago the BBC interviewed a whistle blower who had been fired from the administration of education in Limpopo for revealing that millions of dollars allocated for the purchase of text books had gone missing.

The report caused such a stir including threats against the BBC that yesterday the BBC published an even greater in-depth story further documenting more than $2 billion dollars gone missing in South Africa’s school system.

The textbook scandal might be the one that penetrates the ennui of so many South Africans to their incompetent government. Protests are growing.

But the textbook scandal is only one of many such examples of illegally awarded government contracts.

Perhaps most disturbing is that South Africa’s much revered independent court system is being emasculated:

In one of dozens of similar cases, the Gauteng Provence High Court nullified a $1.1 billion dollar ( 10 billion Rand) government grant in August to middlemen dispensing social security payments. It was a bold move when the judge declared the award “illegal and invalid” but a lot less bold when he refused to “set it aside.” In South African jargon, that means it’s wrong but nothing will change and implementers will not be held accountable.

It is typical of the massive transformation of South Africa’s previously powerful courts into platforms of ANC control.

I don’t know if this latest scandal really is the tipping point of ANC power, and the ANC is being extremely clever by floating the idea they will get rid of Zuma before the control boils over.

But I do know it’s a tipping point for something.