What a day for Kenyan justice! Balance liberty by justifying the release of a murderer with a killer!

Fridays are fun at Kenyan prisons. The weekend is too poorly staffed by prison workers, so Fridays all sorts of fun last-minute stuff must happen.

So today two of Kenya’s most notorious inmates were released.

The last of the blue blood colonials to live in Kenya, Tom Cholmondeley (pronounced, “Chumley”), was released early after serving a manslaughter charge for killing an African who had shot an antelope on his game ranch. He was released early for “good conduct.”

This was the second African that Cholmondeley had shot for killing wild animals on his ranch. He managed to avoid conviction for the first.

And another murderer, Maina Njenga, the feared Mungiki “Chairman” (Kenyan mob), was released from bail after prosecutors were unable to proceed with charges that he had masterminded the murder of 29 people.

Mungiki Spokesman Njuguna Gitau said: “We are very happy because the chairman has been released; he is finally free after suffering for a long time.”

Twenty-one others were released with Njenga. They all skipped trial because of procedural difficulties. You see, they were all being tried in another court for other murders, so the judge decided it was double jeopardy.

Holy Moses.

Some of my fondest memories are of safaris in Zimbabwe, and since March the power sharing agreement seemed to be working. It’s all coming apart, now.

Who would have thought that the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, would today be Zimbabwe’s prime minister? Or even more unlikely, sharing government with the same man who had beat him to a pulp?

But that’s what happened last March, following the UN-managed elections which Tsvangirai won beating the aged dictator, Robert Mugabe. Problem was Mugabe wouldn’t concede power, so as seems trendy today, the two adversaries formed a coalition government.

No one thought it would work. For the first few months, the only country in the world that recognized the new government was South Africa, which had mediated the agreement.

A few months later, more governments recognized the coalition as it seemed to be holding. Each side divvied up the ministries pretty fairly, although Mugabe kept all those with hard weapons. All ministers got Mercedes.

By July some of us felt Tsvangirai was capitulating to the dizziness of power. Nothing was really happening in Zimbabwe to move the country out of its xenophobic, racist ways. Near random land distribution was still uncontrolled. The country printed its first one trillion dollar bill. Mining was still dead. All the country’s great resources were still not being used, and all that was keeping it alive was South African aid.

And most telling of all, refugees kept flowing out of the country.

But then, remarkably to this person anyway, by September there seemed to be some hope. For the first time ever it looked like tobacco was actually being replanted (the country’s dominant crop). A few new pieces of equipment arrived at the Hwange Coal Mine. And EWT started to get promising little notes from safari operators throughout the country.

So – we thought maybe – Africa has worked magic, again. David and Goliath are playing cribbage.

Yesterday, it came apart.

Tsvangirai confirmed to a South African radio station (where he is on a lecture tour) that Mugabe has issued an order forbidding any of Tsvangirai’s party members – including ministers in the current government – from leaving the country.

Presumably if Tsvangirai returns, he’ll be under house (country) arrest. Mugabe’s move follows a cabinet meeting Tuesday that Tsvangirai’s party boycotted. And to make matters worse, it looks like some of Tsavangirai’s coalition, including Deputy Prime Minister Arthur Mutambara, may be shifting over to Mugabe, who after all holds all the keys to all their Mercedes.

In my opinion, this is the beginning of the end. No protestor alive has paid his dues more than Tsavangirai, who has been beaten unconscious several times by Mugabe supporters, jailed innumerable times, and who even lost his wife this year in a car accident that remains incredibly suspicious.

Maybe the wounds are just too deep. Maybe Tsavangirai believes the time is ripe to fracture the coalition. Maybe someone knows that finally Mugabe really is dying.

There’s no bread on the shelves in Harare. But there are lots of new Mercedes.

The political intrigue surrounding the western world’s response to Iran’s nuclear program is being implemented right now in Kenya.

A first step that an aggrieved society takes against the accused is diplomatic. That threatens and is followed by economic sanctions. And that is exactly the course that the western powers, especially Britain and the United States, began implementing against Kenya last week.

The western world has invested over $10 billion, more than two years of the Kenyan Government’s entire budget, to help Kenya reform itself after the catastrophic 2007 election turmoil that killed over 1300 people and displaced as many as 150,000.

The two protagonists in the election, sitting president Mwai Kibaki, and principle challenger, Raila Odinga, did forge a coalition government that ended the violence, an agreement engineered almost single-handedly by Kofi Annan.

But that agreement included pledges for a number of subsequent reforms, including significant constitutional reform, to avoid a repeat in 2012 and to bring to justice those who had perpetrated the violence. Despite a very active and public diplomatic effort ever since, including prominent involvement by Secretary Hillary Clinton, really little has happened.

The Kenyan press is furious. It is truly fair to say that the Kenyan population in a very wide majority wants these reforms. But the sitting politicians have lagered to protect one another.

The “List of 15″ culpable politicians compiled by the ICC chief prosecutor, Moreno Ocampo, is already pretty well known despite it being a sealed indictment. Among the most powerful named are Kenya’s Attorney General, Amos Wako; William Ruto, a powerful and evil man who has held a number of ministerial posts and who was originally nominated by Raila Odinga to be his prime minister; and recently fired national police head, Hussein Ali.

Wako and Ali have been around for nearly 30 years, surviving radically different democracies and dictatorships because their power base is so strong. Ruto arrived on the scene in 1992 and has been involved in a variety of huge scams, including milking the national pipeline of billions.

After months of threatening the action, last week Britain finally banned these three and 17 other prominent Kenyan politicians from entering the U.K. The U.S. ambassador to Kenya, Michael Ranneberger, delivered 15 individually addressed letters to Kenya’s Foreign Secretary on Thursday, presumably doing or threatening to do the same thing as Britain.

Few in the world noticed outside Africa. Libya’s Muammar Ghaddifi, as this year’s Head of the Organization of African Unity, responded by successfully passing an African-wide resolution that urges all African States to withdraw from the international institutions being used to implement the sanctions. Right now, that’s mainly the ICC, the International Court in the Hague.

The actions by Britain and the U.S. have caused quite a stir in Kenya. Most of the press strongly supports it, and once again I think the Kenyan press truly reflects the country at large. At the same time President Kibaki has sent an urgent diplomatic letter directly to President Obama, something that is rare and unprecedented in Kenya.

Today, Kofi Annan returns to Nairobi to try to get things going, again. Not a moment too soon.

Keeping political secrets in Kenya is about as successful as damming a raging river with a Maasai shuka. But did Hillary intentionally leak the culprits’ names?

Before leaving Kenya, Hillary held a number of high profile meetings with activist politicians and local leaders. She said she was going to “name and shame” the list of culprits already drawn up by the Kenyan government as responsible for the 2007 election violence.

Short of economic sanctions, this is what governments do. They start by denying entry visas to certain individuals, an executive power that really stings. High profile politicians travel to developed countries much more than you might think. Did anyone know, for instance, that Kenya’s Prime Minister and central figure in the Kenyan political miasma was in Washington recently?

But they come for other than diplomatic reasons. They bring their children to good colleges. They shop. They bank. They invest bulging pockets. They often come incognito, because these are tasks the people at home don’t want to know they have.

According to the U.S. Customs and Immigration Department, at any given time, there are “thousands” of names on lists for denied entry of this sort.

It matters little to us that some potentate who has aggrieved the U.S. ambassador in Doha can’t shop at Macy’s. But it matters a lot to the citizens of Qatar, and when it leaks out at home, it’s worse than being forced to sit on a stool in the corner with a dunce cap on.

Hillary let it be known that the Kenyan Attorney General, Amos Wako, and the head of the national police, Hussein Ali, were on the bad boys’ list.

These are two dunces who sometimes get mean. Wako has served as Attorney General for 30 years. Both hold their position, because of their centrist political power from the tribes whence they come. Removing either of them could unbuckle the complex coalitions of power that keep both the current rivals, Odinga and Kibaki, in power.

As to their actual sins, I think they’re both minor players who have basically functioned as little as possible to keep themselves in power. That’s the Kenyan way. I don’t think they masterminded violence, for example, like William Ruto, the current Agricultural Minister who should be shackled and displayed on the public square. But I think Hillary’s point is that they both hold positions that should now be used to cleanse the body politic. And they aren’t. At least not in the way she would like.

One of the reasons the Truth-and-Reconciliation Commission won’t happen, is because Wako is moving the whole process to The Hague. Another important reason is that Ali is working with Scotland Yard and the FBI more closely than he is with Kenyans. This might get out the truth more effectively, but as Hillary explained (and as most foreign leaders agree) it would be better to have a Truth-and-Reconciliation Commission in Kenya than trials in The Hague.

And as many in Kenya hope (more than believe), a Truth-and-Reconciliation Commission might be so bold as to implicate Wako and Ali by their 30 years of negligence.

But it seems that Kenyans in power believe that the further that the truth comes out from Nairobi, the better for Kenya.

The U.S. Secretary of State is in Kenya delivering a strong message that she won’t make clear. Let me help: Kenya’s Minister of Agriculture has to go to jail.

A small consortium of western democracies joined the U.S. 18 months ago in promising more than $10 billion in reconstruction aid, as a part of Kofi Annan’s plan to reconcile the two opposing candidates in the violent December, 2007, elections. Hillary is reading the receipts to Kenya’s leaders, but between the numbers is a man called William Ruto.

Part of Annan’s plan accepted by all sides was that something akin to a Truth-and-Reconciliation Commission be set up to determine once and for all who was responsible for the violence which killed more than 1,000 people and displaced nearly 150,000.

The signed agreement required the Kenyan Attorney General to complete a study and list suspects. That secret report was completed and couldn’t be too badly corrupted, because it was completed with the active assistance of the FBI and Scotland Yard. That list has already been given to Annan. The signed agreement further gives Annan the right to take this list to the World Court at The Hague, if Kenya doesn’t adjudicate the matter itself.

And right now, it doesn’t look like Kenya will. For some good politicians in Kenya, this is as it should be, since any judicial inquiry overseen by the Kenyan politic is likely to be corrupted.

The now infamous list of the “top ten” most likely suspects, still being kept secret by Annan, has Ruto at the top of its list. Ruto is one of the most ruthless men alive. Like his Kalenjin tribal predecessors, Daniel arap Moi (the dictator for 21 years) and Nicholas Biwott (Moi’s hatchet man), Ruto comes from Eldoret. He has a militia. He is a gangster that has skimmed off food aid during a drought. And to no one in Kenya is there the least doubt that he ordered widespread ethnic killing.

What’s particularly sad for me is that he was on the “right” side, the ODM, the one that Raila Odinga led honestly and openly to the election. Ruto was instrumental in the electoral victory and not just with dishonest means, but with all the necessities for an election victory: money, mostly.

They were never good bedfellows, Odinga and Ruto. Odinga was a real moral champion, transparent, straight speaking, an underdog you could identify with. Ruto for all his life was in the shadows pulling strings, making billions, growing more powerful everyday. But in Kenya’s dire society, tribalism rules. Kalenjins and Luos, Ruto and Odinga, was a match made even stronger because “Ruto et thugs, Inc.” was a part of the dictatorial regime of Arap Moi that the current president democratically overthrew. And current President Kibaki is Prime Minister Raila Odinga’s rival and nemesis.

I believe that the violence started with no organization. It began among the poor in the slums who had voted and who had won with Odinga. And when the election was stolen from them with tactics not so dissimilar to Bush stealing power from Gore, the fires exploded.

And the police over reaction was terrible, and the police were part of the establishment, and so the inevitable counter reaction ensued. For all we know the people truly in power may have truly felt a civil war had begun. And that’s when William Ruto got out his militia, his brownshirt brigades and lashed back with a ferocity that not even the police could match.

And for his money, his power and his “defensive” reaction from the perspective of a civil war, he was awarded the Ministry of Agriculture.

And now, he is the most wanted of the secret list of most wanted men. And any tribunal, in Kenya or The Netherlands, will have to deal with that. And that – more than any other single reason – is why both President Kibaki and Prime Minister Odinga – the archest of rivals ever imagined – together oppose a tribunal as well as a trial in The Hague. Both are trying to sweep the matter under the rug.

Kofi Annan will not wait forever. The day will come when William Ruto’s name is postulated for infamy. And Hillary is probably trying to explain that it would be better to do it in Kenya than on the world stage.

It’s not going to be a pretty play.

The talk on the streets in Nairobi, today, is that all the Kenyan leaders have to go. Wipe the slate clean. Out with the old!

Kenyans are absolutely fed up with their government. No one’s attempted a poll, but my informal and unscientific survey of my friends here suggests 90% of Kenyans don’t like or want their leaders. And the remedy? Universally, everyone says young people must come forward to assume the reigns of power.

Of all East African countries, Kenya is the most tribal. The British colonial government supported the Kikuyu over all other tribes, giving them a leg up on development. The west supported the Kikuyu during the Cold War. So the ethnic divide was encouraged, even nurtured by the developed world. The old “divide and conquer” mentality.

It is striking that no matter how educated a Kenyan may be, their allegiance starts with their tribe. They buy their tribe, marry their tribe, socialize with their tribe and vote their tribe. Peace in Kenya comes when power is satisfactorily allocated tribally.

And like all historic tribal conflicts – northern Ireland Catholics or Balkan Muslims – over time these socio-religious divisions ultimately become economic ones as well. In Kenya, the Kikuyu are the rich and the Luo are the poor.

That’s a generalization, and to be sure, Luo politicians aren’t poor. But even as they race around town in their Mercedes, they champion those in the slums, those out of work, and those whose attempts to disengage from poverty seems hopeless. Because the majority of the poor are Luo. But there’s plenty of poverty to go around in Kenya, and of course it extends to many Kikuyu. But Kikuyu politicians are the free marketers, the small government champions, the ones who break the white collar laws the most often. The generalization that the Kikuyu are the rich and the Luo are the poor is more important than its qualifications.

But all politicians are rich. About the only project on which leaders from different ethnic groups cooperate is how to pay each other outrageous salaries.

And it may just be that this rich-poor divide is prying open the eyes of many Kenyans. Luo and Kikuyu leaders are all rich. And all are elected by a majority of people who are poor.

But what to do? Kenyans may universally disavow their leaders, but they seem unable to disengage from the tribalism that keeps taking them down the same, doomed path. No tribal-less leader has ever emerged. No man or woman has ever tried to appeal to a broad swath of Kenya. They all emerge from their own ethnic groups. When they finally reach positions of power, their main fortress is their tribe.

The wisdom of the street in Nairobi, today, is that everyone old has to go. Youth has to emerge. There is a real hope that some of the student leaders might emerge as the new political leaders.

I doubt it. In March, a hotly contested battle at the University of Nairobi for student council president, between David Osianyo (Luo) and John Ngaruiya (Kikuyu) was even financially supported by the country’s two main political parties, the PNU (Kikuyu) and ODM (Luo). The dissident student protest in March of this year, which disrupted traffic for a day and led to some serious police violence, was orchestrated by student David Otieno (Luo), and it was Kenya’s Prime Minister Raila Odinga (Luo) who gained most by the affair.

That’s sad. If the new “youth” leaders can’t come from the university, where will they come from? High schools?

Forty-six years ago, today, Kenya became independent. It’s a holiday, today, but Kenya’s too sick to celebrate. I wonder if it’s going to make 50.

Most safari travelers make their plans about a year in advance, although I do have reservations for my 2011 Great Migration Safari. But for those travelers whose horizon is more distant, I’m telling them they better at least for the moment forget about Kenya.

This is painful and terribly disappointing to me personally. And, by the way, it isn’t just American tour wholesalers who are preparing for life without ole Kenya. So is Kenya’s Prime Minister, Raila Odinga.

I hasten to add that Kenya’s fine to visit, now. In two weeks I will be traveling with a five-year old, among 13 children in a family of 20, in Kenya. Today, Kenya, is one of the most exciting, safe places to visit in Africa.

But we are right now planning for a new era of stable business we hope will begin towards the end of next year. The last thing we want to do is jeopardize a fragile business recovery with unstable politics. And right now, Kenya seems on the brink of 2012 disaster.

Last week the IMF, supported mostly by us in America, wanted to help bailout Kenya from its victimization in this world recession. But Kenya couldn’t take all the money! There was … no place for it to go!

Last week Kenya refused $440 million in IMF bailout money, ending up taking only $210 million. I use “Refused” in the Kenyan vernacular. The IMF could not release money available for emergency development in Kenya, since that must necessarily go through government channels to be dispersed, and well, there aren’t any government channels!

Neighboring Tanzania got $340 million and is set to get twice as much next month. Most of this emergency development funding is to restart tourism and agricultural industries. The money goes to the Ministry of Agriculture and is then hopefully dispersed to credible projects, and food starts growing, again.

Kenya has a Ministry of Agriculture, but the only transactions occurring there are the payment of the salaries of its ministers and bloated bureaucracy. That’s because there is no plan for the Ministry of Agriculture. There’s no plan for any of Kenya’s 54 ministries except to pay salaries! There’s no plan, because the government is unable to pass any legislation at all, like a national budget!

Parliament is stalemated as the two parties in the coalition government block every initiative of the other. Completely embarrassed and fed up by the situation, Kenya’s Speaker of the House tried some imaginative maneuvers including cleansing Parliament’s budgetary committees of the main coalition members who were blocking action. But that failed, too. There weren’t enough members left who hadn’t already taken sides. The Speaker stands abandoned in a desert of corruption and political idiocy.

So the emergency funding that comes from the developed world is limited to fiscal rather than economic stability. The money Kenya did take basically props up the shilling and keeps the country from going bankrupt, paying interest on debt and politicians’ salaries. Good grief, Kenya even closed the primary schools in the country, because there isn’t enough money!

This isn’t tenable, even among the vast majority of Kenyans. With Kenya’s leaders totally out of touch with reality, the vast majority of Kenyans are very angry. Local newspapers are screaming. But nobody’s in the streets – not even the students – because there’s nothing anywhere that can replace the mess that currently runs the government. Like an American district court judge up for reelection, all the electorate can really do is shout, “No!” and therein seethes the time bomb.

No new, young politicians or cross-ethnic alliances are emerging. The election of December, 2012 will be a rematch of 2007. The better ideology is held by the ODM party (Orange Democratic Movement) led by Raila Odinga. But like in 2007, Raila won’t be allowed to win by the powers-that-be controlling the election, who are all in the other party. The results will be the same: a tightly contested, corrupt election that spawns violence. But this time, it will be much worse than 2007.

Already, Raila Odinga, the Prime Minister and head of the ODM, is spending more of his time abroad preparing for the post-apocalyptic scene of 2012 than he is at home trying to make the alliance work, now.

In the last two weeks he was in the U.S., Iran and the Sudan. Obama chose not to meet him and underscore the septic divisions in his country, but Michele Obama did meet with his wife. Clearly Odinga is building some type of international awareness of his capacity to govern Kenya, and clearly he expects trouble before it happens.

While I’ve often written that many of Africa’s problems come from a near immoral colonial legacy coupled with a definitely immoral Cold War legacy and thus the responsibility mostly of the developed world, things have changed in Kenya. The outside world is really trying to be extremely generous, given the world recession. Obama has written letters; Hillary Clinton has appealed publicly; and our own excellent ambassador, Michael Rannenberger, has steadfastly offered to help Kenya, if only it will help itself.

So far, it won’t. December, 2012, looms as ugly as anything that has happened in Africa, before.

Our president meets Tanzania’s president, and nobody cares. Not even the Kenyans over which it was all about.

You probably didn’t know that a week ago President Obama met with Tanzanian President Kikwete, the first African head-of-state to meet with our new president.

In fact, the only mention of the meeting in the U.S. came in an Associated Press release whose topic wasn’t this important meeting, but “Life in the White House.”

It was an important meeting at several levels. There haven’t been that many heads-of-state to meet with Obama, worldwide, yet. And it came on the same day as Obama’s detention plan was released followed the controversy with losing funding to close GITMO. It was probably a pretty busy day for Obama.

The hour-long meeting was twice as long as scheduled.

The meeting, according to reports in East Africa, was entirely about Kenya. The Obama administration is growing increasingly worried about the Kenyan coalition government.

Former President Bush also used Kikwete as a go-between to get messages to Kenyan leaders without going public.

The message was clear: get back on track, or face “serious actions” by the U.S. These serious actions will most likely start with a refusal to give Kenyan politicians visas to enter the United States. This relatively benign sanction bites hard and has been used often before, since most Kenyan politicians’ children study in the U.S. and many have investments, here.

There is a lot that isn’t secret: U.S. Assistant Secretary of State, Johnny Carson, and our current ambassador, Michael Ranneberger, have publicly expressed increased alarm at the pace of implementation of the Kenyan reforms that created the current coalition government. There are two specific actions that the U.S. (and its partners) are waiting for: (1) create and adopt a new constitution; and (2) develop a mechanism for discovering and possibly punishing those who promulgated the election violence of 2007.

These issues are in the forefront of the Kenyan public’s universal criticism of the current government as well. The dynamic Kenyan newspapers are filled every day with details and commentary, mostly rebukes of the current political leadership. It just doesn’t morph into violence, as it did during the election.

What does all this mean?

This is par for the course. Except for very vociferous newspapers, the public doesn’t seem disturbed. Regarding this single aspect, it’s probably not a good sign for Kenya’s future, but I do know that for tourism it’s very good… at least for now

The Kenyan public gets disturbed or elated only during elections. (The one exception to this has been the students, but remarkably at the moment, even the students are quiet.) The complaints and expressions of dissatisfaction are never-ending, but never erupt into any kind of disruption until the election cycle nears its end. We’re still 3 years away from another election.

Hopefully, the U.S. pressure will work. Three years is not as far away as it might seem.