Secretary of State Clinton expressed concern about the political situation in Kenya, as she should. But I don’t think violence is on the horizon.

Several weeks ago Clinton sent a letter to President Kibaki and Prime Minister Odinga expressing several concerns about the state of the coalition government trying to run Kenya. And last week Parliament opened but didn’t, as political wrangling over how Parliament in this new coalition era should be run.

The Kenyan coalition isn’t working the way the parties agreed more than a year ago; and not just the U.S., but much of the world including the master of the coalition design, Kofi Anan, has severely criticized Kenyan politicians.

There are a myriad of disputes. The most prominent is who gets to appoint top civil servants: the President (Kibaki) or the Prime Minister (Odinga)? The grand coalition document divided the ministries between the two men, but appointments of certain powerful positions immediately under the very top management was never addressed. And there are some appointees, like the civil servant responsible for distributing food aid, who span multiple ministries’ portfolios.

So far, President Kibaki has muscled his way on this issue, and for a while Odinga let it go. When a scandal broke out about the distribution (or lack of it) of grain, Odinga’s power base got hot. There was violence in the slums where the initial post-election violence of 2008 began and where Odinga’s heart of power truly resides. The Nairobi slums are not just the most numerous single demographic in the country, it has among the highest voting turnout of any group and it is squarely behind Odinga, the “champion of the poor.”

Then came the thorny issue of the method of determining who was responsible for the 2008 violence and what to do with them. I see an incredible analogy here with our own recent disclosure of the “torture memos.” And so there is a philosophical red flag thrown up by Obama when his administration insists that Kenya determine the raw facts and prosecute those responsible, but is reluctant to do so at home.

Neither Odinga or Kibaki really wants to pursue this “truth and reconciliation commission”, and admittedly there is more at stake than just this single issue. Obama and the EU are wrapping this issue to the general state of corruption in the country, which seems to be getting worse, not better. I’m not sure, though, that the way to tackle systemic corruption is through the extremely sensitive issue of who started the 2008 violence. Street wisdom believes that there were few sitting politicians at the time who didn’t contribute to the chaos.

Is the coalition unraveling? This weekend the Odinga camp called for new, immediate elections. I don’t think that’s serious; they’re just trying to find a way to calm what is certainly a growing uneasiness among their base. But will it come to outright violence.

I don’t think so.

This weekend Nairobi newspaper columnist Dominc Odipo summed it up well: “We’re better off than in 1989″ was the title of his column.

“What was it like …back in 1989? “ Odipo asks. “There was only one legal political party, and its leader, President Moi, was the undisputed, all-powerful political head of the country. There was no question whatsoever about where political or State power lay.”

Odipo referred to an important speech that was delivered at the time by Moi’s Minister of Agriculture, Elijah Mwangale.

Pointing at the President, Mwangale intoned: “You speak of the public will. There is enshrined, in human form, the popular will! Even the lobsters and the fishes of the sea, out to the 200-mile limit and beyond, pay obeisance to our great President!”

Odipo then went down a list of important men at the time, all of whom are either (a) happily obscured in deep retirement, (b) dead or (c) missing.

Odipo continues: “Twenty years on there can be no doubt the country has moved … in the right direction. Yes, we have not yet been able to reign in corruption, impunity, negative tribalism and other national ills but, on the political fundamentals, we have certainly trudged ahead.

“Today, any adult Kenyan, man or woman, can register a political party and have it operational within only three days. To the best of my knowledge, no citizen is being held in any torture chamber anywhere in the country.

“There has been another sea change. There is no undisputed, supreme political authority in the land. Political power is being shared, even if not yet equitably as required in the spirit of the National Accord and Reconciliation Agreement.

“Power has also largely been demystified. If President Kibaki today tells you to jump, you don’t have to. You can look him in the eye and tell him to get lost.

“We have come a long way since 1989. And don’t you ever forget that!”

The Chinese are building a modern road through Samburu.

The road from Mt. Kenya into the Northern Frontier is being transformed by the Chinese. The Chinese have been prospecting for oil in northern Kenya and rumors have been flying that they’ve hit liquid gold.

For twenty years I’ve suffered this horrible drive from Nanyuki to Samburu. Now it’s being paved. There are dozens of big red Chinese trucks, huge road working equipment, hundreds of Kenyan workers and dozens of Chinese managers in oriental straw hats, creating a modern road through the desert.

For right now it’s pretty bad, as all that exists for travel are the cut tracks at either side of the creation in progress. This means slow going, tons of powder dust and games of chicken with oncoming trucks.

The Kenyan military is out in force, too, presumably to protect the road workers.

Eventually, though, this will link Mt. Kenya with Samburu in modern quick ways. The journey here will become so much easier!

…and inches forward, just a little bit late.

Today, Kenya’s President Kibaki makes an unusual road trip a-la-Obama into some of the areas in the country most effected by food shortages. Kenyan presidents don’t normally show their faces in public, much less in troubled areas. He is desperately trying to prop up the political soul of the country, fragilely held by the Grand Coalition Government.

Yesterday, more than 3000 university students held a demonstration in the city that was mostly peaceful to protest the police shooting of human rights workers the week before. Students have never been given government sanction to protest before yesterday. (It did not end wholly peacefully, which was a real shame, with nonorganizers looting a few stores and blocking downtown traffic.)

Yesterday, the head of the Kenyan Tourist Federation held a press conference that was actually attended by the press to condemn the government’s sanction to grow the number of tourist lodges and camps in Kenya’s most famous big game park, the Maasai Mara. Similar conservationists have been sounding this alarm for years, but rarely if ever got coverage.

Yesterday, all primary schools in the country were closed down in mid-term and the children sent home. The education ministry ran out of money. Kenya has given all children the rights to a free education. They are expected to be called back when money is found, maybe in a couple weeks. They are going to be a little bit late finishing their assignments this term.

Yesterday, the long-rains began. Like everything else in Kenya, a little bit late.

Kenya is struggling, which is not news, but doing so in the midst of the worst global economic recession in memory, with consequences for increasing poverty and starvation unimaginable to us in the west. We are worried in the U.S. that our government might have a budget deficit equal to 15% of our GDP. In Kenya, the government budget deficit this year is likely to be 300% of GDP. They are going to be a little bit later in erasing their deficit than we will be.

The patience of Africa is unfathomable to an American. But Kenya is moving forward, pole pole, slowly, but it is moving forward. And it is in every citizen’s of the world interest to keep them inching along, if only a bit late.

My favorite newspaper publishes an unfair article about Kenya.

The situation in Kenya – as throughout the entire world – is not as good as we expected it would be a year or two ago.

Kenya was plucked from near abyss by a Grand Coalition Government that ended the political violence that accompanied the December, 2007, Presidential elections. There was great hope, then. The struggle was then clobbered by a double whamming: a drought in the north and northeast that came as far south as some important agricultural lands to the east of Mt. Kenya, and a world economy catastrophe.

Yesterday, the New York Times bureau chief, Jeffrey Gettlemen, wrote an article about Kenya that I consider unfair.

It’s important to note that Gettlemen has been in Nairobi for a little more than 2 years. He came from Afghanistan, where conflict was the name of the game, then arrived Nairobi as the political apparatus was unraveling before the December violence, and then reported well throughout that period. He covers a wider and wider region for the Times, including the conflicts in the Congo and Ethiopia.

There’s nothing that Gettlemen writes in his February 28 article (republished on Sunday, March 1) that is patently untrue, but much I think is misleading and reflects rather that “half-empty” glass that the I guess readers want to see, instead of the “half-full” one that I see.

I’m sure that much of Gettlemen’s material was simple broom sweeping of the local media, because last week in particular, the numerous vocal columnists in both major newspapers, Kenya’s very active and political group of lawyers, and a prominent clergyman all delivered or published scathing reports of the current government. There was no original reporting in anything he wrote.

It was an appropriate time for local critics to hit the government hard, as the time for constructing a “Truth & Reconciliation Commission” to probe the December, 2007, violence had come and gone, and the UN who is charged with overseeing the coalition was rightly mad. Some very prominent political watchdogs like John Githongo, the anti-Corruption Czar, went public, too. Githongo caused a sensation last week when writing, “The only thing that holds this government together is the glue of corruption.”

Gettlemen, of course, reported that. But what he didn’t report was that the pressure to create a commission or kick back the commission to the World Court at the Hague (provided for in the coalition agreement) is going to work. There will be action, soon, in Kenya, to deal with this problem. The Attorney General may even resign shortly. The process is working.

What Gettlemen didn’t report was that Githongo had fled to London for several years, fearful for his life as a robust whistle-blowing journalist and anti-corruption crusader, and that he accepted government and private offers to return last year to help in reconstruction. At least Githongo considers the political climate in Kenya much improved right now from even two years ago.

Gettlemen reported that”Ten million people face starvation, partly because farmers in crucial food-producing areas who fled their homes last year have not returned, instead withdrawing deeper into their ethnic enclaves, deeper into fear.” He has exaggerated the numbers and stretched reality.

I have rarely known a year in Kenya when some integer of “millions” were not starving. In the developed world we tend not to care about this unless it is linked with something even more ghastly, like a revolution. Consider this: On the same day that Gettlemen published his “Menace & Starvation” article, a better news source, Reuters, also published a story on Kenya including this remark: ”Climate change has hit this part of Kenya hard over the past few years. With fodder and water for cattle increasingly scarce, the regular droughts that are part of life in the Rift Valley now put communities at risk of starvation.” (Click here for the full article.

That is a much more balanced account. Obviously, any political stress whatever is going to exacerbate something like food shortages which might otherwise simply be the result of drought. But for Gettlemen to imply that it is substantially caused by ethnic conflict, is simply wrong.

Finally, Gettlemen reported with a flair that tourism is down 35%. My goodness, this is something I know about! As my faithful blog readers know, I removed everything from Kenya in 2008 that we had booked through June. If all companies had done that, tourism would have been down at least 50%! So I don’t consider Gettlemen’s figure of 35% bad at all. In fact, it really does show a rebound greater than any of us expected.

And by the way, tourism is down that much or more in all the neighboring countries. In southern Africa it may be down by half. It is “down” because of the world economic crisis, not because of any kind of social disruption.

Kenya has had drought, and political conflict, and robust political debate, since its inception. This is without doubt a rocky period, and a positive political future in Kenya is undoubtedly compromised by the situation in the world that has little to do with Kenya, namely the economic recession and climate change. While it is hard to fault Gettlemen for inaccurate reporting, he should definitely be chastised for not being more balanced.

What attracts viewership to Fox News and Rush Limbaugh ought not be the motivation for our much lauded NYT.