hi,
couldn’t agree better.
This idea of moving on grinds my balls.
All these patriotic songs telling us to put up and move on drive me up the wall…not to say their efforts to help the displaced families is in vain.
Its like the elections all over again.Get screwed and shut up…..you are kenyans.
Well,the way things are going people are not shutting up.My generation cant just see things messed up infront of our eyes.We have kids on the way, we have a future to look forward to and thus we cant stand this bull sh*t of being screwed over and over!!!
seeing kibaki being sworn in made me feel like i was in a nightmare……sh*t this whole thing looked like Moi all over agin.
I was in Uhuru park in 2002, sad but true i was excited when mud was thrown at Moi…little did i know that our “saviour” would turn out to be the man he despised.
all in all i see history repeating itself.The institution of the presidency is too powerful.If we shut up i see no changes.Even if Raila gets in there is not stopping the metamorphosis….look at ukraine.We can shut up people and sing medlies till tears drop…people are dying and we need to fight for what is right…….if not we will leave in a mreeygo round and start asking ourselves “what went wrong” when we are in our 50′s
Remember animal farm……..

Even as we ‘move on’ trying to ‘recover’ WHILE continuing to watch/monitor the political situation(that will determine which fork in the cross roads that our country will take) it goes without saying that the re-run of elections (in my humble opinion, an inevitability,just a question of whether it is sooner rather than later) should see NEITHER Kibaki nor Raila run again (Yes, i am an OPTIMIST! like that).And, our current ECK should not be within sniffing distance of the same! – in fact their role at this point should be limited to providing the independent auditors of the election process – a must have – with the original data required for their review.
This in itself means that there is a ‘transition period’ that needs to take place while the modalities of the next steps in our country’s future are worked out. During this time, let us continue to preach peace and find our own individual ways of contributing to taking Kenya to where we want to see it.
Although my comments seem to show that i am in Kenya i am currently based in SA so i will borrow from Toiyoi’s disclaimer – I cannot guarantee that, was in Kenya, my comments would not be different.

Have just arrived here after being stuck in good old Kenya. Been 4 hrs off the flight.
Firstly, the election was RIGGED, THROUGH AND THROUGH. Anyone disputing this is not speaking the truth. I witnessed this myself having decided to drive upcountry on election day after casting my vote in Nairobi. Reaching my local village school which was a polling station, I found a 504 estate car with 3 clean shaven hunky police/army looking fellows marking BALLOT PAPERS inside the vehicle parked outside the school (Can furnish you with reg No). They appeared startled to see my car, only to relax on noticing my wife seated next to me. I drove further down the road to the village shops to ask what was happening. I was told “wametumwa na Kibaki kumuongezea kura, ni polisi, tutafanya nini?” If those fellas were in Luo Nyanza, they would have been VERY DEAD.

Most guys voted for Raila in my Shags, however on tally he had beaten the incumbent by 2 votes at the local polling station! Nobody believed it at all. This I believe was widespread and resulted in the 25% in 7 provinces. I also believe this is the reason he will NEVER accept a rerun with an independent Electoral body since these votes will not be available to him and the defeat will be RESOUNDING.

Despite this widespread rigging, it was still not enough, forcing him and his cronies to openly manipulate the ECK to declare him winner. Kibaki is in office illegitimately and no amount of whitewashing, words and attempted re-writing of events is ever going to change that. Kenyans have died and that is sad since NSIS had issued an alert that these events were going to lead to bloodshed. This blood rests CLEARLY on the hands of one man who choose to ignore that warning. It will not go away. History and the current circumstances will judge him harshly.

In my part of the country, the Kikuyu diaspora has held sway over public transport and small businesses. On the eve of the elections they told ODM supporters to their face they would be going back to state house “whether you like it or not”. They also told commuters they were withdrawing their matatus from the road to ensure “kura musipige kwa wengi na kama mutapiga laima mutembee wenyewe” There was no transport from 26th onwards except for a few locally owned matatus. The locals told them it was all right, but they should not even think of putting them back on the roads after elections. They made themselves an easy target of post electoral violence.

Soon as the elections were announced, people remembered what had transpired and descended on Kikuyu businesses and homes, deciding they were all thieves. I have never seen such mayhem. It was certainly not premeditated in my part of the country, but the Kikuyu definitely set themselves up for the polls aftermath.

Where to go after this? If Kibaki was a nationalist and a patriot at heart, he would never have countenanced to do what he has done. He has run the gauntlet of fire, he will not put it down. He will not resign…PERIOD. He really does not care about the lives lost or property damaged at all. He casually puts the country in harm’s way then calls for maintenance of peace. Was he not thinking about peace when he plotted all this? Did he care about the NSIS warning?

For the ordinary Kenyan who has a dictator on their shoulder what to do? Life must continue as indeed it always does, but organized protests by ALL members of society and pressure on this regime must continue. If it does not then the same impunity will be used again and again and Kenyans will just not turn up to vote. Ugandan troops are in the country, that is not a rumour, I saw three with my own eyes and heard them speak. They are ERY ugandan. Why? Some think they are there to target the internally displaced camps and hit them with such organised force so as to bolster the nascently emerging talk of Genocide. This will shore up international support for the regime on the premise that the best person to look out for the Kikuyu will be a Kikuyu president. We are not out of the woods yet good people, not by a long shot. This may just be the lull before the storm. Blue helments may soon be headed our way.

The crazy games Kibs and his guys play with the country may yet ring us into the precipice. Pray, preach peace, A JUST PEACE will hold

I agree with taking action against injustices when they occur and generally refusing to let issues like that fester until they explode in even worse consequences I do not think that the aggrieved parties have so far done anything to actually resolve the primary concern here. The flawed election.

It is one thing to feel rightly aggrieved when an opponent is declared winner of an election in the dodgy circumstances that saw Kibaki returned to state house and with the glaring irregularities in the counting process. The unfortunate thing is that though they do have a right to be aggrieved the opposition rather than uphold exercise the institutions that are meant to protect from and deal with these miscarriages of justice, have deemed it neccessary to further undermine the very purpose of their existence by resorting to fighting with the state’s security apparatus using mobs of largely disillusioned and misguided followers. What has been clear from the rhetoric on the ODM side is that apparently unless their guy Raila Odinga is in State house then under no circumstances can the election be deemed credible leave alone democratic. While it would completely absurd to say that they, the ODM have no reason to feel cheated and should just lie down and get on with life they should not take this as some kind of leave to ignore the ‘civilised’ route by trying to bully their way to their objective at the expense of the very thing they claim to defend, democracy and the respect of democratic institutions.

On the flip side the cynicism with which the people now sat very comfortably in the government benches have tried and continue to try deny that something is genuinely wrong is very dissapointing. Yes PNU’s own candidate garnered four million votes and could very well have won the election despite the irregularities that occured in the whole process but this is no excuse to try sweep everything under the carpet and pretend that everything will be fine and the troubles will ‘go away if ignored for long enough.’ over 500 people are dead, hundreds of thousands are homeless, 3 constituencies do not have an MP millions if not billions of shillings worth of property have been damaged and the numerous communities have been shredded (not for the first time) by the violence and if something is not done these things will happen again and again.

But then again thats probably not going to happen now is it?

Mr. Omar,
We appreciate your concerns and well wishes. We all remember Somalia and what has become of her and we hope she will eventually rise from the ashes. Experience is not enough of a teacher since civil strife repeats itself in the same places all over Africa.
The problems in Kenya are as simple as they are complex and a quick resolution will never be reached.
There’s plenty of rope to go around and we’ll most certainly hang ourselves with it. I predict more bloodshed before this is over because the issues that brought this wave of violence will remain unaddressed. Like you’ve already warned, it’s bye, bye to Kenya as we knew it and it’s hello…well, something else.