School burnings in Kenya point to a troubled nation facing ruin

Prof. Makau Mutua

I am sure no Kenyan wants their country described as Dystopia. Yet increasingly we are hurtling down the cliff towards a door of no return. We’ve countries that have been there. Somalia, DRC, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Iraq, Syria, the former Yugoslavia, Colombia and Afghanistan. The list is long. They are — or were — in a state of dystopia. Dystopia is an imaginary place where everything — everything — is terrible. Politically it describes a totalitarian state, or an environmentally devastated place, like Chernobyl. Think of the book — Lord of the Flies — and you get the picture. The countries listed above have one thing in common — you don’t want to live there. Could Kenya join them?

I predicted at a talk at the Stanley Hotel — December 10, 2007 which is International Human Rights Day — that Kenya would be engulfed in a civil war after the elections. The Kenyan press — print and electronic — buried its head in the sand. Not one news outlet reported my alarming prediction. It was the classic case of hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. Except the evil was all around us. We all knew political acidity had reached genocidal levels. There were signs of Rwanda circa 1994 all over. Yet Kenyans shut their eyes. We didn’t want to know that little devils had infested us. I don’t know why anyone was shocked when neighbour used machetes and other crude weapons against neighbour.