Accountability gone missing in Kenya

“In the wake of last year’s Gen Z protests, Kenyan President William Ruto had two choices. He could accept the youthful population’s rejection of business as usual and get serious about cleaning up corruption in government, aiming to ride the wave of enthusiasm for change to usher in a new political paradigm based on delivering for voters rather than knitting together a coalition of self-serving elites. Or he could revert to darker days of Kenyan history, using political violence to suppress dissent and cow the public. He chose the latter path.

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The result is, as the Kenyan Conference of Catholic Bishops put it, an attempt to make everyone complicit in a “culture of lies.” In a statement issued last November, the group lamented, “Basically it seems that truth does not exist, and if it does, it is only what the Government says.” It’s a political scenario that deserves close watching. How does a society that has lost faith in its political class but not necessarily in its own ability to affect change react to obvious untruths coming from official sources, to threats and violence, and to an attempt to distort the very idea of truth? How can Kenyans continue to center the ideas that energized a nationwide movement for change while contending with old attempts to divide them and this latest intentional shirking of responsibility at the very top? The answers will matter a great deal to Kenya’s future, and to the prospects for democracies in peril far beyond Kenya’s borders.”

Ruto made his big career move from the 2008 Post Election Violence and being a target of the failed attempts at accountability. So no right to be surprised.