Lessons from Gaddafi's fall.

It was all going to end badly for Muammar Gaddafi. When the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation decided to join hands with what would eventually morph into the National Transitional Council, his goose was well and truly cooked. To his dying day, Col Gaddafi believed that he was right in the manner that he had ruled, though he would dispute the fact that he was a ruler in the traditional sense. His death at the hands of the ill-trained, ill-equipped elements of the NTC was predictable; what was not, was the fact that Washington DC and London showed such disinterest in the whole affair. But then again, Barack Obama's administration had kept their involvement in the whole affair at arms length, and London had long since given up strategic leadership in the matter to the Brussels-headquartered NATO. 

After swiftly recognising the NTC as the legitimate heirs to Col Gaddafi's regime, the combined leadership of the West turned their attention to more urgent and pressing concerns such as the imminent collapse of the Greek economy, followed by the efforts of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to stabilise the global economy following its less than stellar revival after the end of the 2007/08 crisis.

This is the lesson that Kenya needs to take away from the sorry affair in Libya. When Col Gaddafi decided to give up the pursuit of Weapons of Mass Destruction, handing over the results of his research and detailing his international contacts with groups that were hostile to the West, he was, briefly, feted in the capitals of the West. Regardless of who was in power, he enjoyed favours from both the White House and No 10 Downing Street. Libya was taken off the list of sponsors of terrorism and was slowly being rehabilitated into international bodies and systems. 

But American and European leaders constantly underestimated the breadth of discontent from among the Libyans themselves, and when the uprising against Gaddafi commenced 6 months ago, it took them some time to get their ducks in a row and throw in their lot with the rebel fighters. But even their support for the rebels had the whiff of disinterest and now they are left with the choice of interceding more muscularly as the NTC tries to build new institutions in a nation that has gone a whole generation without any.

In the aftermath of the 2007/08 crisis, Kenya welcomed the assistance of international interlocutors, including the African Union, the European Union and the US Government. Now that we have decided to conduct military operations against al Shabaab in Somalia, we are once more begging for the intervention of these same powers, as well as hoping that they will legitimise our actions in the international arena. 

What we seem not to have considered is that they will only do so once they have determined what their interests in the matter will be. They will not intervene simply for altruism's sake, but because their national interests are at stake. Kenya will pay a price for the help it will receive from the international community, and we must honestly discuss whether we are prepared to live with the cost of such 'help'. The costs remain unknown for now, but without a national discussion they will continue to remain unknown.

For a decade now, Kenyans have studiously refused to come to terms with the nature of their government. Even during the referendum campaign in 2010, Kenyans were only preoccupied with the political nature of the contest, refusing to hold a candid examination of the nature of the government that they were choosing for themselves in the new Constitution. That attitude has allowed our political leadership to get away with almost anything. When the dust settles in the aftermath of the 2012 general elections, if indeed the elections are held in 2012, we may yet find ourselves at the mercy of foreign interests. 

For instance, devolution, we are assured, is the panacea for skewed development priorities going back 47 years, yet we seem incapable of agreeing on whether devolution is a good thing or not. We are also persuaded that a presidential system is preferable to a parliamentary one, yet there seems to be no candid discussion of how such a system will be implemented after decades of a parliamentary system. Without answering these and other thorny questions, we may find ourselves 'importing' foreign 'experts' to assist us to govern ourselves, with the result that the priorities that may be pursued may yet again favour foreign interests at the expense of our own. Watch what happens in Libya for it is a harbinger of a new form of neo-colonialism.