We are shameless.

When Samuel Kivuitu announced that Mwai Kibaki had been re-elected as President of Kenya, it set of a chain of events that led to the deaths of at least a thousand Kenyans, the rape and grievous assault of tens of thousands of Kenyans, and the displacement of at least six hundred thousand Kenyans from their homes. For seven years, the International Criminal Court, its Office of the prosecutor and the Government of Kenya have danced around investigating the violence that ensued and the prosecution of those suspected to be most responsible. Those who were murdered, raped, maimed or displaced have largely been forgotten; even their representative at the ICC seems not to pay them much mind these days.

Lone voices have attempted to keep the plight of the survivors of the violence in the public's mind with little success.The Government of Kenya and a large proportion of the post-election violence civil society industry has focussed almost entirely on the displaced. The national Executive and many of its supporters have repeatedly stated that, as proof of its concern for the "victims" of the violence, it has resettled all the displaced. The survivors would beg to differ. So would I.

The national Executive controls the key institutions necessary for action to demonstrate that the plight of all the survivors is being addressed effectively: the police and the Director of Public Prosecutions. When the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions reviewed "over three hundred" files related to the violence, it concluded that none of them could form the foundation of successful prosecutions because the police had done "a shoddy job" in investigating the crimes that were committed. Seven years after those dark days, murderers, rapists, knee-cappers, arm-breakers, skull-fructurers, child-defilers, arsonists, robbers and thieves walk free while the survivors try as best they can to rebuild their shattered lives.

What must gall them to the core, what must intensify their grief, is the national obsession that places two individuals and the large political constituencies they represent at the centre of the violence, and their subsequent political rapprochement as proof that both the survivors and perpetrators of the violence have moved on. Collectivisation of the crimes has destroyed any national desire to investigate individual crimes even where perpetrators were clearly identified. Conflation of the fate of the two men with the post-2013 peace has erased the survivors from the mind of the people.

The survivors, especially the survivors who were not displaced, are on their own. Those who were sexually assaulted, defiled, maimed or injured have no one to turn to. They have been erased from public discourse. They are witness to callousness on a colossal scale. They are called to survive injustice twice over: the national Executive will not properly investigate the crimes committed against them and, therefore, there will be no prosecution, and the national Executive will not - NOT - compensate them for their losses. Ever. We should be ashamed to even think of ourselves as civilised.