Just a little bit tighter.

Democracies are losing their foundations and evolving towards an aristocratic regime as a small elite dominate decision making. ~ njeri.unedited

 Democracy may be the best of a bad lot, but Kenya has had a taste of the worst of the lot and I don't think we have any appetite for it any more. Between 1897 and 1920, we had the rapacious Imperial British East Africa Company that set the stage for much that was to follow, most of it all bad. Between 1920 and 1963, we had the colonial government that essentially set in stone the graft, inequity and criminality that came to define governance. 

Between 1963 and 1969 we had the Independence government that attempted to live by democratic ideals but succumbed not just to graft, inequity and criminality, but to tribal chauvinism and political assassination. Between 1969 and 1978 all pretenses of democratic government were abandoned. Between 1978 and 2002, benevolence in dictatorship defined the state. Between 2002 and 2013, a second attempt at democratic government was attempted. In 2015, it seems, that experiment has run its course.

Kenya is not unique but its circumstance are peculiarly its own. njeri.unedited sees Kenya drifting towards an aristocratic regime, unwilling or unable to admit that it has always been an aristocratic regime. This is how it has always been. The people, the voters, have always been an afterthought. They are not the shapers of opinions; they are the sheep to the slaughter. It is why a cabal of men has grown fabulously wealthy while the nation they govern has progressively become poorer.

Without a doubt, the forces of globalisation and the influence of transnational corporations have wreaked havoc, while the prescriptions of global lenders have constrained citizens' choices. But these are not the causes of Kenya's straitened democracy circumstances; they merely exacerbate a situation that has never favoured the people. The venality of Kenya's aristocracy remains what it was in 1897, 1920, 1963, 1969, 1978 and 2002.

Kenyans, by and large, seem fine by this. The few Kenyans who want to change things do not wan change for the benefit of the people but for the opportunity to become members of the aristocracy too. The last major wave of change-agents fizzled out in the rapacious venality and criminality of 2003. You can see them today, in their swanky high-rise offices, lording it over the great unwashed. You can see them get increasingly agitated every time the law courts refuse to endorse one of the crazier schemes. 

What you do not see is the citizenry demanding the same rights and privileges as the aristocracy; you see them begging for them when the poor are massacred in their schools, flooded out of their hovels, buried under the rubble of their collapsed places of work...You don't see them demanding their rights. You see them on their knees before the aristocracy and the aristocracy doing what it does best: tightening the screws just a little bit tighter.