Kenya’s decline and fall

The streets are no longer burning, but smouldering corruption at every level of government threatens to rip the country apart. Once the pride of East Africa, it has now been judged a failure of a state, writes Daniel Howden.

More than 1,500 people died in violence which took the world by surprise when it broke out last year after Raila Odinga won the Kenyan election.

Eighteen months after East Africa’s island of stability was brought to the brink of civil war by the fallout from a stolen election, there is a temptation to assume that if the country is not burning, it must be healing. That would be wrong, according to the annual index of failed states, issued yesterday, which put Kenya in the critically failed group, one place below Burma.

The appearance at 14th in the respected rankings compiled by the US-based Fund for Peace has shocked some in Nairobi but others are clear where the failures lie. “If a state exists to provide security, maintain its borders, provide food and a system of arbitration, then you can make the case that Kenya doesn’t do those things,” says Mr Mwalimu Mati of the Mars Group.

Read more of this story from the Independent newspaper (UK) >>

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