Kibaki must now answer back

President Kibaki is a mysterious, inscrutable old man. That in a nutshell is why the opposition for all its boasts about its political prowess has found it impossible to beat him; resorting instead to smashing the chessboard and the pieces. It is difficult to beat an old man whose core strategy is to ignore you.

For Kenya at large, much accustomed as it is to an over-bearing head of state and government, Mwai Kibaki's presidency -for all the calls for a reduction in presidential powers- has proved to be a most introverted one. Apart from a brief series of outings in the campaign period, gone was the constancy of the powerful, omniscient, hectoring, itinerant patriarch. Instead, all that filtered down from the presidency are genially broadcasted progress reports on the growth of the economy, achievements in healthcare and in governance -much of them relayed by the Government Spokesman or the Presidential Press Service.

Read more from Wanjiru Kamau here.

The lie of the land

The Africa Policy Institute, a Kenya based independent think tank has released a report titled The Lie of the land: Evictions and Kenya's crisis.

It argues that while Kenya, like other former British white settler colonies such as South Africa and Zimbabwe have yet to decisively deal with the legacy of colonial and post-colonial injustices relating to land ownership, the link between the on-going systematic evictions in the Rift Valley and Western Kenya and “post-colonial injustices” relating to land is very tenuous. A much more plausible explanation is that Kenya is reeling under a deadly intra-elite power game that has come to characterise multi-party politics here.

Read more from Patrick Mutahi here.