NAIROBI, KENYA—In a conflict of endless complexity, one simple truth now stands out as the most salient feature of Kenya’s post-election crisis: the government has allowed itself to be overwhelmed by teenaged mobs whose most sophisticated projectile is a poison arrow.

An understaffed — and in some cases complicit — police force has been left to its own devices; gangsters are running circles round it while the army watches from the barracks. There may be several reasons for this, but the most likely is that authorities are afraid to acknowledge they’ve got an emergency on their hands. By withholding the armed forces, that’s just what they’ve created.

The impunity with which murderers are operating — often in front of television cameras — is ample demonstration of the government’s ability to deny this descent into chaos. Their head-in-the-sand approach has been clear ever since president Kibaki visited the war-torn Rift province more than two weeks ago.

The province covers a 300 km stretch of the Rift Valley, that ancient parting of tectonic plates where the Leakey family dug through so much of humanity’s past. The lush, rolling hills now harbour a dark new set of anthropological secrets. Immediately prior to Kibaki’s visit, roughly 100,000 farmers were chased from their homes at knifepoint and herded into refugee camps, where they continue to be attacked in the night.

Kibaki came by helicopter — the vigilante groups blocking the highway would have made driving slow and annoying — and touched down in the northern town of Eldoret. It’s possible he napped during the flight and so failed to notice that most of the landscape below was charred and still smoking; it’s also true that after some initially fierce riots, Eldoret’s post-election violence subsided without leaving much trace in the architecture. A cursory look, which is surely all he got, wouldn’t have revealed anything amiss.

So perhaps Kibaki believed his own lie when he assured his audience they had nothing to fear. No need to cower at home, he told them, life could go on as before. In a moment of divine serendipity, he had just finished saying that “the perpetrators of criminal acts will be brought to justice,” when the crowd before him began to shout and wave. What was all the commotion? It took the old man a few moments to figure it out, but eventually he turned to look at what everyone was pointing to: Arsonists had ignited several homes just a few hundred metres behind his stage; for anyone looking in the right direction, the flames were impossible not to see.

But not, apparently, to ignore. “Let them burn,” Kibaki said grandly. “We will apprehend the people who have done this, too.”

If by apprehend he meant allow vengeful atrocities to play out across the country, then the president was true to his word. Instead of arrests, his speech was followed by more death and displacement. Out of more than 800 officially tracked murders so far, only twenty are being investigated.

And if it seemed for a brief period to be subsiding, there’s no question now that the violence has resumed its initial intensity. As before, it’s all about revenge. Kikuyus tired of waiting for the government to protect them are taking to the streets on the principle that the best defense is a good offense. Their mobs are spontaneous and unpredictable; most recently they formed in the southern end of Rift Valley, engulfing the towns of Nakuru and Naivasha. An area previously known for providing Europe with a third of its cut flowers is now famous for propagating death by machete.

“For every Kikuyu killed,” one aspiring gangster promised a reporter, “we will murder three Luos.”

Meanwhile, Kofi Annan is trying to hammer some sort of a pax out of the two protagonists. At first, his chances looked good — the day after he arrived, Kibaki and Odinga met face to face for the first time since December 27th. They came out of the meeting smiling; not only that, they looked each other in the eye and shook hands.

And then they read their speeches.

Odinga’s was appropriately bland. “I have promised to go the extra mile to bring peace to this country,” he declared, “and I remain committed to that cause.” Kibaki listened, grinned, and introduced himself as Kenya’s “duly elected president.” He might as well just have said “go fuck yourself.”

The renewed flow of blood in the streets is a testament to the power of words. It has also revealed the monumental scale of Annan’s task. Terrified of what may come to pass should he leave without brokering a deal, Kenyans are literally praying for him to deliver a miracle.

Worst of all, it may well be that the crisis has transcended the pride of two tyrants. Many are asking: does it even matter what agreement is reached in the capital? Whoever comes out on top, the country’s criminal element has already started acting on the one clear lesson from the struggle for power going on above them: There’s no law left to fear.

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Posted on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 at 11:29 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.