The conventional wisdom in the Kenyan media is that the 2013 election has been an ethnic census, not issue-based. This half-truth fails to recognize the issues that drive the ethnicisation of politics.. It is true that the easiest way to predict how an individual voted would be to know his or her ethnicity. What is not so obvious is to perceive how ethnic blocs have voted and for whom. To graph this we actually need to look at the issues

At high school we watched the screening of Steven Spielberg’s Poltergeist.  In the Movie a family lives in a house erected on a graveyard without knowing it. This did not go down well with the spirits of the dead, who made their displeasure known by slowly torturing the family to madness.

The previous Kenyan election had been marred by ugly scenes of wide spread post electoral violence. This time around as Kenyans again went into election gear, the whole world held its breath. By the end of the day when without a sign of violence it was all over, you could almost hear the collective global sigh of relief. To that extent the 2013 election was a success.

At the first war crimes tribunal at Nuremberg at the end of World War II a total of 23 accused stood at the dock. The trial lasted 13 months. By comparison there only 5 accused stood at the dock at the Pennon Pen trial. Yet the proceedings have now lasted 7 years and still running.

Whenever and wherever in the world Miriam Makeba took to the stage in performance of the one and only Malaika, the African love song, she first made famous and then help drive to the top of the charts, to become one of the most loved of all love songs, nothing so becomes this delicate and charming Empress of Songs.

If there were an African country in which the leader was so imbued so fired with dreams and plans for a better tomorrow for his under developed land and his impoverished people, that country was Tanzania. If there were a country in which grand and sincere dreams for a better future in the end went terribly wrong and caused untold sufferings for millions. That country is Tanzania. If the saying, bad things can happen to good people could apply to a whole country. That country is Tanzania.

Something is happening in Africa; particularly in one corner, to the mid south east of the vast continent. It is noteworthy that the ongoing world economic crisis, particularly in Europe, has had little negative impact on most African economies. Instead African countries have been able to take advantage of the strong foundations they built in the years leading up to the present crisis

Sadly, it's for the same reasons that India bribes, honks unnecessarily, drives drunk and over speeds, why it pushes and pulls and can't form a line, why it spits and urinates where it wants and why it insists on scratching its balls before dishing out food with the same hands.