Kenya meltdown

The assassination of 2 human rights advocates means Mwai Kibaki will supervise a huge bloodletting without compunction.  It is as Bernard Porter in the LRB (if you subscribe) says, except, Porter sometimes seems to embrace a weaker version of the prejudices he dismisses in his accounts. There is nothing special about Africans in the world community that makes them "culturally" susceptible to bad government or fraud. It is not only just that the "it is our turn to eat" framework was violated by Kibaki, as Porter has it. It is not only that tribalism was no big deal and then became a big issue under Daniel Arap Moi.  It is that the state is disfunctional to civil society in Kenya, as it is in many postcolonial African countries. The state must be an impartial arbiter, not a slouching leviathan looking to first one, then the next tribe. The looking to first one and then the other tribe is the problem.

We in the United States have to act now.  Today is the time to punish Kibaki's government with measures now, not after a massive slaughter and ethnic cleansing in the cities, no government aid, no more loans, no nothing. Only save travel, the role of human beings going from one place to another, learning about where they are. And medicine so as not to wound the hurt. Other than that no more money. Stop Mercedes from selling Kenyan governmental officials white Benzes. Stop the liquor companies. Prevent the Kenyan bottle company from getting materials from the West. Stop the auto parts. No more container ships.  No more computer deals. No more US money handed over to the forty-person fake cabinet. Just as in 1907, when Casement and Morel reported about the Congo atrocities, publicize the killing of innocents.  Do it now before it gets really really bad.

Reorient the trade to countries that do not attack and kill their own citizens. A very simple rule.