You were hopefully spared the shocking visual in last week's print media of a mother in Kenya, lying dead
on the floor in a large pool of her own congealed blood, her eyes wide open and her arms akimbo, while her orphaned toddler sat crouched and screaming in terror on a nearby chair. I'm not repeating it here. The 
picture was too shocking even to become the iconic picture of the chaos as did several from the Vietnam War.
The dreadful hidden cost to the on-going Kenyan riots, instability and killings is of course the psychological impact on impressionable young minds. In Kenya, most people alive today, have pretty much lived a peaceful, if poor existence. So the scale and intensity of the current election-driven violence is all the more out of kilter with what Kenyans have come to expect and know.
One wonders if incumbent Mwai Kibaki and the Pretender to the throne, Raila Odinga have paused to consider this in their ego-driven, testosterone-fuelled jousting?
Anyone notice the total absence of former epitome of corrupt African presidencies, Daniel Arap Moi? Is he hiding out in a chateau on Lake Geneva or summat? Nary a peep from him.
The Kenyan future now has a virus in it. It will spread its slow contagion of dysfunctionality and distorted value systems and if the script runs true to form, Kenya in fifteen to twenty years will experience a wave of crime, a lack of respect for elders or authority, self-serving thuggish behaviour and a brutality among its young adults that will parallel what we have in South Africa. The law of cause and effect is regretfully as inexorable as the slow pace of non-change that continues to afflict the African continent.
imbizo.com
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