Legitimacy

I can't say anything about the situation in Kenya beyond what I read in the papers but it does speak in some ways to the misguided embrace of "democracy" as the key indicator for political development. The idea of an effective democracy presupposes the idea of a broad consensus about the legitimate decision-making unit. Viewed in those terms, the noteworthy thing about Kenya isn't so much that there was a closely contested election marred by credible allegations of fraud followed by something of a popular uprising against the regime, but the fact that there's such substantial support for the incumbent anyway: "Gangs of young men have built roadblocks between the neighborhoods of the Kikuyus, Mr. Kibaki’s tribe, and the Luos, the tribe of Raila Odinga, the top opposition leader, who narrowly lost the election [...] the no man’s land between them is often a single lane of potholed asphalt, patrolled by men holding huge rocks in their hands."

If Kikuyus feel that their main loyalty should be toward the Kikuyu then there mere fact that the Kikuyu may be outnumbered by the Luos isn't going to carry much weight. In the US, pretty much everyone thinks of themselves as owing primary allegiance to the United States. But it wasn't always thus. During the Civil War, at least some Southerners agreed to abide by the decisions of their respective state governments to secede without necessarily believing that secession was the best move on the merits. These days, the number of Americans who seriously contest the legitimacy of the United States of America as a decision-making unit is trivial, which is what makes things like Orson Scott Card's Empire so preposterous.

But that sense of agreement about the legitimate level of decision-making doesn't just happen inevitably because you live in the same borders with some other people. In Iraq, clearly, you don't have it just as Chechens seem disinclined to treat "Russia" as a legitimate unit and just as how the Irish in the early 20th century didn't view their right to elect members of parliament in Westminster as adequate compensation for the absence of national self-determination.

Comments

agreed to abide by the decisions of their respective state governments to secede without necessarily believing that secession was the best move on the merits

Is that the polite way of saying "blamed their treason on peer pressure"?

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | January 1, 2008 5:17 PM

Much has been said about the recently concluded presidential election that Raila Odinga lost but which still gave his party sufficient constituency wins to control parliament.
There is a feeling of resignation, shock and being cheated at the electoral loss and this is fully understandable. Those of us old enough will recall the 1992 election where everyone thought they would beat the KANU candidate Daniel Arap Moi but he still came out triumphant. Opposition leaders screamed that Moi had rigged the elections and even FORD Asili's Kenneth Matiba went the extra mile to file a petition in court, one which ultimately failed on a technicality.

A study of the 1992 elections is bound to give a better insight on when the rain started beating Raila Odinga. In the 1992 elections, the opposition was its own worst enemy, they split the anti-Moi vote leaving a large path clear for their nemesis to coast to victory.

For the 2002 election, it was always emphasised that turn out would be the biggest contributor to a presidential poll win. Kibaki and his people knew that if they mobilised their communities, then they stood a big chance of winning it. Raila and his ODM preached this message to their people. The result has been perhaps one of the closest fought elections and in many parts of the country, one with the highest voter turn out.

In Luo Nyanza for instance, there were very high turnouts in the region of 90%. I am ignoring the figures circulated yesterday that had places like Emgwen with a +100% turnout on the basis that these are arithmetic errors. The final counts will be interesting when finally posted by the ECK.

As I said above, ODM were beneficiaries of many seats in parliament. But where it really mattered and counted, there were areas that let down ODM and perhaps turned the election in favour of Kibaki. In Western Kenya, the Luhya voted for ODM candidates but they were averaging a 55% voter turn out. So when the presidential tally was taken, Kibaki managed 40% of the Western vote, but this was only a small figure in a province of 2 million voters.

In the Rift Valley for instance, the turn out was extremely high and this helped boost Raila's vote as they gave him 1.5 million votes much higher than the Raila got from his own backyard. In an earlier article, I had alluded to how much Raila would owe the Kalenjin should he have won the election. Perhaps in another thread, I will write on the possible future political position of the Kalenjin.

In Kibaki's strongholds and perhaps in reaction to the anti-GEMA passions fueled by the ODM campaign, they voted in HUGE numbers like their lives depended on it. Services ranging from food, transport and even reception into public areas was denied anyone without the ink stain that proved participation in the election. ODM were in shock when they started receiving the figures and it was inevitable that there would be claims of inflation of figures. But let's step back and look closer at the figures. If you take the Kasarani vote for instance, the winner was an ODM candidate. The many Kikuyu candidates on the ballot contributed to the PNU loss, dividing the massive block that voted for President Kibaki between themselves. Their supporters however all voted for Kibaki which led to an overall Kibaki win in Kasarani.

Having put the reality of the vote on record above, let us now interrogate the ODM's claims.

According to the party, the results announced in the constituencies do not tally with those that were read out by the Electoral Commission in Nairobi. These claims of doctoring of results have been repeated so many times that the main issue or problem has remained clouded. It also seems that the problem was with form 16A that left the constituency, and the final one that got to the ECK headquarters.

The ECK has called for an internal inquiry as to whether anyone of them did doctor the results. Perhaps a belated attempt at redeeming their own credibility. But I would like to imagine that this was the position taken by all other commissioners in order that they can clear their institution of blame rather than a mini-rebellion in ECK as some would wish we believed. Indeed in his final statements ECK Chairman Samuel Kivuitu did confess that he had been presented with weighty and troubling questions by both sides, but that the commission was powerless in dealing with these. Like the ECK Commissioners yesterday, he asked the aggrieved parties to seek resolution before a court of law.

One of the problems of Raila and the ODM's chest-thumping after they election is that it only served to whip up emotions without producing any facts. Macharia Gaitho writes in the Daily Nation that in a phone call with the ODM candidate, he was PROMISED evidence by Raila of the voting fraud. This was on the 30th December. He has not to this day received any of it, and neither has anyone in the media. I quote,

ODM also produced what looked like potent evidence in testimony from an ECK officer who said he had witnessed with his own eyes figures being altered. He said he had the evidence, but did not produce any such papers.

Curiously, the ODM leaders had, at the time of writing, not bothered to make public any of the documents they claimed to have in their possession, save for the Molo returns.

I personally spoke to Mr Odinga on Sunday shortly after the statement issued at the KICC. He promised to have the documents delivered to me at Nation Centre within the half hour. No show.

I know that many of my colleagues seeking the same documents also spoke to other members of the ODM Pentagon, campaign aides, party officials and anybody else who could help. Blanks.
The ODM leaders would help their cause a great deal if they provided that documentary evidence. If they have it, it need not await the filing of any election petition. They battle right now is in the public court.

The continued refusal to accede to the jurisdiction of the courts where any facts that would validate the ODM candidate's cause would be displayed for all to see, only helps convince those of us who would like to give Raila the benefit of doubt that his effort is more about politics than fact.

We are all aware of the numbers read per constituency by the ECK. In each and every polling station, Presidential Polling Agents were all given copies of form 16A. It is presumed that ODM has these forms for all the 210 constituencies. They should be in a position to tell Kenyans that these are then X constituencies where we have form16A that differs from what the ECK read. This form 16A would also have been signed by the Kibaki agents to authenticate the final result. It would not be very difficult to produce such documentation to the media, who will no doubt be consumed with glee, and publish these figures to all and sundry. This will help clear the air about these allegations of rigging and place a permanent hole in the election's credibility. I would be among the first ones to condemn such attempts at rigging.

My only concern is that ODM and Raila are not going to provide this information. They will promulgate a rigging effort in such abstract terms and insist that they did not lose the election. It will be a repeat of 1992 where Kenneth Matiba was never convinced that he lost the election, even though he had no evidence of this above a certain je ne sais quoi.

I expect that this article will be met with the usual cynicism from ODM's supporters, where we never want to stop and think or ask the right questions. It will be taken as pro-Kibaki propaganda. I do not have a problem with that, but it is still an objective piece where we are asking ODM to show the facts and not the figures that they were sending to KTN on a regular basis, figures which are indeed responsible for the mess we are in today. Talking of KTN, they were the new Citizen Radio which transmitted the results of 2002, but unlike in 2002, the Citizen results were self-collected rather than provided by a political party - and this would explain the inflated figures for both candidates before KTN reverted to the correct values provided by Electoral Commission of Kenya.

ODM owes all Kenyans, especially those that support it the truth about the elections. If they do not, it will remain an insult to the lives of all those who have been killed in the mayhem that has visited us in the aftermath of the announcement of the results.

Posted by mogi yusuf | January 1, 2008 5:30 PM

Whoa! OSC really got paranoid didn't he?

As for democracy and nationhood, it's easy to forget that Kenya's first president was elected in 1964. In a way, the nation is 40 years old. Add to that, the borders were drawn in colonial times.

One might suspect that absent some serious federalisation project, the country may not be inherently that stable.

Posted by Meh | January 1, 2008 5:32 PM

I'm sure that Mr. otto will be along shortly to blame the problems in Kenya on Israel.

Posted by SLC | January 1, 2008 5:33 PM

Am I the only one who wishes the red states would break off into a separate country? If the US were to follow blue-state policies, the rest of the world wouldn't hate us so much, and we wouldn't have to subsidize the idiots who think abortion rights are more important than fiscal and foreign policy put together. Sorry, but the South has been holding this country back since Yorktown ("We demand the federal capital be in the South, even though NYC is the most important city and financial capital." So it's in a geographic area that makes no sense at all.) Oh and the slavery thing.

the number of Americans who seriously contest the legitimacy of the United States of America as a decision-making unit is trivial
That number is going to go up with the recession this year, the housing collapse, the declining dollar, and the increasing price of oil. And it's going to keep on going up as people gradually come to recognize that the American way of life based on driving for every little thing and exponential economic growth forever in a finite world is going to becoming untenable in the first half of this century, probably within the next 10 years. For example, I have put money into Social Security for my retirement. There is no way I will see any of it, considering the US government is going to default on its debt before then at the rate things are going.

U.S. Treasury securities are AAA and are considered to be virtually free of credit risk as they are backed by the full faith and taxing power of the United States.
http://personal.fidelity.com/products/fixedincome/risks.shtml
Ha! If only that were true. It didn't have to be this way, but the conservatives don't like to pay for anything, so now we have a lot more debt than we did in 2000, a trade deficit of $800 billion that will never go away so long as we depend on oil (every year we import $400 billion in oil, and that's only going to go up since the price of oil is going to keep spiraling up), which means the dollar will keep declining.

That is why Americans will lose faith. When I go to the gym and see the inane stuff on TV like ads for Celebrity Apprentice, I think about how unserious this culture is, and how its leaders reflect that lack of seriousness. When I read the political blogs, it really ain't much better. There are serious and very real problems facing this country, and the ignorance about them and focus on trivial nonsense, even in politics, even by people who think they are addressing the most important issues, is breathtaking.

Posted by blah2 | January 1, 2008 5:57 PM

This post seems mixed up to me. Or maybe it is just that the idea of "legitimate decision making unit" is unclear.

In one respect, the idea of divided loyalties is not much different here. I'll bet that Kenyans think the "legitimate decision making unit" is "Kenya", but that their loyalty to their tribe would lead them to support their tribesman for leader of Kenya. Similarly, here, African-Americans, to take one example, believe that the "legitimate decision making unit" is "the USA", but that their loyalty to their race would lead them to support Obama. (Similar things could be said about, say, Christian fundamentalists and Huckabee, perhaps.)

That's quite different than the idea of self-determination than Matthew brings up in his last paragraph. The Kenyan tribes don't want "self-determination" the way that Chechens do, or Kosovars, or whatever. Chechens don't want to rule over all of Russia; they just want self-determination for Chechnya. The Kenyan tribes, however, each want to rule over all of Kenya. (And here in the US, African-Americans would want Obama to be President of all of the US, not just African-Americans in the US.)

I think more clarity is needed here.

Posted by Al | January 1, 2008 6:06 PM

Is that the polite way of saying "blamed their treason on peer pressure"?

Never understood this. A desire for self-determination is not treason.

Posted by Al | January 1, 2008 6:08 PM

That is why Americans will lose faith. When I go to the gym and see the inane stuff on TV like ads for Celebrity Apprentice, I think about how unserious this culture is, and how its leaders reflect that lack of seriousness.

Free advice, dude: When one starts posting off-topic screeds (and this is not your first) about how TV ads are signifiers of impending catastrophe, it is time to take some time off. Go get laid, or have a couple drinks, or smoke a bowl, or whatever's necessary to get you off your present paranoid trip.

Posted by James Gary | January 1, 2008 6:16 PM

Al: I'd dispute that the major Kenyan tribes would not want self-determination, it's more that the constitution of Kenya as is doesn't provide a mechanism for self-determination to occur.

Posted by Meh | January 1, 2008 6:22 PM

Al, it's only treason when you don't sympathise with the group that wants self-determination.

Posted by oljb | January 1, 2008 6:25 PM

Meh, maybe you are right, but I don't see the evidence for that. Certainly not in the linked article. In all those cases, the tribesmen were looking for their tribe to rule over all of Kenya, not just their own tribe. Contrast with, say, Kosovo, where the Kosovars are looking for self-determination - meaning rule over Kosovo, not over all of Serbia.

Posted by Al | January 1, 2008 6:29 PM

it always amazes me that people can justify southern secession as a "desire for self determination" never mind the self determination of millions of black slaves. what are you smoking?

Posted by english teacher | January 1, 2008 6:50 PM

"...which is what makes things like Orson Scott Card's Empire so preposterous."

Other than the writing, you mean?

Posted by Matt (not the famous one) | January 1, 2008 6:56 PM

Democracy does not equal elections. It's simplistic to think that after a national vote, the majority winners will run a democratic country.

Majority decision making simply doesn't work when voting is determined by pre-determined allegiance -- allegiance to ethnic group or tribe or religion. The elections in Iraq did not result in democracy in any sense that I can recognize.

It seems to me that electoral democracy only works when individual voters make individual among candidates or propositions.

Matt is arguing that democracy requires a broad consensus of the legitimacy of the governing unit. I would add that elections are only democratic when individual voters make individual choices.

Posted by jk | January 1, 2008 7:02 PM

James Gray: When one starts posting off-topic screeds (and this is not your first) about how TV ads are signifiers of impending catastrophe, it is time to take some time off. Go get laid, or have a couple drinks, or smoke a bowl, or whatever's necessary to get you off your present paranoid trip.

So you tell a person who is concerned that people aren't focusing on important matters because they're too busy having a good time to...forget about his concerns and just have a good time. You don't see any irony here?

It ain't paranoid if it's true. Al Gore and Bill Clinton have stated they are aware of peak oil and the danger it poses. So have the Prime Minister of New Zealand and officials in France and many, many others. Billionaire investors like Boone Pickens and Richard Rainwater have bet hundreds of millions on it. The European energy commission, the IEA, states that supply will not be able to meet demand by 2012 at the latest, probably sooner. And oil production has been flat for 2.5 years.

All the recent evidence backs up the thesis that oil supply cannot meet demand and that supply is going to start decreasing soon. Everyday there's another story about its effect. Here is today's:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20071231/wl_csm/o2008food_1
Notice the mention of political unrest because of it.

The US imports almost 3/4 of its oil, paying over a billion dollars a day for it. This is not sustainable, and nothing is being done about it, people aren't even talking about it, not even the presidential candidates. Take a look at http://www.oilposter.org/posterlarge.html and it's all you need to know to see that right about now the fuel of the global economy is hitting a wall. If this doesn't concern you a great deal, I don't know what will. If the lack of attention it's getting doesn't disturb you, there's not much I can do to change that, I agree.

Posted by blah2 | January 1, 2008 7:58 PM

An Iranian blogger is sued for $2m by a guy in the Israel lobby's think-tank, WINEP. He needs our help. Can you write about his case?
http://hoder.com/weblog/archives/016557.shtml

Posted by Mark L. | January 1, 2008 8:24 PM

Guys patrolling the road with big rocks.

"If Kikuyus feel that their main loyalty should be toward the Kikuyu then there mere fact that the Kikuyu may be outnumbered by the Luos isn't going to carry much weight."

This is called chimp behavior.

You see it in a lot of places, even outside Africa.

Maybe we should get rid of all the chimpanzees in Africa and in zoos across the world - maybe people would stop emulating them.

Naah.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | January 1, 2008 8:25 PM

Democracy works for us because we were born as one. However, the european countries embrace socialism more and it works for them.
You cannot force your ways on others and expect the same result when it's not done their own way.
And forcing your ways on others never works out.
That is the problem with Iraq. It was never a country that came together on their own and worked as any form of a functioning democracy. So, how can anyone with sense expect to go in and expect them to imitate us. Especially since they are in a region that doesn't have any democracies.
We are bullies, stupid and totally impractical people when it comes to understanding the world.
Instead of understanding it we try to make it like us so we can understand it.

Posted by vwcat | January 1, 2008 8:44 PM

Re: We demand the federal capital be in the South, even though NYC is the most important city and financial capital."

Washington was just barely in the South. It's more central than Southern, and back in the late 18th century a centrally located capital made a lot of practical sense. Many state capitals from the pre-modern transportation era are also located more or less in either the geographic or population center of their states.

Re: That number is going to go up with the recession this year, the housing collapse, the declining dollar, and the increasing price of oil.

We had all those things (or things like them) in the late 70s. How many people were ready to rebel against the federal government?

Re: The European energy commission, the IEA, states that supply will not be able to meet demand by 2012

There is no such thing as "supply not meeting demand". As prices rise people cut back usage (demand falls) or substitute other goods.

Posted by Jonf | January 1, 2008 8:49 PM

There's another tribal nation where threats are being uttered about secession if the wrong party wins. It is called the United Kingdom, and the idea that Scotland might secede if Cameron's Tories win has become a regular topic in the Comments are Free Blog. Plus, of course, Belgium is breaking up.

I believe that Belgium will break up before Kenya does, actually.

Posted by roger | January 1, 2008 9:03 PM

I don't think it's fair to interpret the events in Kenya to mean that there is not a Kenyan identification among the population. There are certainly strong tribal identifications but my experience has been that there are also strong Kenyan identifications. True, people do vote in Kenya along triable lines. In the U.S. we like to think we vote according to ideas. But I think we just define our tribes a bit differently (religion, etc.). In the U.S. we have a larger number of people who don't strongly identify with a "tribe" than there are in Kenya, but I would submit that most of in the U.S. do identify with a group and that that identification can be quite rigid.

What happened in the 2000 election in the U.S. enraged a lot of people. It seems to me that there is some strong evidence that in Kenya (according to independent observers) there was clumsy, visible and significant fraud. If there had been that level of fraud in the U.S. in the 2000 election, and a large group felt that this fraud represented a blunt continuation of their long-term disenfranchisement, and if our country were much poorer than it is, then we might indeed have seen a much stronger response than the one we got.

I spent a couple of years in Kenya and the idea of being Kenyan to those I came to call friends was serious. They recognized and worried about tribalism, and at times fell prey to it, but they felt a strong national pride. What seems to have happened in Kenya is that a group in power tried to keep power in a destructive way. I think we've seen that happen even in countries where democracy is well rooted.

Posted by Hugh Simmons | January 1, 2008 9:10 PM

"Instead of understanding it we try to make it like us so we can understand it."

It goes way deeper than that, as my chimp remark was meant to point out.

Humans exist in a state of total paranoid war with all other members of the species at all times. This only gets knocked off track when sex rears its head - and sometimes not even then. That's part of what evolution has selected sex to do - prevent a social species from dying out due to uncontrolled competition.

Humans have a pre-rational unconscious perception of the world as a zero-sum game. This comes directly from their primate heritage. "If you get all the bananas, I have to die - so you have to die so I get all the bananas." Humans have the conceptual ability and imagination to deal with the world as a non-zero-sum game, but rarely do so. The notion of cooperation and non-violent competition simply gets overwhelmed whenever primate fear takes the helm - which is just about 24x7x365.

The expression of this can take complex forms due to the higher developed nature of human brains over chimp brains and human societies over a chimp troop, but that's about it. The basic attitudes remain firmly embedded.

The fact that these African nations - as well as many ME nations like Iraq - are still operating on a more-or-less tribal basis is why "democracy" in the Western nation-state sense can never work there.

They have to have their tribes beaten down by industrialization, the nuclear family, forced "education", and a host of other means introduced to reduce the tribal allegiances and fracture the population into a bunch of scared INDIVIDUALS before the state can work effectively at introducing "democracy" - which phrase merely means homogenizing the population and manipulating them to support a central power structure - for the purpose of those who want to run that central power structure.

If your tribal leader is the one who gets you a job, a wife, deals with your problems, how is a centralized state going to take over those roles? Only by beating down the tribe completely and destroying those roles.

This is how Western "civilization" did it, and how Asian "civilization" did it long before the West. Now the ME and African cultures get to do it, egged on by the Western and Eastern states.

Some historians regard this process as the biggest wrong turn humans ever took, and that the breakdown of the state in many places with a return to ethnic and religious identities is a reaction to that, enhanced by the rise of technology which augments local economic efforts but still allows long-distance communication and trade with other demographics. This also explains the rise of social groupings based on ideology, or even entertainment pastimes. It also explains the rise of 4th Generation Warfare.

The final result is irrelevant, because technology is coming that will devastate the notions of states and tribes, as well as what it means to be human at all.

Both states and tribes are in for a rough century.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | January 1, 2008 9:17 PM

JonF said:

"There is no such thing as 'supply not meeting demand'. As prices rise people cut back usage (demand falls) or substitute other goods. "

This is correct, I guess, but doesn't provide much comfort for the future. In a famine, for instance, to "cut back usage" usually refers to people dead from starvation no longer trying to acquire food. Or perhaps from people "substituting other goods" in the form of eating shoe leather, glue and motor oil.

Posted by oljb | January 1, 2008 10:00 PM

Thank you mogi yusuf, for an informative post.

It's going on 15 years since I was last there, but I enjoyed it and the people I worked with and recommend Kenya to vacationers and those seeking business.

The post Matt made incorrectly hinted at two tribes in conflict, when actually Kenya has a "balance" of many tribes in distinct areas, each with some resources and infrastructure but none, IMO, able to make a go of it alone - or given tribal size - rule the whole place as they please.

From the CIA Factbook, tribes as portions of the population: - Kikuyu 22%, Luhya 14%, Luo 13%, Kalenjin 12%, Kamba 11%, Kisii 6%, Meru 6%, other African 15%, non-African (Asian, European, and Arab) 1%

Nor is Matt right about the cancer of multiculturalism and identity politics continually exerting centrifugal forces on society as long as they are accepted as good vs. highly dangerous.

It leads to war, ethnic cleansing, and breakup of nations, ultimately. Even America is threatened long-term by blacks conditioned to see themselves as blacks first, not American. Native Americans not wishing to get off the Rez and assimilate but embracing the Cult of Victimhood and separate ID.
And we may face a Quebec with the mass legal and illegal Latin invasion of America in future years.

We don't have to look far or too long in the past to see the disaster MultiCulti is. The Former Yugoslavia, former USSR, Czechslovakia, Congo, Spain and ETA, Irish, Rwanda, S Africa, Zimbabwe, Pakistan, Iraq, now even friggin' Belgium.

The other solution path, pomo, that says nations are just so over and we have "international" or regional supergovernments ready to replace nations and "do away with foolish unguided masses" and "nationalist evils"??? Well, it would be fine if the UN and "international law" run by Lefty human rights lawyers had worked, but it hasn't. Nor has taking away the vote of people of a nation and doing away with their culture, social norms, the Constitution they created really been accepted.

This started with Jewish transnationalism and cosmopolitanism which argued that the ideal life would be stateless people free to move where the rights and money-making opportunities were good, as they pleased and bail out of a bad country just like shedding an unwanted car. National loyalty was silly. Then came Trotsky and his own varient of Jewish transnationalism, which was that the Communist Revolution respected no BOrders and would do away with nationhood in favor of a COMITERN, an international committee of Communists that would consolidate the workers of the world under one Part, One Law. Then of course the mighty UN, with it's mightt disappointment. In the 50s and 60s came pacifist, anti-West opinion that war and colonialism were products of and only possible with the malignacy of nationalism and the Answer was One World Government, run by the best Ruling Elites that Communism, Jewish transnationalists and lawyers, and the Left of America and Europe could provide. Then of course the 60s also saw the 180 Deg different rise of the multinational corporations - with loyalty to no country. In a sense, to serve themselves, the multinationals have been more successful than any previous transnational movement - reorganizing the world into borderless labor and resource centers in a race to the bottom for lowest price worker and commodity, free trade, global capital firms and banks government and private, and establishment of laws people of no nation voted for that facilitate the Ruling Elite agenda and regulate the People in each nation.

For Kenya, the future is perhaps the best for them if they go to a sustainable birth rate given water and arable land constraints and use the schools as committed nationally and evaluated on success in various means of assimilation, with jobs offered without tribal discrimination and with a continual war on corruption and the idea that 90% of government spending must be done in Nairobi. Nairobi is now an unlivable mega-city. Better Kenya spreads its industry, commerce and people out. Do as Brazil has done and create new cities from scratch. Two new Mombasa-sized cities along or near the Indian ocean coast where water is plentiful, and one on Lake Turkana to depopulate Nairobi 50%.

Posted by Chris Ford | January 1, 2008 10:28 PM

Someone described Chris Ford as Cliff Claven with a severe brain injury.

I think it's more like Cliff Claven after a couple of skinheads invited him down for a joint that they had rolled out of copies of "Right as Reina" and he's getting high and trying to make his point and things like "This was a great country until the niggers took over!" keep jumping out of his mouth.

Posted by Ed Marshall | January 1, 2008 10:42 PM

Some people call Ed Marshall a rent boy cock-sucking traitor.

That is wrong.

He is basically a craven little cock sucker for pay.

The treason against country is simply gratis. Ed proudly takes no pay for that, since it is from the heart.

Posted by Chris Ford | January 2, 2008 12:55 AM

So which Jewish neocon group is paying you, Chris?

What, you do this bullshit for free?

You must be nuts.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | January 2, 2008 2:02 AM

I'm sure that Mr. otto will be along shortly to blame the problems in Kenya on Israel.

Er, no.

Posted by otto | January 2, 2008 5:05 AM

Sorry, but the South has been holding this country back since Yorktown ("We demand the federal capital be in the South, even though NYC is the most important city and financial capital." So it's in a geographic area that makes no sense at all.)

That would be Philadelphia, not NYC.

Posted by Njorl | January 2, 2008 9:26 AM

Chris Ford doesn't seem to realize that being called a cocksucker by a racist fascist is a compliment. It's like being called a socialist by people who thought that Martin Luther King was a racist communist bent on destroying American and selling white people as sex slaves to Castro and Ho Chi Minh.

Posted by Reality Man | January 2, 2008 9:47 AM

I do not think that "locus of decision-making" is as dead an issue as you think in America; a large portion of Paul's appeal (and of the ground-level culture war) is driven by arguments over the proper locus of decision-making.

Posted by SamChevre | January 2, 2008 10:54 AM