According to Ghai et al, the Crown Lands Ordinance 1915, the Kenya (Annexation) Order-in-Council 1920, and the Kenya Colony Order-in-Council of 1921, cumulatively vested all arable land in the British Crown and utterly disinherited indigenous Kenyans of their land. The Hut Tax Regulations of 1901 and the Hut and Poll Tax Ordinance of 1910 were promulgated to compel Africans, otherwise confined to special Native Reserves, provide labour to the white settlers. The settlers lived in exclusively white highlands in plentiful lavishness, sustained, supported and subsidised by taxes collected from African labourers: they paid no income tax until the 1930s. (This situation may have present-day parallels.)

To entrench, protect, and maintain the class differences between the coloniser and the African, the colonial government created the Kenya Police (KP) and a regimented Provincial Administration, supported by a ruthless Tribal Police force (the precursor of the current day Administration Police - AP). Colonial Chiefs collected taxes, forcing their own people to provide near-slave labour to the colonists. Present-day Kenya, therefore, was founded on the politico-legal jurisprudence of international mercantilism which viewed land as a commodity for commercial exploitation and the people on it as a mere a factor of production, valuable to the extent they could provide labour. Disfranchised of their land, and confined to native reserves devoid of basic infrastructure, Africans reeled under the weight of social and economic tribulation.

 The struggle for independence was underpinned by the people's desire to reclaim their land and free themselves from poverty, ignorance, and disease. The historical conspiracy of exploitation continues to thrive and inform our present political leadership: in 1963 the new African leadership inherited and embraced the colonial superstructure because it served them well, ensuring that they retained the trappings of power, authority and economic advantage that were previously enjoyed by the colonial administrators.

 Forty five years later, the situation persists and our elected "leaders "and "representatives" exhibit a colonial readiness to deploy the Provincial Administration, Kenya Police and the Administration Police (AP) to brutalise their own people for their own selfish interests or at the behest of exploitative multinationals, the rich and politically connected individuals. Kenya is still ruled by the pre-independence generation which does not appear to be in a hurry to hand over political and economic power to a new generation. The political leadership watches passively as criminal cartels and heartless, faceless multinationals exploit our people by charging exorbitant prices for food, water, oil and other basic commodities. The political elite enjoy urbane lives of unsurpassed luxury, protected by state security as they continue to hoard and hold large swathes of land while the majority rural and urban poor continue to live in hovels, contend with insecurity and wallow in abject poverty without a place to call home. Today, wayward politicians thrive on engineering ignorance and orchestrating ethnic violence; those with pending corruption-related court cases serve in cabinet and fly our national flag on their limousines. Ours is a country where a wasteful state beauracracy backed by a complacent political class drive around tarred urban roads in paid-for fuel-guzzling off-roaders and SUVs, while the populace in the marginal rangelands of Northern Kenya and the arid North Eastern Province (NEP) live at the mercy of drought and hunger. Ministers continue to make key public appointments on the basis of an individual's surname rather than merit. And yes, it is the same country where the Speaker of the National Assembly, a Minister of Government and an elected Member of Parliament can publicly equate the payment of tax to philanthropy, folly and misery on the part of their constituents.

This unchecked primitive accumulation of wealth is now untenable. When the late Josiah Mwangi Kariuki, former MP for Nyandarua North, quipped in 1974 that it would reduce Kenya to a country of 10 millionaires and 10 million beggars, he was aptly describing the current socio-economic situation in our country. Ordinary people are desperate and restless. The recent public outrage over soaring food and oil prices, and the reluctance by MPs to pay tax, are clear pointers that the country is on the brink of a socio-politico revolution. It is not whether, but when and how it will happen, that should disturb the political elite and the rising middle class. The 10th parliament has little choice; it must provide leadership or the country will burn. It must reform the present constitutional order and create a politico-legal framework that advances inter-generational equity and ensures equality and justice across the social strata. If not, ordinary citizens will continue to be restive and the 2012 general elections will become the watershed for Kenya.  The country will either sink or celebrate 50 of independence under a new politico-legal dispensation and socio-economic order. For now, independence celebrations only make sense to the political elite: to the ordinary Kenyans the dream of independence from poverty, ignorance and diseases remains just that, a dream!

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