In primary school, one of my biggest heroes was rally driver Nduati Karanja. He was a self-made man with a demeanor similar to mine, as I have since come to appreciate. He was no less outspoken than honest, nor less adventurous than a retiring family man. He was a good man. My last memory of him was one cold Nakuru morning when he dropped his children off at school. Looking back at them, he revved his engine violently and disappeared in a cloud of dust. As children, we did not then understand why his family quietly relocated to the USA but when he turned up dead after a lengthy detention at Nyayo House, it was made clear to everyone.

At around the same time, the families of some of my playmates relocated abroad. A quiet chill crept over all of us, even as we knew that we must not speak about what we thought. It was only in whispers that we raised our voices, and we never ventured into town for fear of being beaten by policemen on horseback. They strutted about the middle of Kenyatta Avenue in Nakuru in those days, looking down from their perches at us walking by.

And then came the 1990s and with them the endless rounds of ethnic clashes. Scores of civilians were displaced from Molo and they descended on the town with tales of horrid ethnic cleansing. Even now, a whole decade on, many families have not recovered from the terror of those days, and the cruel sounds and images keep playing on and on in their nightmares.

In those dark days, when the soil in the Central Rift was soaked with blood, and the air torn with hate, several prominent politicians from the Rift Valley went around filling the people's minds with dreams of violence. They told the people that their land was under siege from foreign interlopers and urged them to rise up and defend it. The consequences were hellish for those living out those times. High Court Justice Bosire for example can testify to the tragedy that visited his family at their Molo farm. A childhood friend of mine, lost a parent in the ensuing violence in so violent a fashion Baghdad's horrors seem tame in comparison. The victim's family returned to the scene days later and struggled, tears boiling their sight away, to pick out his bones and pieces of his dismembered body from around their farm.

This is the reality of Kenya, our country. The current underpinnings of Kenyan violence, both that of the state and that springing from below, cannot be disconnected from the current constitution of our economy. The sins of yesterday are our reality today, and those of today will survive with us long after our politicians are gone. The Old Guard's grip on society is as a result of such a history, and it is this history that keeps economic progress and power concentrated in the hands of a few. It was how the British subdued the nation, and how the post-colonial governments have dominated the people.

All major ethnic groups are pawns in a much bigger power-play that pits ordinary Kenyans against one another. We are urged to destroy our friendships and retreat into our ethnic enclaves in ignorance and prejudice. While we keep ourselves busily embroiled in these ethnic clashes, both hot and cold, the rest of the world, including our neighbours simply pass us by. The warning is that unless we wake up and smell the smoke, we will be just as culpable when it all goes up in flames.

The festival of hate at Nyayo Stadium on the occasion of the PNU launch last weekend comes in the spirit of this conflagration. The lesson from our past is that no one can stand by and watch, no one can say ‘it was not me'. That President Kibaki did so is not only tragic and irresponsible; it also serves to bless the poison spewed by the speakers of that occasion, who after all only did it in his name. Kenyans now start to question the image they have had of the president as an urbane and civil gentleman. We are steadily reminded of his roles in past governments, of his service as a Finance Minister in Kenyatta's regime and Vice-President in Moi's. His alliance with President Moi, and the prominence in his efforts of the likes of John Michuki and Simeon Nyachae accuses him.

No longer is his ‘hands-off style' an excuse, its loud silence is a deafening abettal. It is this non-interference that saw Kenya's potential wane and among its brightest political minds disappear into the CID's notorious gulags. I am not only unsympathetic to his plea to run the country for another 5 years but outraged at his audacity to even ask it.