Women are the ones holding Kenya together

So people realise that single leaders will not solve all their problems.

A group I met recently around Kitui were emphatic: “The ICC should arrest all our MPs and take them away.” Still, people have not given up and there are many good people both in and out of government working hard to solve the great problems of the day.

I believe as a friend told me when I returned last year that the new Kenya is being moulded painfully in its most cosmopolitan areas — the cities, the Rift Valley and Coast Province.

The accommodations, compromises and hard choices that shall be made in these areas will determine how we resolve our most difficult issues and what Kenya will look like 10 years from now.

In the new year, I hope to publish my findings, which will inform what I do next.

I am hopeful because Kenyans can see through the lying rhetoric of most leaders.

While ethnic polarisation is a nationwide reality, no one is thinking through the consequences of civil war and instead, there is a fear that we may be about to lose something we cherish called Kenya that deep down we all desperately want to hold on to.

Secondly people are hardworking and still willing to believe that good will triumph over evil.

What is the biggest problem you see facing Kenya today?

As I have travelled around over the past several months, our challenges fall into three categories.

First are identity issues — tribalism and nationhood in particular. We have never questioned our Kenyan-ness as we have since the post-election violence.

This is not a bad thing.

We had taken it for granted for too long.

Even in the IDP camps, there were those who insisted they did not want to be counted in the census by a government that had failed to carry out one of its key mandates — to protect its own people and their property.

At the Coast, in North Eastern and other areas that have been marginalised, many feel they are not part of Kenya and repeat to me endlessly that, “Kenya ina wenyewe” (Kenya has its owners).