Women are the ones holding Kenya together

What have you been up to since returning to Kenya last year? Some media reports have it that you are still in self-imposed exile...

I have been very much around, just not in Nairobi.

I have spent a good deal of time lately travelling around Kenya, essentially reconnecting with my country, which went through such terrible convulsions while I was away.

I do this as the head of two small new organisations — Twaweza [We can do it] which is an East Africa-wide initiative aimed at empowering wananchi to solve their own problems, especially the provision of quality essential services like water, health and education — and the Zinduko [Awakening] Trust, which is involved more in societal issues —working with people to help build trust where ethnic issues have undermined them, and to address the suspicion and bad faith that infect all important national processes.

You said you have been travelling around the country, “reconnecting.” How exactly?

I have travelled throughout Kenya and this safari is nearly complete.

I have talked to a great many people to try to understand how they view themselves as Kenyans; to understand how much has changed in people; their thoughts about the future; and what they think the solutions are.

It has been a humbling experience.

As far as possible, I have been staying not in hotels but with ordinary people, who have welcomed me into their homes with a generosity that demonstrates that even though the referendum and post-election violence tore the social fabric apart, Kenyans remain Kenyans — hospitable, God-fearing, generous with the little they have.

What else have you learned?

Every region in Kenya, every community is affected by the same issues, but expressed differently because of our diversity in terms of experience, culture and the different conditions people face.

At the Coast, I was shocked by the insidious effects of heroin on the youth and the really outrageous situation that has seen many in Pwani turned into squatters on their own land.

We have a few individuals in this country who between them own land the size of a province when put together. This is not tenable.

In parts of Western, vigilante groups of unemployed, angry young men have sprung up.

In Central, the effects of alcohol and violence have “castrated” many youth and the existential questioning of a future in which one of their own won’t be president informs all debate, implicitly or explicitly.