Send them to the Hague – now!

Kofi Annan has come and gone. His message was clear: Enough of commissions and task forces and ongoing processes. The reforms must now move to completion. Failing which, Armageddon — a situation neither Kenyans, nor the region, nor the rest of the international community want to contemplate.

The question is whether or not the reforms taken up will address the central concern they were meant to — accountability. Accountability of individuals occupying public office. Accountability of public institutions.

Capacity building alone is not enough.

The police, for example, obviously must be better equipped to handle the forms of crime and insecurity now experienced in Kenya.

But better equipment, without a change in the culture of policing, will only increase their capacity to commit human-rights violations.

Individual police officers gone wrong must be held to account.

As must the institution of the police itself for such wrongdoing. Ditto the judiciary.

Which is why ending impunity decisively is important.

And this is also why achieving accountability for the violence that followed the announcement of the presidential poll results is so important.

The Principals and the parties to the Grand Coalition Government are prevaricating — putting their own short-term economic and political interests ahead of the interests of the survivors. But their prevarication is placing the whole country at risk, particularly those in the tense and volatile Rift Valley.

The lesson from Rwanda is clear.

The genocide of 1994 was not its only defining moment.

There were preceding moments of ethnic cleansing from 1959 onwards, each moment worse in intensity and scale.

And while we cannot term what happened in Kenya genocide, certainly the politically instigated clashes of the 1990s had an ethnic dimension to them.

Again, while the forms of violence last year were diverse, they also had ethnic dimensions to them, including violence by state security agencies.