The plunder stops here

Graca Machel arrives in Kenya this weekend.

Not, this time, in her capacity as a member of the mediation team in the post-election violence, but as the member of the Panel of Eminent Persons overseeing the African Peer Review Mechanism for Kenya.

The APRM is the voluntary peer review process associated with the African Union’s New Partnership for African Development.

It assesses member states’ progress in four areas — democratic governance, economic governance, corporate governance and socio-economic development.

Kenya submitted to the APRM and, after a lengthy and rigorous self-assessment, its first full report was discussed by African heads of state and government in 2006.

Kenya was praised at that time for the candidness of the self-assessment.

And the questions posed to President Mwai Kibaki, focused on, among other things, issues of discrimination and inequality on the basis of ethnicity.

It is always easy, with the benefit of hindsight, to pinpoint what we could and should have done to avert what happened in 2007/8 — like addressing the imperial presidency through comprehensive constitutional reforms, as well as the electoral system, the pressing issues around land — both in terms of recognising and dealing with historical claims to land as well as with illegal allocations of public land.

And we could and should have addressed discrimination and inequality on ethnic and other grounds.

You see, we knew what we needed to do. Kenya’s APRM report and the plan of action that came out of it, spelled out the imperatives clearly — reiterating what analyses from many different quarters had said before, in as many words.

I am thinking, for example, of the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Society for International Development’s scenarios for Kenya, which forecast ultimate doom and gloom unless we pursued the scenario involving both constitutional reform and economic recovery.

We knew what we needed to do. But we did not do it.

And so, many of the issues flagged before found themselves reiterated, with new urgency, in the mediation agreements.

There is nothing new in any of the four agenda items that make up the mediation agreements.

Just as there is unlikely to be anything new in the new APRM assessment that is about to begin — though it is to focus exclusively on democratic governance.