The current Kenya government seems, increasingly, to rely on the worst of practices elsewhere to justify its own behaviour. On the lines of what’s good for the goose should be good for the gander. If so-called stalwarts of liberal democracy in the West can do something, why the hell can’t Africans?

Nobody doubts the double standards at play in the world. Nobody minds them being called out. It’s just that it’d be nice if — for a change — they were called out in favour of the good, and not the illiberal bad.

There is something painful in reading the Attorney-General’s statement before Kenya’s second Universal Peer Review. In which he blandly, blithely, asserts the contentious (anti-human rights) provisions of the Security (Amendments) Act of 2014 are in line with similar provisions elsewhere (in the “imperialist” West).

That may be true. What he forgot to mention, however, is that similar legislation has also been and continues to be challenged by citizens in the imperisalist West too. Citizens who have also put up spirited battles against their own government’s excesses in the so-called war on terror — the illegal and secret detention sites, the illegal renditions, the redefinitions of torture to enable torture.

We are not alone in having governments whose actions horrify us.

This past week, yet another copycat move along the lines of worst practices:

The announcement by Mandera’s County Commissioner of the building of a wall along the Kenya-Somalia border to stop the movement of Somali jihadis into Kenya.

The details are unclear but the walling off of the entire border would surely be an exercise is futility — it is too long, for one thing. And given Al Shabaab’s propensity for improvised explosive devices, one can imagine its members gleefully sprinting up and down whatever wall is constructed, promptly blowing completed sections to bits.

It’s ridiculous

The ambition at first glance seems more modest. Just a little wall between Mandera and Bula Hawa towns in Kenya and Somalia respectively, plus clearing settlements from the no-man’s land in between.

The government of Somalia (such as it is) seems benignly resigned to the whole thing, stating that Kenya is free to follow whatever course of action it deems fit within its borders.

We may be free to do whatever we want, but should we?

When we know the action is harebrained and doomed to fail in its supposed intent?

What do projects like this say about our having essentially moved our minds into a permanent state of division and war?

Kenya may be asserting its right to behave just as badly as its Western imperialist counterparts. The assertion is hollow. It is actually tragic.

L. Muthoni Wanyeki is Amnesty International’s regional director for East Africa, the Horn and the Great Lakes