LOST YEARS?

My eldest daughter turns five at the end of March. It's a very big deal -- she is making plans, inviting every face painter she meets, and taking notes at the parties she has been to here in Nairobi. Birthday parties in London were extravagant affairs -- but they didn't have fire-eaters as the party we went to last weekend did! So the bar has been set quite high.
In 2012, she will be eight -- it seems such a long way away. She will have lost teeth, grown new ones, she'll be reading, tying her own laces, sleeping alone in her bed (hopefully!), she'll have learnt to swim without armbands, she'll be past the Backyardigans and onto Hannah Montana and High School Musical (or whatever the 2012 equivalent will be), she'll be casting a much more critical eye on my clothes, she'll be in a new school, she'll have discovered the joy of maths, she may even be living in a different country.
I started thinking about all these changes because I was mulling how often politicians here refer to 2012 -- it seems to be dictating every move, every decision, every pollitical play -- already. I know this is not unique to Kenya: politicians do focus on getting re-elected ridiculously soon after the final votes from their victorious election have been counted. But this over-riding obsession looks likely to condemn Kenya to three years of stagnation at best, with a possible explosion of violence at the end of those lost years.
Just a few examples:In an interview in the Sunday Nation, Agriculture Minister William Ruto said Justice Minister Martha Karua had approached him wanting to form a political alliance. She denies this, and has reportedly already said she plans to stand in 2012. Last week, the Nation also ran a story saying that parliamentarians in the Rift Valley and Central Provinces wanted to forge an alliance between Ruto of the ODM and Deputy Prime Minister Uhuru Kenyatta of President Mwai Kibaki's PNU party to win the election -- bringing together the votes of Ruto's Kalenjin supporters and Kenyatta's Kikuyu backers.
Even abroad, everyone is looking to 2012 http://www.guardianweekly.co.uk/?page=editorial&id=973&catID=21
It's a worrying thought - poignant even -- when you look at today's Nation which has a front-page photo of Mark Nyauma Maugo who was the best candidate in last year's Form Four examinations. In 2012, Mark and the cheering students surrounding him in the picture will be in their 20s, looking for jobs and a future. And what will happen then?
Kofi Annan recently articulated what needed to be done: "The root causes of last year's crisis need to be comprehensively addressed if the country is to avoid a repeat of the violence. These include constitutional and institutional reforms, land reform, and reducing the huge gap between the haves and the have-nots. Other priorities are creating more jobs for youth, equal access to opportunities, promoting ethnic harmony, ending the culture of impunity, and promoting transparency and accountability," he said.
It's a long list -- three years might even be too short, but what hope if those three years are to be sacrificed on the altar of the basest kind of political ambition.
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On another story -- the assassinations of the army chief and president in Guinea-Bissau this week http://af.reuters.com/article/guineaBissauNews/idAFL227561220090302 I heard a few newscasters referring to this as a return to the bad old days in Africa. Surely, Guinea-Bissau is an example of a pernicious new risk in Africa - the poisonous influence of drug money on fragile economies and shaky political structures. Sure, Guinea-Bissau has had coups a-plenty in the past -- and the two dead men shared a decades-old history of animosity -- but the flood of narco-dollars pouring into this poor country only herald more abuse of power, more instability and more corruption to fuel popular discontent. Far from being a return to the bad old days, this may be a warning shot across the world's bows about the dawning of bad new days in West Africa. http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/daniel-howden-the-new-cocaine-capital-of-africa-1635903.html