While initiatives seeking to address ‘negative ethnicity’ in Kenya are ‘potentially useful and well meaning’, L. Muthoni Wanyeki believes that they fail to get to the core of the problem. There is, she argues, no real understanding of what equality and non-discrimination actually mean. Wanyeki deems there to be a misplaced focus on ‘whether or not we like each other’. She holds rather, that tensions in Kenya have arisen because there is an unhealthy cycle of discrimination and stereotyping that has become normalised. The focus in remedying this cannot then be on making Kenyans ‘like’ one another, Wanyeki argues, but on how to ‘regulate whether and how those feelings translate into actions; into discrimination’.

Last week the BBC published a story entitled , making public the fact that ethnic groups in the Rift Valley were rearming in preparation for future election violence. Apart from this being a very worrying story, the backlash this has had on Ken Walfula – who gave subsequent interviews to Kenyan newspapers on the matter – has been disconcerting, argues L. Muthoni Wanyeki in this week’s Pambazuka News. Ken Walfula is now facing charges of incitement and the circulation of false and alarming information from the Kenyan government. Furthermore, as Wanyeki points out, there has been both public and private discussion of rearming, such as that undertaken by the Kenya National Dialogue and Reconciliation Monitoring Project. This is an issue the Kenyan government needs to take seriously, the author stresses.

Last week’s United Nations General Assembly Special Session saw President Obama place America back on a multi-lateral path. But something else important took place at the session, L. Muthoni Wanyeki writes in Pambazuka News – the opening for signatures of the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, a treaty pushed for largely by newly independent states emerging from colonialism and aimed at delivering ‘real changes in citizens’ material condition and realities.’

Kenyans have plenty to be angry about with their parliament, Muthoni Wanyeki writes in Pambazuka News, from the ‘outrageous remuneration’ it has given itself, to ‘its refusal to stand up for justice for the families of the dead and displaced’ during last year’s political crisis. But parliament’s disappointing performance is partly down to ‘the limited options available to the House, as representatives of the people’ when ‘either the Executive or the Judiciary behaves badly,’ Wanyeki argues. If Kenya is to ensure government accountability to the people and ‘real checks and balances among the three arms of government’, constitutional reform is imperative, says Wanyeki.