A Greedy Caste of THUGS: Kenyan members of parliament, ministers and assistant ministers earn upto $120,000 a year — in a country where the majority live on a dollar a day

Opposition leader Raila Odinga, left, was named Kenya’s prime minister in a power-sharing arrangement announced in April by President Mwai Kibaki.

Nearly eight months after a wave of post-election violence brought one of East Africa’s most stable democracies to the brink of collapse, it is almost as if there had been no crisis. And that is what troubles some Kenyans the most.

“My biggest worry is that it’s business as usual,” said Bethuel Kiplagat, a retired diplomat who helped form the group Concerned Citizens for Peace during the violence. “My fear is that the deeper causes are not being addressed.”

Kiplagat, the former diplomat, said that although grass-roots efforts have begun the reconciliation process, more attention needs to be paid to changing the ethnically based political system that sparked the crisis. That includes adopting a new constitution, possibly one that redraws the electoral map to break some of the largest ethnic voting blocs and devolve power to a more local level, he said.

Some observers say the compromise has played out only superficially, as members of the political elite have returned to petty backroom machinations at the expense of a country still divided by the crisis.

“There has been a lot of childishness,” said Gitau Warigi, a political columnist with the Daily Nation newspaper. “But underneath there are major structural problems with how the top offices are relating to each other.” …[ more ]

VIP Turf War — An example of the childishness

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