In the Kenyan countryside, roads that were paved are now dirt, overgrown with weeds. Telephone service is abysmal and thieves have stripped many phone lines for their copper. AIDS afflicts at least one in 10 Kenyans, but the government's plan to deal with it is so feeble that international lenders refuse to advance money, lest it wind up in some functionary's pockets. Kenyan voters last week said "enough" and turned to the political opposition to lead the nation back toward the prosperity it enjoyed when it won independence from Britain nearly 40 years ago.
The inauguration of Mwai Kibaki on Monday in the capital, Nairobi, was a good gauge of the country's mood. Crowds booed outgoing President Daniel Arap Moi -- deservedly. Kibaki bluntly and accurately told the people that he was inheriting a nation "badly ravaged by years of misrule and ineptitude."
The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund froze lending to Kenya because so many top-level government officials and their underlings were ripping off the cash before it could do any good.
Moi's arrogance extended to picking the man he wanted to succeed him, Uhuru Kenyatta, whose percentage of the vote was half of what Kibaki earned. Kenyatta is the son of Jomo Kenyatta, who led Kenya to independence from Britain in 1963 and was president until his death in 1978, after which Moi moved up from vice president. Corruption and mismanagement drove the economy steadily downhill, and many foreign investors fled rather than pay bribes. In 1963, the average Kenyan earned less than a dollar a day; in 2003, that's unchanged.
