Politics about who rules Kenya after President Moi seems to point to a tribalised state in crisis. Throughout the Moi tenure, ethnicity has been but one symptom of a more general weakness of democracy in the country.

Despite multi-partyism, other groups outside the official mainstream of political society, ethnic and cultural minority groups such as Mungiki, Mageuzi and the United Democratic Movement have all at one time or another been or continue to be silenced by the State on alleged security grounds.

The root of institutionalised official intolerance is to be found not in the character of the Kenyan people or their political leaders but in the very nature of the Kenyan State. Traceable to colonialism, this state was founded as a crown colony of Britain. Crown colony government, on the other hand, originated in the most repressive period of British history. This refers to Britain's unsuccessful struggle to maintain colonial rule in America, which exposed British fears of a disintegrating empire.

Then came Britain's war of aggression against revolutionary France between 1793 -1815. This war secured for Britain a new empire which included Malta, Mauritius, Ceylon, Heligoland and the Cape province of South Africa.

It was in this period that Britain founded a Colonial Office designed to keep a firm grip on colonies by London. Colonial government came to be run "under prerogative without recourse to Parliament".

The Colonial Office was further consolidated by the British Settlements Act of 1887, and the Foreign Jurisdiction Act of 1890. It is curious to note that by passing these two Acts the House of Commons more or less renounced its right to direct control of colonial affairs.

Such is the context in which the Kenyan state emerged as a full apparatus of the British crown colony government between 1895 and 1905. The Governor of Kenya was the crown colony's representative in whose hands despotic powers were concentrated. He was at once "representative of the king, the head of the executive government and usually president of the Legislature".

He governed with the assistance of civil servants and two councils, the Executive and Legislative councils. The Executive was the the apparatus of the colonial government's repression. The current post colonial state of presidential decrees has remained colonial in substance.

In such a state, a sharp demarcation between tribes characterisespolitics. In it has developed a system of tribal lordism in which politics means struggles over the rules of accumulation i.e. how to make them fairer to other tribal lords. Those opposed to opening the arena of accumulation are the ones who make war cries in the name of tribalism.

The dominance of the tribal mode of politics derives its legitimacy from occupation of the State reduced to mere apparatuses Ð the Army, police, special branch and the presidency. Once in charge of such a machine, the political leadership has had has only talked and acted tribal. "It is our turn to also enjoy", seems to be the political calculation. Any threats to enjoyment must be silenced.

Today, the politics played out divides Kenyans more than ever before. Unless checked the politics is accelerating the forces of geopolitics in a situation of acute ethnic nationalism when the State it is a part of has collapsed, been privatised and personalised.

This state is intolerant of any group outside the official mainstream of Kenyan society. Its conception of nation-building is forceful obedience by the populace.

Under the circumstances, a strong civil society is the solution to state authoritarianism. However, experience of similar cases elsewhere belies this thinking. Popular social forces have undermined democracy in Ecuador and Venezuela. Likewise, democratic voters have returned former authoritarian leaders to power in Guatemala and Bolivia. Sounds like Kenya!

Besides the non-governmental organisations seeking honours in this country do not escape the tribal tag. They are either dominated by one ethnic group or another, if not family-based. This defeats their role of shaping the public agenda.

Civil society is a motley assortment of groups. How can they, therefore, play a coherent political role in democratisation? Indeed, their legitimacy has often been questioned in contradistinction to political parties.

Like the ethnocentric state, a form of multi-party politics in Kenya over the past decade has meant substitution of the people for the parties. Parties have become the focus of politics. In other words, the members are further alienated as politics is referred to structures external to them.

In fact, the subordination of politics under the political parties is the origin of the prevailing belief that the party is politics. The consequenceis the absence of democratic politics inside the people due to their partitisation and or statisation. In the end other logics have taken over Kenyans and made them unable to restrain political parties in their exclusivist or symmetrical treatment of a difference like ethnicity.

At another level, political party leadership has failed to grasp the historicity of democratisation as struggles to win, defend and the protect rights of people as well as individuals against one-sidedness. They are unable to see that the institutionalisation of the defence of various rights is a specific historically arrived at compromise.

The history of the political party, therefore, its importation into Kenya. Is the party as a historically constituted modality of treatment of the resolution antagonising the state and the mass movement still the incarnation of politics in a post Cold War post socialist democratising world?

The issue of the moment in Kenya is to recognise the multiplicity of differences. In this project, the institutional forms through which struggles will unfold are not given a prior. The conditions of existence of those struggles will themselves determine the politics, political consciousness, political capacity, political sites and their militants.

Until the foregoing point is grasped by political leaders, they will continue operating from false epistemological premises of modern politics. For example, they should pause to ask themselves why multi-partyism should be institutionalised now when it failed to do so before. What assessment has been made of its past failure in the early 60s to warrant its success this time round?

* Mr Busolo is a former MP for Webuye.