A Reflection on Kenya's Descent from Crisis to Permacrisis
There is a lazy assumption that war announces itself as evil and nothing more, a moral catastrophe requiring only condemnation. This is an incomplete verdict. War is also, often, simply stupid: an expensive, self-defeating instrument that consumes what it claims to protect. A country need not fire a single bullet to wage war on itself; it need only mistake vigilance for violence, and protection for punishment.
For decades, Kenya has worn a reputation it did not always ask for but rarely resisted: the demilitarised zone of a volatile region, an ambience of peace amid neighbours defined by coups, insurgencies, and civil collapse. Visitors have called it tranquil. Diplomats have called it stable. Kenyans themselves have called it home, in the fullest sense, a place where the social strata, however unequal and however contested, still produced a kind of resilience: citizens who quarrelled bitterly at the ballot box yet stood shoulder to shoulder when the roof caved in, irrespective of which flag they had waved the week before.
That reputation is now being tested by something quieter than war but no less corrosive: a political putrescence, a slow rot beneath the floorboards of the republic. It has turned brother against brother, not through invasion but through incitement, not through occupation but through impunity. It has produced a stalemate dressed up as stability, in which political goons operate under an unofficial license, and in which the very security operators charged with keeping vigil over the citizenry have, in places, changed uniforms in spirit if not in cloth, from guardians to tormentors. When the shepherd begins to graze on the flock, the field is no longer safe, no matter how green it looks from a distance.
Scholars of international relations have long observed that the world exists in a condition of fundamental anarchy, that there is no sovereign above the sovereign, and that in the absence of an enforceable higher law, power narrates its own legitimacy. War, rather than law, remains the ultimate arbiter of disputes between states, and within states the same logic quietly repeats itself. Institutions bend toward whoever funds and commands them. Raw force, unapologetic and often ruthless, continues to decide not only who wins and who loses, but critically, who gets to narrate the story afterward. This is not a defence of that arrangement. It is a description of it, offered as a warning against mistaking the description for the ideal.
Kenya's recent trajectory illustrates the warning precisely. We were plunged into a crisis, and were assured it would be managed. Instead, the crisis escalated, seemingly obliviously, into a polycrisis, several compounding failures arriving together, each one feeding the others. Now the polycrisis threatens to calcify into something worse still: a permacrisis, a condition in which emergency is no longer an event but a permanent address. And yet the official posture remains a stiff upper lip, delivered loudly from the rooftop with theatrical confidence: we are a grundnorm, we are told, the basic foundational order from which all else derives its validity; we will stick to our lane, we are assured, even as the lane itself buckles beneath us. This is a campaign built on fantasy rather than fact, one that has failed to look into the very reality unfolding in front of it, verisimilar to the notion of sunk cost familiar to any student of business: having invested so much political capital in a narrative, the instinct is to defend the narrative rather than correct the course, long after the evidence has turned.
We are oscillating between abjectification, unconstitutionalism, and anarchy. There is a newer term for what results from this kind of decay, borrowed unglamorously from the language of technology and consumer platforms but disturbingly apt here: enshittification, the gradual, then sudden, degradation of a system that once worked, as those who control it extract more and deliver less, confident that inertia and the absence of alternatives will keep users, or in this case citizens, from leaving. Political enshittification looks like a state that still holds elections but has hollowed out the meaning of consent. It looks like a security sector that still wears the uniform of protection while performing the function of intimidation. It looks like a government that speaks fluently in constitutional language while governing in the grammar of impunity.
None of this is inevitable, and none of it is unprecedented. Nations have rotted before and have also repaired before. But repair requires first admitting the rot, rather than reciting the old reputation as though it were still current fact. Kenya's peace was never a birthright bestowed by geography; it was a daily choice, made collectively and defended stubbornly, by ordinary people who decided again and again that a quarrel need not become a war. That choice is being tested now, not by an invading army, but by the slower, stupider violence of a political class unwilling to be governed by the very laws it swore to uphold. The task before the country is not to relearn how to fight. It is to relearn how to keep the peace it once took for granted, before the stiff upper lip stiffens into a rictus, and the grundnorm becomes a h
eadstone.
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