This is the dialogue Kenya needs to have

Kenya is a beautiful country that God has bountifully blessed with favourable weather besides vast arable and fertile land.

Scattered beneath the soil of its land are natural resources including the much sought-after crude oil. It has a big population, too, and a workforce that is highly knowledgeable and skilled.

But what is wrong with Kenya? What happened to the country that held so much promise on that morning of June 1, 1963?

The problem in my view is we have not been able to transition from being a country to being a nation - a tightly-knit group of people who share a common national identity. It is the construction of a shared sense of identity and common destiny to overcome ethnic and/or religious differences and counter alternative allegiances. It goes beyond just sharing borders or identity cards and passports.

In our case, we have never been and have never acted like a nation. Despite the general perception that we are one as a country, the reality staring us all in the face is that Kenya is yet to achieve nationhood.

To paraphrase Yoruban Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the author of Path to Nigerian Freedom, Kenya as we know it today is a mere geographical expression. There are no 'Kenyans' in the same sense as there are 'English,' 'French' or even 'Tanzanians'. The word "Kenyan" is merely used to distinguish those who live within the boundaries of Kenya from those who do not. Sadly, we equate our statehood with nationhood. Because we satisfied all the requirements of a State and became an independent country with its own borders, we assumed we are a nation State.

So, why is it that we continue to be a country and not a nation more than 50 years after independence?

There are fundamental issues that our country needed to resolve among its multiple divides to make that profound leap from a country to a nation State, which we ignored in the past and we continue to ignore today. We assumed State-building is analogous to nation-building. We referred to nation-building as the construction of roads, railways, skyscrapers and ports. We thought if we democratised and built strong State institutions, then we would become a nation. Of course, that was and continues to be a mistake.

While State-building may enable nation-building, it does not necessarily guarantee it. In our case, it certainly did not. We have in the recent past, through the enactment of a progressive Constitution, put in place effective State institutions, but that did not result in a sense of nationhood.

We completely ignored and failed to invest in the key ingredient of nation-building: The building of a common identity. What is our identity today? There is no real national orientation, nothing you can call the "Kenyan dream". There are no national standards of morality precepts or decency. Certainly, there is no national ideology. Our unity is only in name.

There are 42 "nationalities" that live in the "nation space" that is Kenya. We failed to invest in the effort that we could use to turn the great diversity of our country, different origins and opinions as well as beliefs, from being an obstacle or a threat to an opportunity to build the nation State that we so desperately need.

The argument that it is more difficult for us to build a national identity because we have many different ethnic groups is neither here nor there.

Tanzania is more complex than Kenya in terms of its ethnic diversity, with about 175 ethnic groups and with religious pluralism. Yet it remains more stable and peaceful than Somalia, with its homogeneity in ethnic and religious experience - one people, one religion, one language.

The real issue for Kenya, therefore, is that we failed to work proactively towards building a nation. We assumed nationhood just happens by a historical accident. Yet nation-building is a product of conscious statecraft, not happenstance; it is always a work in progress and a dynamic process in constant need of nurturing and re-invention.

Today, we spend and continue to spend too much resources on development work, but very little in building a nation. What we don't realise, however, is that development without achieving nationhood is not sustainable in the long run. Libya, Iraq and Lebanon, for example, were well developed countries. But they were never near being a nation.

Furthermore, nationhood has been linked with meaningful growth and development while lack of nationhood results in slow progress. That is why we need to invest in it as much as we invest in State-building.

So, do we need a national dialogue? Yes. But we need one that will help us examine and genuinely resolve longstanding impediments to our cohesion and harmonious development as a truly united nation. I remain an ardent supporter of the call for a national dialogue. But it must be sovereign and truly open to all. A stage-managed affair scripted and monitored to achieve narrow political aims will achieve nothing but further division among us.

The national dialogue that we need should have only one item on the agenda and answer only one question: How do we transition from being a country to being a nation? All other issues such as insecurity, corruption, ethnicity and poor governance are consequential and exist because we do not have a nation State as yet. In other words, if we get nationhood right, we will be able to manage the attendant problems.