The dialogue agenda part III: Why talks are going nowhere

It has been said that the absence of war is not the same thing as the presence of justice. This is some of the language that only fleetingly emerged in the national settlement that followed 2007/08 post-election violence. Instead we ended up with the 2008 peace, or political ceasefire, that the Grand Coalition Government of the time represented. We could say the same thing about the Building Bridges "handshake" that followed a decade later; it gave us a fragile peace.

If the hard question in both cases is whether or not these political settlements helped us to fully address our long-term issues (Agenda Four; BBI), the short answer is no. But this is a nuanced answer. The ultimate nation-building (or re-building) goal that underpinned both "projects" was never supposed to be about an event or series of events, but a sustained process of continuous improvement built on constructive national conversations. Simply, the idea was to in-build continuity into our nation-building, not to fight after every election. I canvassed this point a fortnight ago, and threw the gauntlet of imagination at Kenya Kwanza as the people in charge.