Posted by David Sibbald

The violence and tragedy of Kenya post the Dec 27th election has rarely left our TV screens. I've been having daily calls with people on the ground trying to understand the situation and ensure that all the people within our community are safe and accounted for. It's difficult to say how things are going to play out, more and more people are displaced from their communities, (currently estimated at around 200,000 by the UN) and the level of violence ratchets up a notch as each day goes by and the mobs become more emboldened.

Civil society is making itself heard with the two main newspapers sharing a common headline and editorial pleading for Kibaki and Odinga to move things forward. One of the most encouraging things about Kenya over the past few years has been the growth of this group; educated, informed and articulate people in business, arts and media. At the end of the day, these are the people that hold the future of the country, the people that can help grow the economy and lift people out of poverty. Politics is corrupt in Kenya and many other African countries principally because civic society doesn't exist in large enough numbers. There's a political elite who see an opportunity to raid the state for personal benefit and you have a mass of disempowered, hopeless poor who are kept under an economic jackboot by the politicians they elect and not much in the middle. In Kenya that middle group has been growing, they're the people responsible for 5% economic growth per annum in Kenya over the last few years, not the politicians.

However this crisis ends, there is huge damage done to the development of the country. The simmerings of tribal conflict, always bubbling underneath the surface have raised their ugly head with devestating effect. It's difficult to see how people who lived side by side for many years irrespective of their tribal allegiance can now come back together, maybe the country is permanetely fractured, only time will tell.

For 2008, the Sumerian Foundation have plans to push forward our social enterprise investments, expanding Johari, developing a range of jewelery in collaboration with the art schools in Edinburgh and Glasgow, investing in building a botanics business to help rural farming communities and expanding our educational scholarship programs. After witnessing the lack of political leadership, the violence and the mayhem of the past week I'm personally more determined than ever to press ahead with these initiatives, because the core of what we're doing is creating economic opportunity for people and communities to lift themselves out of poverty and ultimately grow the size of middle class. Civic society is the group that will ultimately stop another generation of corrupt politicians from taking their turn at the feeding trough of state finances and we should do all we can to help its growth.