Too much power in too few hands

For the moment, the news from Kenya is called "good": Odinga's confrontational rally shelved; Kibaki's non-speak policy softened; mediation filtering in. Things are not worsening. The 600 – or 1,000 or who knows – funerals will be conducted. The quarter-million – or half-million or who knows – displaced people will return to what is left of their homes. The direction is towards restoration.

But "good" is a sickening word in the circumstances, wildly outweighed by the ungoodness that restoration should be necessary at all. Moreover, the methods of restoration so far show no reasonable signs of cutting out future repeat acts. Nor of obviating similar disasters in others of the world's flimsier democracies.

The nub of the problem is not the personalities of the players or the characteristics of the people behind them, or the concatenation of ethnic loyalties that now spill out of hiding. The nub is the set of conventions that have become attached to democracy.

Democracy originally conveyed the notion that people exercise power over their lives. Widely now, and especially in respect of newer democracies, the idea is that if the population is given a more or less free choice to fill in a winner-take-all headcount behind one of two contesting Big Men, voila! Democracy is fulfilled.

Kenya's (contested) election figures show 4.5 million votes for Kibaki, 4.3 million for Odinga. That split would have returned Kibaki and his people something more than 90% of Kenya's total quantity of political power. America's upcoming presidential election, the split may be as narrow, even narrower. It will not lead to deaths or displacements. Why not? Because there is power elsewhere.

In America's states, its cities, its towns, its counties, the decisions that affect people do not depend on a massive pyramid headed by a single person.

That, finally, is the difference. In Kenya and in many countries, the birth of real stability will come with the discovery of how to really spread power.