Nairobi — A lot of times, it is difficult for anyone to comprehend how government leaders think or why its officials operate at cross purposes. It is incomprehensible why, for instance, issues contained in the negotiated Agenda Four are so hard to be addressed even through they are the thread the nation hangs its future of peace and stability on.

Coming from the most vicious violence since that of the Mau Mau in the 1950s, one would imagine that the government cobbled up last year in order for the country to get back to sanity would have moved with dexterity to address the land mine that lies under its feet.

Agenda Four is about tackling profound issues that cut across the entire landscape which began during Britain's colonial rule. From the Coast where they docked, to western Kenya, Lokkichoggio to Namanga, Kenyans were forced out of their lands to pave way for British settlers.

In all these places, there are so many landless people who still remain squatters in their ancestral areas, 50 years after independence. None of the successive governments have addressed this problem.

But land is only one issue that still festers. Kenya ranks among the world's top 20 countries with the widest rich-poor divides. Over half of its population subsist on the ill-famed dollar-a-day, but when one looks at the grand opulence flaunted by politicians, the rich can as well go and join their counterparts in Europe.

What is more annoying is that the rich think the poor do not know how most of them got their filthy riches. They stole it, and they still expect the poor to applaud and obey.

Politicians holding similar positions in the developed world look like paupers in comparison to our own ostentatious livelihoods in a country suffocating from all manner of problems, top of them being massive poverty.

Kenya's legal and constitutional framework, the other major point of Agenda Four is a total joke, and few in successive governments have ever seriously been interested in reforming it. This is because by doing so, they would swiftly expose the grave injustices that lie underneath.

Many commentators have said that there exist two sets of laws in Kenya, one for the rich who never get punished for their crimes, and another one for the rest of Kenyans who face "justice" swiftly. A potentially rich country with a most industrious, hard-working people -- and which should be in the league of South Korea or Hong Kong -- has had international investors fleeing in droves in the last two and a half decades.

Result? Chronic unemployment, an ingredient of revolutions and soaring crime that has already defied the security organs. These investors now take business to our increasingly nimble neighbours such as Rwanda. The Kofi Annan brokered peace deal was about redressing these and several other injustices. Still, our neighbours laugh at us when we permanently need foreigners to come and solve our problems.

Mr Annan, US president Barack Obama, the UN, the EU and others will not be able to address these issues here in Kenya even if they wanted to if the leadership is not willing to do so. They're concerned.

They may have their motives, but they don't want to see Kenya become a failed state like Somalia, and plunge again onto violence. We can save ourselves from this embarrassing, endless foreign opprobrium. Warning: if Agenda Four fails, our existence here will never be the same again.