Before the country's recent election and, indeed, when the returns were beginning to be counted, all indications were that President Mwai Kibaki (seeking a second term) would be defeated by Raila Odinga, a Luo, and that the political arena would no longer be under Kikuyu control.

International observers have stated that gross violations with ballot counting occurred when Kibaki's ruling party realized he was about to lose the election. The mere idea of a party change (too often along ethnic lines) has been anathema to most African leaders once they assume power, no matter whether there are term limits or not. Worse, powerful forces -- the military and the police, as well as other party

leaders -- surrounding most African leaders realize all too easily what will happen to their privileged lifestyles if their man loses an election.

We have seen this scenario many times before but most recently in Uganda, where Yoweri Museveni changed the term limits; in Zimbabwe, where Robert Mugabe rigged the last two elections; in Nigeria, where Olusegun Obasanjo was unable to change the term limits but rigged an election process so that only his hand-picked candidate could win; and even in South Africa, where Thabo Mbeki is currently doing everything possible to prevent his party's presumed successor, with whom he disagrees, from taking office.

While Museveni may be the most humane of the group, Mugabe has bankrupted his country, leading to massive starvation of Zimbabweans and the exodus of a quarter of the population. Western estimates of the theft of Nigeria's oil assets by its leaders down through the years come to $300 billion. It is not inaccurate to say that in too much of Africa the elite get obscenely rich, while the poor just barely get by.

All of these machinations are tied into the concept of the Big Man in Africa, whether that is the head of state or the lesser Big Men -- politicians, businessmen with monopolies and connections, those in the security forces -- who do almost as well, cronies woven into such a tight mesh that the rest of the people are strangled.

The vast majority of the African masses live no better today than they did before the end of colonialism. The enormity of African greed on the part of its leaders is incomprehensible to most Westerners. Nor can the issue be so easily simplified as to say that African leaders learned their methods from the colonial powers.

In Chinua Achebe's 1960 novel, "No Longer at Ease," his sequel to "Things Fall Apart," the main character, Obi Okonkwo, returns home to Nigeria after earning a university degree in England. The time frame of the story is just before Nigeria's independence, and Obi, who gets a position in the Ministry of Education, is full of optimism -- staunchly against corruption and tribalism. Yet it is not long before he caves in to the economic pressures that engulf him. In the African tradition, he is expected to help economically not only the members of his extended family but also his villagers, who expect him (with his good salary) to assume the prerogatives of his British predecessors. Obi takes one bribe and then another, and it isn't long before all of his early idealism has vanished.

In Achebe's much bleaker non-fiction 1983 treatise, "The Trouble with Nigeria," the author states more directly, "The Trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership…. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which are the hallmarks of true leadership."

Achebe's countryman and Nobel Prize laureate, Wole Soyinka, has spent most of his nearly 50-year career as a writer -- excoriating in plays, poems, fiction and critical studies of the continent's failed state African leaders and their endless quests for power and property. These two Nigerian writers are not alone. Ironically, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Kenya's leading writer, spent a year in prison because he criticized President Kibaki's predecessor, Daniel arap Moi, whose stranglehold on his country was even worse that his successor's.

There's a story, perhaps apocryphal, that Western diplomats tell about their African counterparts. A cabinet member of an African country is visiting his counterpart in an adjacent country and, when he notices all the Mercedes parked in his friend's driveway, he asks how they were acquired. His friend responds, "Ten percent." Some years later, when the governmental minister from the second country visits his friend who had visited him earlier, he notices dozens and dozens of luxury automobiles parked on his counterpart's property, so he asks the same question. How were they acquired? The response: "Fifty percent."

The unrest in Kenya is not only due to tribalism -- a canker for too many African nations -- but, worse, about greed, a growth industry around the world that is carried out to perfection by many of the continent's so-called leaders.

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Charles R. Larson is professor of Literature at American University, in Washington, D.C.