Kenya is alive with outrage. Outrage that resettling the wakimbizi will be made much more difficult by the allocation of billions of shillings to the game of musical chairs we call the Cabinet. Not a day passes without mention of the huge salaries parliamentarians are earning compared to the puny takings of their constituents.

Meanwhile, terrified men and women are being returned to the homes they fled - on the trucks that were not there to rescue them in the first place. They have been given guarantees that no sane Kenyan can believe in.

Inflation is demolishing the incomes of the poorest and yet the president still dares ask "Anataka nini?" ("What do they want?") in his Labour Day speech. His question was met with uproarious laughter by the assembled millionaires seated on the dais behind him.

There is much to complain and be angry about. Yet so much of what makes us angriest has its roots in the injustices and brutalities of our private lives.

Many years ago, while sneaking out of school alongside a few other Fifth Formers, we were arrested by a pair of policemen patrolling the outskirts of our boarding school. They said they were arresting us under the Vagabond Act. We had never heard of it but we knew that whatever it amounted to, what they really wanted was a bribe.

WELL, THIS WAS A ROUTINE THAT every teenage boy in Nairobi knew well: Wheedle and beg, protest your innocence and your poverty to the heavens and hope that they let you go without too severe a beating.

They made us join hands and follow them to the Riruta police post. A few hours later found us seated on the flooded floor of the cell with faces numb from being slapped. One of the policemen called us back out to the small mabati room and pronounced he was tired of our presence.

We were vagabonds, he repeated, and deserved punishment. But since he was too tired to beat us any more, he suggested that we confer among ourselves and decide on an appropriate number of strokes of the lash. He was holding one of those whips made from car tyres that are used so liberally on donkeys. We were to decide on the number and then break off into pairs and flog each other.

We held a quick conference. One of us suggested five strokes each and was met with an outraged response - too many, we said. A suggestion of one stroke each was unanimously rejected as too few and therefore unacceptable to the policeman. We settled on three each and not once did any of us suggest that we should not be getting whipped.

Even knowing that we were not guilty of any crime, we accepted this treatment. It was simply an acknowledgement of the power that they had over us - and power, we had learnt in our dealings with adults, was often used in similarly arbitrary fashion.

We had been flogged so many times by teachers as collective punishment that we had come to assume it to be the most normal thing in the world. We understood how to accept the violence and injustice of power because we also wielded it.

OUR BEATINGS BY THE POLICE CAME after and before beatings we administered to our juniors. In the very same way that the policemen decided to punish us for being what they called vagabonds, we slapped and kicked younger kids for no particular reason apart from not liking their expressions or on suspicion that they were not respectful enough.

We were beaten by teachers and policemen and we beat up juniors who waited their turn when they would become seniors and have someone to beat. Such was the cycle of life in high school.

Thus the Kenyan character is formed and shaped every day, every minute even. Not merely every five years by national elections. The politicians who speed around in their luxury cars and whose bellies shook with laughter at the president's words on Labour Day are the head of a snake whose tail reaches into the smallest and poorest home in Kenya. Their greed and lack of empathy, their mediocrity, is built on an entire edifice of petty brutalities we mete out to each other daily.

This is not to suggest that we should stop opposing their excesses simply because so many of us are also guilty in our private lives. It is merely to suggest that our unfaltering focus on the sins of our politicians fails to acknowledge that we after all voted for them and that they are a part of us. They learnt to behave as they do long before they became parliamentarians.

I wrote on this page last week that our politics should reflect our lives. But now I see that it already does - especially the worst part. The thousands of maids in Nairobi who daily suffer physical and sexual abuse. The many that are never paid and kept as indentured labour and robbed of the naïve hope that brought them to Nairobi from their rural homes.

WHAT RIGHT TO ANGER AT POLITIcians does the inhabitant of the mansion in Westlands have when he pays his gardener too little to afford a matatu to his shack in Mathare? How can the men and women who gathered in posh restaurants to raise money for Mungiki in January ever complain about the government not doing enough to suppress crime in their leafy neighbourhoods when they funded murder and terror?

If our politics must reflect our lives in terms of our shared interests, then we would be honest enough to acknowledge that it now reflects many evils that we see daily around us. The sacred notion of politics as an activity that is irredeemably human, which is not merely elections and parliaments but is instead the daily negotiations and transactions of our lives, is the foundation of how we are governed by those we elect to office.

Even as we agitate and demand change from those in the Cabinet, we need to have the honesty to root out the injustice and brutality in our private lives since these, after all, are in our control.

If indeed the salaries of parliamentarians are too high compared with their constituents, then the readers of this paper should think of how much they pay their servants. We should think of the conditions of employment we offer, of whether we give opportunities for self-advancement to fellow Kenyans.

Our active opposition to the excesses of our politicians needs a dose of humility founded on the understanding that the public life characterised by responsible leadership and the embrace of justice we demand can only be founded on private lives that reflect the same virtues.