The dreadful image of a massacre of women and children seeking refuge in a church that dominated Wednesday’s headlines from Kenya has instantly caused comparisons to be made with the genocide in Rwanda in 1994.

Yet it would be simplistic and misleading to reduce the tussle for power in Kenya to a simple story of tribal warfare, and to bandy about wild accusations of genocide – as a Kenyan government minister did on Wednesday. He accused the opposition Orange Democratic Movement of “well-organised acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing”.