The gods will not save us

If the Gods are fucking you, you find a way to fuck them back. It's Baltimore, gentlemen; the Gods will not save you. - Ervin Burrell, The Wire (S3E3)

If there ever was a truth that my peoples need to learn, it is that all the demigods they have created for themselves - the preening, selfish, avaricious, malicious and vindictive men (and a few women) they call "politicians" - deserve nothing but a cold shoulder if not a closed fist. It baffles me that otherwise sensible men and women still believe that what Kenya needs is incremental tinkering with the structures of political, economic, social and ecumenical power. I think it must be the water. Or urogi. Or uchawi. Something!

Those who unfortunate enough to watch the "presidential debates" between television news anchors and presidential candidates must have seen what I saw: a conspiracy to create the impression that politicians' feet were being held to the fire while, in reality, they were receiving hot stone massages from their pet TV entertainers. For sure, the TV pets threw in a sharp-toothed nip here and there that startled the pet-owners but all in all, it was a saccharine exercise in arse-kissing that served the power-brokers and un-served the people intending to vote.

Kenya and Kenyans have a habit of tiptoeing to the edge of truly radical change and pulling back at the last moment. We had an opportunity in 1990 when section 2A of the former Constitution was repealed. We had a second opportunity in 2000 when we appointed the Constitution of Kenya Review Commission and adopted the Bomas Draft. We had a third in the aftermath of the 2007 general election, when the country convulsed itself in terrible violence, and appointed a Committee of Experts in 2008 to consolidate all the constitutional reforms in a Harmonised Draft Constitution. At every stage, when faced with the hard choices that needed to be made, Kenyans kicked the can down the road and prayed to all its demigods to save them from having to make the decision.

Well, if it wasn't clear enough, the gods will not save us.

It behoves us to admit this to ourselves. It is the only way that we can recognise the iniquity of well-paid, fattened monsters making laws over us. The televised drama of the lies the candidates were prepared to openly peddle hid a dark secret; neither the politicians nor the neutered press is remotely interested in the truth. They will serve us drama, sensationalism, histrionics and all the other spectacles beloved of the entertainment industry to lull us into a false sense of constitutional accountability. It is a well-practiced sleight of hand. Regardless of what they profess their political stances to be, the one thing they are united in is in denying the people who vote for them the truth - or any access to the truth.

The gods intend to fuck us till we are quite dead. And then they will desecrate our corpses. And dance on our Potter's Field full of graves.

Radical change - a complete tear-down of these structures of power and control and abuse - is the only solution. Radical change will not be led by the people seeking political power in the general election. Nor will it be led by the people hiding the truth about the state of things even as they call themselves "the media". It will not be led by judges and magistrates - not those people who were so aggrieved that they were denied Mercedes-Benzes that they threatened to boycott work.

No, my peoples. The gods will not save us. We have to save ourselves. Only then can we save our country.

A lesson in the law

There are many members of my tribe, good lawyers mostly, who still believe that the law can do good. This fantasy they have woven for themselves has proven quite resilient, unaffected by the realities of modern Kenya. These are the sorts of people to say "persevere" and "good things come to those who wait". In short, these are the kinds of people Elsa Majimbo would probably find incurably stupid.

The ways of the law in Kenya are proof that the law is, has been, and shall forever be, a weapon. Kenya's law books are not filled with the tools to give an honest man an even chance against vagabonds, scallawags, miscreants and scofflaws of every shade. It is a hammer. It is wielded with the wickedness of men who know what only though great crime can they build their enormous fortunes. If in doubt, witness the dozens upon dozens of policemen who earn a pittance but command Croesus's fortune - land, mansions, expensive cars and multiple high-maintenance wives. Or the dozens upon dozens of lowly clerks through whose bank accounts billions wash through every day.

But it is in the free exercise of the adult franchise that the law bares its fangs. Reuben Kigame, so far as I can tell, has led a blameless life. Though part of the burgeoning "faith-based" sector, he seems not to have started a mummy-and-daddy "church". He sings songs of praise for a living. He does it quite well. His songs have captured the imagination of his many fans, with messages of Christian charity and fidelity to Christ's message. He, and his supporters, believe he has the moral, ethical and leadership qualities necessary to stand in the presidential election, to save Kenya from itself. Of course he is deluded - no one can save Kenya - but his delusion, like that of the Wajackoyas and Mwaures of this world, is not sufficient cause to keep his name off the ballot on the spectacularly weak-tea excuse that "it will cost an extra billion shillings to add his name to the ballot paper". The only way one can make such a laughed-out-of-court declaration is when one knows that he enjoys the protection of a very, very bad law.

Mr. Kigame is discovering that in order for him to sit atop the cabal of law-users, he first needs to get past the gatekeepers of the law. The law, in this case, has been turned on him and on its head. The technicalities so beloved of dishonest men is used with efficiency to ensure that his brand of presidential ambition is nipped in the bud as quickly and as ruthlessly as possible.

Mr. Kigame should have seen this coming. It has taken Kenya six years to try policemen for the murder of Willy Kimani, his client Josephat Mwenda and taxi driver Joseph Muiruri. It isn't as if the murders was difficult to solve. The murderers abducted their victims in plain sight. They didn't bother to hide their faces or their identities. They didn't bother to hide the reasons for the abductions or murders. They did it in the open in the full expectation that no one would complain too loudly or investigate too closely or bother with anything more than a slap on the wrist. After all, they were the forces of law and order, the embodiment of the law, the manifestation of justice.

Mr. Kigame wants to become the head of this governmental machinery and I can only wonder at his naiveté - or recklessness. I can understand the hubris of an ex-special-branch cop at the heart of the Ouko murder investigation throwing his hat in the ring. Or a too-long-in-the-tooth Kanu youthwinger. Or even an over-the-hill political Don Quixote. Even a pastor-lawyer kind of makes sense. But I don't know what Mr. Kigame, gospel artiste, hopes to gain by forcing his way onto the ballot. Maybe the Christian God he sings praises to has whispered in his ear that he is the national messiah. Maybe he has unlocked the secrets of the universe. It doesn't matter. What matters is that he forgot the first rule of Kenyan politics: he forgot that the law was not his friend when he went before the courts of law looking for salvation.

The indignity of extremist social control

Some of us have extremely thick skin which we cover in resplendent glamour. Many of us, though, are extremely sensitive, particularly about being called out in public for the apparent violation of a norm. Many of us have seen that TikTok video of a fashion maven narrating her treatment at the hands of watchmen at Strathmore University's Madaraka Estate Campus. There are those of us who have shown solidarity with her, and demanded that Strathmore abandon its demeaning dress code. Some others, however, have blamed the victim, saying that she should have known better.

We have faced these kinds of issues in the past, usually when something tragic has happened and the victim of the tragedy has been a woman. Almost a decade ago, a woman was assaulted, stripped to her underwear and paraded in public because the men who assaulted her thought that her dress was "inappropriate" and "against African culture". It led to My Dress, My Choice, a public protest, that attempted to advocate for the treatment of women in public on the basis of their character and actions, rather than the length of their skirts or the tightness of their shirts. The protect did not receive the full-throated support of the State (though a few women parliamentarians joined in), the ministries of faith in Kenya and, certainly, none of the institutions of higher learning such as Strathmore. For sure, influential opinion-shapers and social influencers were determinedly quiet and the protest, and issue, fizzled out from public notice.

Now comes the ill-advised shenanigans of Strathmore's lecherous watchmen, their lechery receiving the endorsement, encouragement and imprimatur, of a respected university. What has emerged over the few days since the TikTok video was shared on social media is that, and this is not surprising, the Strathmore policy is more strictly enforced when the target of the policy is a Black person, particularly a Black woman. If the offender is of apparent Caucasian descent, they will be given greater leeway, something that many thought would be anathema at a university campus in the twenty-first century.

We have been witness to the lengths the mostly-male victim-blaming will go and how far some are prepared to bend backwards to justify the way that woman was treated. It comes as no surprise even as it stings that Black women are, by and large, still second-class Kenyans. In my opinion, there was no reason for the woman to attempt to justify her choice of dress for the presentation she was to make at Strathmore; as a maker of fashion videos, renown in her field, her choices were not subject to reproach. Given the audience she was going to speak to - young people, mostly - and the subject she was going to speak on - modern fashion - I thought she had presented herself beautifully and, though it need not be said, decently. In fact, attempting to say that she should have been allowed to proceed with her presentation because non-Black women are given freer license by that university misses the point. All women deserve to be treated as equals and with dignity.

There seems to be a mean-spirited determination to exert ever-tighter control over us, whether that control comes in the shape of the ham-fisted Huduma Bill (which has very little huduma in it) to the crass, Victorian-England demands for modesty (and purity) from mostly-Black women by institutions such as Strathmore. We all deserve lives of dignity and that includes lives where we are not judged on the basis of our outer accoutrements. We deserve to be treated with decency and respect. We should loosen the tight bonds of control, if not cast them aside entirely, that police how we walk, talk, dress, think, or present ourselves. A society that celebrates and protects the freedom of expression is, in my estimation, happier and more just. But so long as institutions built by and for male-dominated control continue to make the rules, especially undignified and bad rules, we are the poorer for it as a people.

Small men, big consequences

In the middle of drafting a pretty difficult statutory instrument, I made the fatal error of watching the former deputy governor of Nairobi City debate the City's senator. The two deeply flawed candidates hurled accusations (and shade) with unpractised unease, stumbling over memorised zingers and forgetting practiced put-downs. Both tried, and failed, to paint themselves as the City's Second Coming. We deserve so much better.

Let us begin with the former deputy governor. In March 2017, according to him, he made the conscious decision to stand in the general elections as Mike Sonko's running mate. After they were elected, he only served for six months before quitting. He claims it is because Mr Sonko refused to give him work and, consequently, his conscience could not allow him to continue earning a public salary for no work done. 

What he doesn't say is that after he resigned, and it became clear that Mr Sonko would not be impeached as swiftly as his rivals had hoped, an unseemly campaign was launched to declare his "resignation" as anything but a resignation so hat he could be brought back into public service so that when Mr Sonko was finally pushed out the door, the former deputy governor could step into the breech. That plan was swiftly abandoned when someone read the constitution and pointed out that as the former deputy governor had already taken up new employment, he could not legitimately claim that he had not resigned, and therefore his path to the governor's office must, of necessity, pass through a fresh election. No one wanted that.

The former deputy governor's political antics recalled the fiasco that was his appointment as the chairperson of the board of the then Anti-Counterfeit Agency. His appointment was challenged in court. It was declared to have been unlawful. Even then, it appeared that he did not know what he was getting into when he took up the appointment and when controversy followed the appointment, he did not have the professional or technical skills to tamp down the flats and he eventually left the job under a cloud.

The candidacy of the senator is not without its own dramatic turns. He has struggled to put to rest rumours that the does not possess the statutorily-required university degree, trying to obfuscate the matter by alleging state-sponsored machinations in the imbroglio. He offers no proof of the hand of senior state officers in his tribulations.

One recalls when, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, when the state was cracking down hard on violators of Covid-19 rules, the senator was found to be involution and, rather than tae his lumps, he attempted to use his high office (including as chair of a Covid-19 oversight committee in the senate) to avoid responsibility. He made threats. He claimed support from the same high state officers allegedly persecuting him today. Whatever integrity he claims today was missing when he was clearly in the wrong.

His record as senator is not as rosy as he paints it. While he has been quite active in senate business, it is not reflected in the way the city's county government has been overseen. The senate's role includes protecting the interests of counties and county governments. As the city's senator, when it became clear that the governor and deputy governor were incapable of governing effectively, it was his responsibility to lead the charge in having them removed from office. Instead, he claims that a senate convention prevented him from doing so - that he would be accused of conflict of interest in supporting the impeachment of the governor. Even if that were true, as part of the city's political leadership, he should have intervened to ensure that the county government was governed, and overseen, effectively such that it would not require the intervention of the national government or the appointment of a military officer to undertake municipal services.

Nairobi will get the election it doesn't want between candidates it can't stand. That has been the tragedy since the advent of devolution. None of the City Fathers have covered themselves in glory. While we pray for the best, on the basis of history and current shenanigans, I fear that we must prepare for the absolute worst.

Bhang, piranhas and false promises

It's maddeningly hard to pick someone to lead who will do what he says he will do. It's twice as hard to do so when the social mechanisms of identifying and empowering that person have been hollowed out by decades of social, political and economic corruption. It is nigh on impossible to do so when the people who should do the identifying and guide the people in the empowering are themselves the epitome of corruption. What one ends up with in such a triple-threat situation is a world where backroom deals supersede the will of voters.

For better or worse, kenya's political framework is founded on political parties. Political parties are supposed to organise the people in decision-making units capable of identifying suitable political leaders, and electoral candidates, and guiding the discourse on political, social, economic and other issues of importance in order to arrive at a settlement that is broadly popular. A casual scan of the Kenyan political party environment reveals a deeply illegitimate system that is easily manipulated to elevate the voices, and interests, of liars, cheats, charlatans, ne'er-do-wells, thieves, looters, rapists, child molesters and murderers.

Professional bodies and associations have suffered a similar fate and as a result, have become part of the patchwork of entities that serve the interests of the people who have the least interest in building a better nation. The lawyers' body, once at the vanguard of articulating the constitutional issues at the heart of nationhood and governance, has become an irrelevant institution more interesting in extracting ever-heftier fees from its members and ever-higher rents from the State. The doctors', dentists' and medical practitioners' union is more interested in protecting killer-medical practitioners of all stripes so long as they can pay the fees necessary to remain in good standing with their peers. Accountants have been at the heart of every financial scandal yet their professional institute only thinks of drawing up a scale of fees for its members to extract even higher fees from clients. Engineers and architects, you ask. Killer roads and collapsing buildings should tell you all you need to know about these hyenas.

Little is different when you look to the faith-based network of faith ministries and charities. Major ministries of faith have spent several decades in Kenya building up a real estate and investment portfolio to rival the State and in exchange have struck a Faustian pact with the State to not pay taxes on their profits and to leave them to internally deal with the ever-louder accusations of child sexual molestation by ministers of faith.

Heartbreak and disappointment too face us when it comes the Third Sector - NGOs, PBOs, CSOs - civil society. One "leading human rights organisation" has had the same man as its chairman for thirty years. If he were Zimbabwean, only Robert Gabriel Mugabe would rival him for longevity in a position of power. While there is an admirable turnover in leadership in other civil society organisations, they have become complacent, part of the spend-spend-spend cabal snuffling the truffle of the national treasuries without a care int he world in the name of "the people". The number of Kenyan civil society organisations (and some international ones) running for-profit businesses in Kenya is growing by the day - all the while, the people they purport to speak for, suffer and die in penury, misery and pain.

How then can Kenyans be expected to pick someone other than an impeached former governor, the spouse of a former governor accused of murder, a former governor indicted for corruption, a former minister found to have sexually abused several children, a parliamentarian who escaped justice after killing someone by reckless driving, a parliamentarian whose rise to fame is highly publicised sexual exploits...how? Not even the Fourth Estate can help; it no longer tells stories but sells "content" for a hefty price. The more lurid the content the higher the profit. It is no surprise that what used to be journalism is merely a vehicle for promoting mobile-based gambling businesses, fly-by-night real estate investments, soft-core pornography and the wildly reckless political promises of liars, cheats, charlatans, ne'er-do-wells, thieves, looters, rapists, child molesters and murderers.

We are left with a small pool of sharp-toothed piranha to pick from knowing full well that regardless of the size of the one we pick, we will end up stripped of our moral flesh to the bone. No wonder someone promising political heaven on the back of sales of hyena testicles, snake venom, dog meat and bhang has caught the imagination of the half-educated jobless young people.

Don't blame the ma-three

One member of the Fat Wallet Association of Kenya thinks that the solution to the increasing numbers of accidents on the still-shiny Nairobi Expressway is to ban matatus from the road. In her considered opinion, an opinion shared by a few members of her social and economic class, the design flaw in respect of the highway is the drivers. (She means matatu drivers - not the wabenzi for whom the road was built in the first place.)

I am privileged to own a car. I drive, I hope, with care and respect for other road users, even the ones who drive other road user up the wall with heir asinine antics. I have driven long enough to know that assumptions about certain kinds of road users aren't always true or accurate. The most destructive assumption is that matatu drivers are automatically bad drivers; and those who drive top-of-the-range multi-million-shillings SUVs and limos are automatically the best. But if one has driven on any road in Kenya, one can see that the quality of drivers, regardless of the cars they drive, is broadly the same.

The problems on the roads in Kenya are design problems, many of which have been identified by urban planners and road-builders over the past decade. Kenyan roads are not designed primarily with safety in mind; they are designed primarily to resolve "traffic congestion". The Nairobi Expressway was designed to ease traffic congestion for those "going to the airport". Safety may have played a role in the design, but it was not the primary concern of the designers of the road. And it shows.

You can see this cavalier approach to road design on Ngong Road, which has led to such terrible and tragic outcomes. You can see it in the design of Outer Ring Road, which witness deaths at such a high rate that one is shocked all that blood has not motivated the Kenya Roads Board to take any action whatsoever. Thika Superhighway kills with impunity. And before Kenyans on Twitter rallied to the road safety banner, the brand-spanking-new Waiyaki Way was well on its way to being awash with he blood of pedestrians and other road users. The poor road design is the primary contributor to road traffic accidents in Kenya.

The second, in my opinion, is the extreme laissez-faire attitude of the forces of law and order. The Highway Code, the Traffic Act, the National Transport and Safety Act and the several bye-laws on traffic management and road use are enforced with an extremely light thought for some road users - the wabenzi of today - and in increasingly draconian ways for those unwilling and unable to pay the bribes solicited/demanded by traffic police. You have seen the casual and reckless way in which GK-plated Prados are driven at high speed on the wrong side of the road because "mkubwa anachelewa mkutano ya muhimu" while the rest of the driving masses are stuck on the side of the road negotiating hefty bribes for minor traffic infractions. The contempt for the law, both by law enforcement and road users, has contributed to the dangerous state of the roads and so long as we continue to treat GK-plated Prados and similar "official" cars as if they were occupied by minor gods of greek mythology, all the beautiful road designs in the world will not eliminate the death and destruction witnessed on our roads.

I pity our Fat Wallet correspondent. She labours under a false sense of outrage at the antics matatu drivers get upto on the road. In the parlance of the bible, she ignores the speck in her eye all the while railing and cavilling about the plank in ours. So long as she is silent about the poor road design and the differential traffic law enforcement, she is complicit in the death and destruction on the highway. If she cannot use her platform, her brand and her access to high-ranking government officials to advocate for saner, and safer, road design policies, all she is doing is pissing up our legs and telling us that it is raining.

It's not a constitution of free stuff

Every person has the right to clean and safe water in adequate quantities. [Art. 43 (1) (d), Constitution of Kenya]

Humans don't create water. They don't create the land on or in which water is found. Humans don't create the ponds, rivers, lakes, seas, oceans and aquifers where water is found. They are not responsible for the clouds that fall to Earth as rain. Humans can't create water. Humans can only exploit water. For food. For manufacturing. For transport. For profit.

Kenya's Constitution places an onerous responsibility on Kenyans to protect and conserve the environment that is the source of the water exploited for profit. The manner in which the environment will be protected and conserved is a matter of legislation: the Forest Conservation and Management Act, Water Conservation and Management Act, Wildlife Conservation and Management Act, Climate Change Act, and Environmental Management and Co-ordination Act, and the numerous regulations, guidelines and other statutory instruments issues by the Government.

Legislation is a reflection of the representative nature of the Government. Voters choose the elected representatives. Elected representatives form the executive and legislature. Together, the legislature and executive enact laws. The laws reflect the collective constitutional settlement of the people that natural resources must be protected and conserved for the greater common good and that the accruing benefits must be equitable shared by the people - including, dare I say, the protection of the right of the people to clean and safe water in adequate quantities.

No one is saying that water services shall be provided for free by (or under the authority of) the Government. (Water services are the method by which clan and safe water in adequate quantities is supplied to the people.) If it were left to "the market" to decide, those who couldn't afford the "market price" for water services would be denied those services. The market, and its "efficient allocation of capital", would ignore the people who couldn't afford to pay for water services and prefer those who could pay he highest rate. Anyone who thinks that this is what the Constitution of Kenya intended was not paying attention to what the majority of the voters who supported the Harmonised Draft Constitution wanted or demanded.

It isn't enough to bring forward economics arguments inspired by dead Austrians to show that in the long run the provision of water services under the current framework will "fail". One must also demonstrate that this economics lesson has the support of the people, in whose name the Constitution was adopted, and that the people collectively want to deny the least among them access to any form of water services if they are incapable of paying a market price. Constitutional rights, it turns out, are a reflection of the highly personalised nature of human relationships as opposed to the impersonal economics principles beloved by statisticians and similar small animals.

Kenyans adopted a Constitution that eschews the extremism of libertarians. It is not libertarian in nature at all. It doesn't contemplate "small government". Instead, it promotes collectivism of a kind that offends free-market zealots. It is not extremely collectivist either; after all, it does not even remotely propose "free stuff" for those who don't have stuff. It attempts to strike a balance between the two extremes and it is up to us as individuals, our elected representatives, and the laws they enact, to find that balance.

Handshakes, legacies and divorces

Deputy President William Ruto has done much to draw a line between his role in the Government of Uhuru Kenyatta and his role as the United Democratic Alliance and Kenya Kwanza coalition flag-bearer. It rings a bit hollow when one remembers that scarcely five years ago, he rattled off a string of promises, in the presence of his running mate, that have not been fulfilled - and the ones that have been fulfilled have resulted in economic catastrophe for millions of Kenyans. The most outlandish promise, in my estimation, contained the following sentence: "the stadium in Kamariny, which is historic". So it isn't that far-fetched for many voters to tie him to the promises of his running mate in the 2017 general election, never mind his protestations that he is his own man with his own agenda. He said what he said.

The Deputy President has a long history in elective politics at the national level. He has been assistant minister, minister, and deputy president. He has stood on the wrong side of history on many issues of consequence, including the efforts to sabotage the Ghai Draft constitution in 2005 to actively campaigning against the Harmonised Draft Constitution published by Nzamba Kitonga's Committee of Experts in 2010. Though he has not been convicted of corruption-related offences, few are persuaded that his dealings in the land on which the Weston Hotel stands point to a high level of probity. It is immaterial that senior members of the Government he serves have been accused, by the president no less, of aiding, abetting and participating in the theft, loss, misappropriation or mismanagement of two billion shillings every day.

The attempts by the deputy president to lay the blame for the current national economic woes at the feet of the Handshake ring hollow when every economist worth his salt can trace the selfsame woes to the policies of the Jubilee Alliance from as far back as 2013. He cannot, on one hand, claim credit for the apparent success of the "10,000km roads' programme" while at the same time distancing himself from the consequences of that programme on the cost of credit in the domestic market.

A leopard doesn't change his spots and the same is largely true of the Kenyan politician. He may flit from one party to the next, but at his core, he remains largely unchanged. His values and principles, such as they are, carry through the several political parties he hops to, and they are reflected in the kinds of policies he adopts, the language he uses to sell his manifesto - and the suspicion, warranted or not, he arouses in the people whose votes he seeks. The deputy president is no different. He is quite good at saying persuasive things about his plans. He has a good propaganda machine that has done a good job of whitewashing is political history. But even in the battle of the opinion polls, it is still a toss-up whether or not he will ride to victory or slink away from the national political plane in disgrace.

Uhuru Kenyatta is not on the ballot in 2022, but his intimate involvement in the stitching together of the Azimio la Umoja One Kenya Alliance has given the deputy president a wedge with which to pry himself away from the political record of the Jubilee government. After the acrimonious way in which the Jubilee leaders have dissolved their political alliance, it is not surprising that the deputy president has every intention of politically putting the president on the ballot, linking him (and his apparent failures) to the Azimio flag-bearer, Raila Odinga. If the deputy president can paint The Handshake as the true Government, and himself as the maligned party, and if the voters agree with him, then his chances at the hustings are better than even.

It is now moot that the presidential ballot will be fought with the shadow of the incumbent president looming large over the decision of the voter. Many voters are apathetic, at best, but they may vote one way or the other on the strength of their feelings towards the president. If they credit him with positive political and economic outcomes, they may vote for his preferred candidate (or against his former partner whom they may see as an unprepared and ungrateful menace). If they blame him for their current economic woes, they will ignore the dozens of praise-singing billboards about roads, bridges, electricity and healthcare, and cast their votes for the deputy president, whom they will see as unfairly targeted for simply seeking that which he was promised in 2013 aka "Kumi ya Uhuru na Kumi ya Ruto".