Rage.

I am not a violent man; I have very few violent inclinations against my enemies. I am not a coward, though. I have faced down monsters and nuisances alike. But I abhor violence; I prefer the faux combat of the football pitch, the boxing ring (though there's nothing faux about a knock-out punch) and the adversarial arena of the hallowed chambers of justice. Every now and then, though, the desire to kick, hit, punch is overwhelming, and it takes the best part of a minute to recall all those yoga deep-breathing exercises designed to restore mental tranquility and relieve cranial agony.

But that is all within the ken of men. They are all capable of controlling their base urges. But only when they act as individuals. When they are part of a mob, when the scent is in the air and their blood is well up, they are akin to a pack of jackals on the hunt. They are unlikely to permit reason to prevail. They are likely to be swept up in the passions of the mob. They will commit atrocities in order to be in solidarity with their fellow base men. They will do it without conscious thought. The outcome is frequently injury, destruction and likely death.

There is always a trigger. The circumstances that lead to the trigger being so potent are varied and variegated. They are complex mix of family dynamics, social values, tribal customs, personal circumstances in relationships and money, and perceived places in society. The men who, with maniacal hormonal glee, violently attacked a woman pedestrian, stripped her of dignity and her dress, filmed it and uploaded it on the internet are the cautionary tale, the conscience (or lack of it) of our society, the proof that we are led still by base instincts, primal urges, violent inclinations.

It is a man's world, Kenya. The Cabinet Secretary for Devolution and Planning has been caricatured by male cartoonists in the base language employed by men of even baser tastes. We need not dwell on her caricatured portrayal except to observe that it reinforces the stereotypical perception of women as objects of men's basest desires. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the forces of law and order would take three days to ask for the victim of the violent assault to come forward and file a complaint; they did not "swing into action" and "launch investigations" promising to "leave no stone unturned" like they are wont to do. I will remind you that the law and order firmament is firmly in the grip of men who would happily have joined in the lynch mob that stripped that poor woman. It is no longer enough to presume that they would not have done that; by their actions we cannot be sure any more.

In a man's world there are always calls to protect the womenfolk, keep them safe from other men. In a man's world, it is not enough to have a constitution; its strictures and exhortation of rights and freedoms are meaningless unless men use their masculinity to guarantee the womenfolk's constitutional rights and freedoms. And what a man can guarantee, a man, too, can limit. You can see this insidious arrangement when we acknowledge that women were always meant to play second fiddle to men: it is in scripture and so shall it be in all walks of life. It is divinely ordained that women shall be No. 2. It is why men see no irony in decreeing what women will wear with the same immutably certain fiat that they decree whether women will stand for public office. As soon as they become men, it maters not one whit that they have mothers, sisters, wives or daughters: the men are men, the womenfolk are...not. And since women are not men, men must decide what women are by deciding everything about women. Clothes are the tip of an icily supercilious iceberg.

Even accepting the unfairness of it all, the desire to hunt down those men that demolished that woman's life remains undiminished. To hunt them down, to surround them with other cackling jackals, to push, prod, kick and slap the, to strip them to their naked balls, and to frog-march them along the streets of our fair city in broad daylight, filming it all and broadcasting it for the whole world to see. There isn't a twinge of masculine solidarity that might suppress the violent thoughts about those beastly men. There is only rage. Rage, rage, rage.

Baggage.

When it rains, it pours. So I am reminded of the wisdom of antiquity. But of more recent vintage are Bob Marley's words; some feel the rain, others just get wet. It is raining but I am not just getting wet. My cup runneth over and I am unsure what to do. I have had occasion to experience bewilderment when fortune cast a favourable eye on me; now I am unsure what to do when both favour and disfavour seem so wildly interconnected.

On the one hand, She seems to have reactivated certain neurons that time and concussions might have damaged. Awkwardness seems to have dissipated. Which is awkward in itself. An appreciation of certain historical facts is slowly being gained. On the other hand, historical baggage weighs heavily on all this. And it is a mixed bag, some good; but much a threat to continued mental well-being. It is the latter that gives us, gives me, pause.

Baggage has one of two solution: bear it until it breaks you or set it down without regret. Neither is an easy choice to make, but it is far easier to bear the burdens of the past than to cast them away because of the fear of the unknown should we cast them away. It is a comfort to have a psychological target for the reason why we won't, can't, shan't, shouldn't do this, that or the other. We will deny that it is a comfort, but this is exactly what it is. There is a reason for moving forward with trepidation and hesitation. There's a reason to half-commit. There's a reason to magnify flaws and then to rely on them to change course - or even retreat.

We all have them, historical baggage that is. Some are physical, many are emotional. Emotional baggage can make or break us. Far often than not we refuse to find out because we have never tested our strengths. Some of us are fatalistic; some other are not; still others are pragmatic and analytical, ruled by reason and logic, denying our psychological immaturity. In our logic and reason we rationalise every decision, refusing to accept that reason and logic, not matter how rigorously applied, must be founded on an emotion: desire, fear, hope, misery. And the outcome of the rigorous application of that reason and logic is emotional: satisfaction.

How much history are we prepared to bear? All of it? Some of it? How much consequence are we prepared to endure? There is no knowing, no predicting. You can't prepare for it. You can hope that despite everything you know, it will end well. You can psyche yourself up. But you still will never be sure. Unless...Unless it is clear to yourself, deep within you, that you will do what it takes to live with your choices, to accept the past, to welcome the future. Sometimes your baggage is not yours to set down, but for others to accept that there will always be baggage.

Neurons are flashing wildly in unfamiliar patterns. The world is full of possibilities. She made that possible. She may not know it yet, but the world is soon going to be grateful to her, though not as you may think. The ability to transcend ones past is rare. The capacity to accept ones flaws is rarer still. But both are possible when one employs all the physical and psychological attributes at their disposal. It is only then that one can decide for themselves whether they intend to be happy or whether they intend to live in fear. Happy people tend to spread happiness. Those living in fear tend to act on their fears - it is never pretty when they do. World, you will have cause to thank Her.

It is now a culture, Mr Bindra.

All this because we have allowed cheating to be rewarded. It’s a drag on our development and a stain on our national fabric. Whichever way we end cheating, end it we must. ~ Sunny Bindra, 17 November 2014

Maybe this is a conversation Mr Bindra and I will continue to have on this medium, and I hope that it is a conversation that public servants in key decision-making positions will follow. Mr Bindra is an avid student of management and I am somehow surprised he has yet to comment on the problem of cheating from a management perspective, especially when candidates are sitting for the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Examination. There are many moving parts to ensure a candidate successfully cheats in the exam.

First, there is an assessment of the candidate's chances in the exam. He, and his senior-most advisors and confidants (parents) have reviewed nearly four years of data and drawn disappointing conclusions. They have assessed the total amount of input and the expected results and drawn the conclusion that the chances of a successful KCSE must be bolstered by less than ethical means. Especially where a candidate and his parents make this decision, it means that the ends-justify-the-means mantra is an acceptable argument to the problem of the candidate's chances in the exam.

Second, there is the environmental assessment. For someone to successfully cheat, it is not enough for mummy and daddy to be on board with the whole enterprise. They co-conspirators must co-opt outside partners. For this they will need resources, whether it is money or some other form of consideration. So the parents will determine how much is available and how much can be committed to the plot. Then they must choose carefully who is likely to advance their plans. The right choice means victory; the wrong choice may involve the parents' criminal prosecution and a ban against the child sitting the exam for some years.

Third, is the preparation of an action plan. Even after identifying potential collaborators, one can't just approach them and whisper, "We want to cheat in the exam." It will require assessing the potential collaborators' weaknesses and strengths and past record in ventures of this kind. It will require intelligence-gathering which may require interpersonal skills capable of exploiting every morsel of information with the aim of persuading and influencing the potential collaborators. These may include the headmaster, the child's teachers, the invigilators, the education officers and the examination officials. The plan must account for the process of taking the exam, from the date the candidate registered to when the exam is taken to when the exam is marked to when the results are announced and certificates issued.

Fourth is the sheer logistics of the thing. The collaborators cannot be seen together. There must be go-betweens. These may be trusted lieutenants or blind messengers. The aim will be to ensure that everything looks on the up and up when the candidate sits for the exam, that his scripts do not arouse suspicion when they are marked, and that should suspicion inevitably arise - this is Kenya after all; everything is suspicious - that there is a contingency plan to defuse the situation. Each party must play their part, play it when they are required to and play it without communicating overtly with the others to monitor progress.

I may have missed one or two elements in the scheme I have described. Now consider how this scheme is applied at university or places of work. A candidate who successfully participates in a scheme to cheat to academic success will learn lessons from the scheme, which he will apply in life. Cheating has been a constant feature of the 8-4-4 system; perhaps even of the previous system. How many procurement managers learnt the dodgy bits of supply chain management from schemes to cheat in national or university exams? How many elected representatives learnt how to manipulate their potential voters from the lessons they learnt when manipulating collaborators? Did Victor Kanyari draw lessons from his mother's incarceration such that he did no have to prove them at the KCSE by dropping out of school in form 2?

Mr Bindra, we may have reached a tipping point. It is true that cheating may lead to the collapse and reform of the current system of assessing how much one has learnt and what one is capable of doing. I believe the bigger problem is that there are many cheaters in decision-making positions who are incapable of seeing the moral hazards of inculcating the same values, consciously or subconsciously, in their organisations. We have a culture of cheating. We may weed it out of the exam system but it has spread outside of the system and pervaded every other area. It is a mathenge, an invasive tree species we planted in Garissa to control desertification along the Tana, but instead became an environmental menace. We must now confront the challenge of weeding out cheating inculcated by successful cheaters who are now managers, teachers, MPs, lawyers, preachers, Ministers and parents.

Colonia-era National Security.

I could kick myself. That is the thing about hindsight. If it was possible to kick one's butt, we could hardly ever sit down. All I had to do was ignore my parents and my teachers and concentrate instead on getting out of school at the earliest opportunity for a lesson in street economics. And because whether I attended school or not would not affect my near eidetic memory, all those tense years in catechism class would pay off, Victor-Kanyari-style. Obviously, that option can no longer be exercised because I sat for my KSCE without putting my parent's academic chops to shame. I should have, though.

That would have opened up the world of national security. Julius Karangi and David Kimaiyo are not interested in the best of the best; they would have been pretty excited if I brought them my C-, with an impressive D in maths, D in any of the sciences, D in social studies but gentleman's Cs in English and Swahili. After all when "communicating" with other Kenyans, passable English and Swahili would be de rigeur. Depending on the more accommodating of the two, I would have climbed up the ranks until I got stuck somewhere in the lucrative, modest money-making middle. I'd be too junior for the muckety mucks to notice, but senior enough to command my own men.

Godmen. Police. Soldiers on deployment. I think it is only union bosses left who haven't yet brought infamy upon their houses regarding sensitive matters. Victor Kanyari is the ghost of Christmas past for the whole church. The police are a law unto themselves and it is why they sneer snidely every time some civil rights industrialist goes on the warpath about graft in the ranks and human rights abuses. The army, on the other hand, is beloved - so long as it is kicking in doors or setting manyattas alight Over There. Now that Kapedo and its environs are receiving the attention that Mt Elgon did a few years ago, many Kenyans are cheering on their soldiers in the fight against banditry. If a few livestock animals get in the way, a few shop windows are smashed, a few houses set ablaze, and a few women are left weeping bitterly for the television cameras, it is a small price to pay to teach those bandits a lesson.

We were silent when traditional policing failed the peoples of Mt Elgon and the army was deployed there. The Independent Medico-Legal Unit visited Mt Elgon and recorded abuses on a scale not seen since the Wagallah Massacre two decades earlier. We may disagree about the inanity of the politics among the cattle-rustlers among the Turkana, the Ilchamus, the Pokot, the Samburu and the police, but by simply cheering on the rapine by the Kenya Defence Forces because it is not us at the receiving end of the "disarmament operation", but the more these operations become regular, the more they will become common in traditionally "secure" areas. 

The reason why families liquidate their holdings in order to buy a recruitment into the police or the defence forces has none to do with desire to serve the nation, but the opportunities to secure families' futures for generations to come. By the time the dreaded spy chief Kanyottu died, he was akin to a colonial-era landowner for all the land he owned and became the subject of vicious battles among his heirs. Former Chief of General Staff the late Gen Mulinge practically owned much of Kathiani. That is the lesson hundreds of thousands of Kenyans have drawn from our security services since independence. It is why the legitimacy of police deployments in bandit-prone areas is low, and why even the deployment of the army when the police fail is not a panacea.

Policing is in the shitter and domestic deployments of the army are about as welcome as skunk spray. Police reforms are meaningless if the founding principles of policing in Kenya remain unchanged. Since the Shifta Wars and the Wagallah Massacre, the army's legitimacy is only high when it is on short overseas deployments, especially on peacekeeping missions for the United Nations. But domestic deployments have always led to gross abuses which the supine profit-driven media houses have only been too happy to ignore for ever fatter favours from the powers-that-be. Kapedo will end badly. We will never find out. The police will never be reformed. And the army will remain a darling of the people - so long as it deals with Those People and not us.

I am not a woman.

I am not a woman. Before splutter into your coffee or roll your eyes in derision, allow me an indulgent moment. I mean that I cannot for the life of me understand how a woman will feel when she is attacked by thugs with anyone who attempts to come to her aid fending off other attackers in the bargain. I am not going to understand why it is men who seem to have a very strong say over whether or not we can discuss menstruation and menstrual cramps at seven in the morning. I don't know how women feel about celibate men deciding what they can and cannot do with their vaginas or uteri. I don't know how women feel when they receive catcalls from boys young enough to be their sons or old enough to be their fathers or young enough to be their brothers. I am not a woman.

There are women in my life. Strong and capable each and every one of them. They are definitely smarter than I am; they demonstrate it every day they keep achieving what I desperately want to achieve: fame, wealth, joy. They are accomplished professionals. In one instance, she is so accomplished she can afford not to take on any responsibilities because even if she is not the boss, everyone will cut out her boss to get to her. Yes, she is that good. The women in my life have sat with presidents, kings and queens. They have made a mark that none can ignore. And they have done it in one of the most hostile environments, an environment of misogyny that hides behind the inadequate fig-leaves of god, culture and tradition.

I saw a man on TV saying he would murder his daughter if she chose to join the National Youth Service. He would kill his child. He wouldn't be directed to do it; he would deliberately seek her out and end her life if she chose to live outside his protective roof and became an individual woman with a career. To the best of my knowledge his is not an isolated stance. Many fathers will murder their daughters if their daughters dare to defy them. I don't know how women feel about living with the subconscious fear that their fathers - not their brothers or mothers - will murder them for doing something that is simply not on. Pregnant at sixteen? Death! Kissing a boy at fourteen? Death! Joining a university/college/polytechnic at eighteen? Death! Joining the NYS/KDF/National Police? Death! Having a menstrual cycle? Death! (OK, that last one seems unlikely, but still...) I don't know how women feel about the Sword of Damocles hanging over their heads at all times.

I know what it feels to be told that my opinion is invalid. Mostly I am reminded that my opinions are invalid because quite frequently the person saying so is a genius and who usually thinks I am an idiot. They are usually not wrong. But I have never been told that my opinion is irrelevant because I am a man. Even if I am patently unqualified to have an opinion because I am man, my opinion usually trumps the opinion of a woman because she is a woman. I don't know how women feel about that.

I know that I wouldn't stand by while men stripped a woman naked on the streets. I know I wouldn't stand for it because it is the right thing to do. I'd get my head kicked in; there are more men who would want to strip her naked than would want to defend her honour. I would intervene not because she reminded me of the women in my life, but because the women in my life would do the same for her. The women in my life have protected me since the day I drew breath and I deafened my birthing suite with my first attempt at communication. They have staved off hunger. They have conquered diseases. They have kept at bay predators large and small. They have imbued me with a vast trove of knowledge that has kept human predators at bay. They have banished loneliness. They have been a beacon of light in a very hostile world. And they have taught me love. In their honour I would die to protect the modesty of a woman, any woman, no matter the accusations leveled at her because women have protected my modesty all my life.

In support.

I thought I would be surprised at the degree of misogynistic vitriol Njoki Chege would attract. I was wrong. I was shocked at the depths Kenyans On Twitter, the hashtag army known as #KOT, would go to find material that would paint her in the worst possible light. She is attracting online hate, haterade in the online lingo, that seems completely devoid of reason. She is not the first woman to face this mass animus; Caroline Mutoko faced down a #KOT mob with courage, her customary acerbic wit and a fierce determination to protect her name - and her brand.

Kenya is fast joining the rest of the online world in the hounding of women who dare to play by boy's rules. It might be true that Ms Chege is too young to have such a cynical view of male-female relationships in the rubric of economic and academic considerations. But, as Patrick Gathara would put it, what does that have to do with the price of tea in China? Absolutely nothing; Ms Chege is expressing an opinion, based on her experiences, and expressing it with wit and style. I hope the Nationa Media Group keep her on for a few years more; her style can only get better with time and she'll have matured in her writing and social commentary.

What is almost certain is that Ms Chege will not lack in online enemies. They will have superficial reasons for devoting, collectively, hundreds of thousands of man hours and hundreds of billions of bytes to digging up unflattering information on her and they will take a misogyny-laced perverse pleasure in sharing this information with their online cohorts. I hope she has a strong mental constitution and she is capable of letting the hate wash off at the end of the work day.

In the United States they have started targetting women attacked online offline too. I hope this is never the case with Ms Chege. It is one thing for someone to violently disagree with an opinion expressed by a brash, witty and sassy woman. It is something else for that disagreement to be expressed out of the strict confines of the Letters to the Editor page or online chatrooms where these specimens of misogyny reside. So if she hasn't considered it yet, it is time Ms Chege started taking a keen interest in her personal safety.

Something notable of late has been the desire to attack the person of Ms Chege without arguing coherently whether her basic premise is correct or not. I think it is naive of her to believe that the path to marriage has only the one map. She was erased an entire demographic from her universe, but in the matters of the heart, the heart wants what she wants. If she is truly determined to check-list her way to marital bliss, we can only ask success for her. But a warning might do her a power of good. There might be a diamond-in-the-rough in the blue Subaru-driving, mutumba iPhone-wielding, cheap-lager-swigging, Roysambu-bedsitter-living, Nax-Vegas-frequent-flier jackanape on the make. It would be unwise to shove him out of the nearest airlock simply because of a checklist.

Pressure.

There is a disturbingly large number of Kenyans with a surprising degree of sociopathic tendencies, and who seek opportunities daily to express themselves in violent ways. A large proportion of these sociopaths work in the "transport industry" and when they are not busy killing us, deflowering our daughters or trafficking in substances of dubious provenance, they engage in Saudi Arabian levels of moral policing that would make the House of al Saud's mutawa'ah proud. That these sociopaths are both male and female should go without being mentioned, I hope.

There is a psycho-social pressure building up in Kenya. Our psyches are being enflamed by social and economic pressures over which, it seems, we are powerless to intervene. The poverty trap is increasingly real for larger numbers of working Kenyans. We are likely, today, to be felled by a bandit's bullet as we to be felled by a policeman's. We cannot even trust that life-saving vaccines are safe when the State and the Church have violently divergent opinions on the matter. We watch in horror as godmen rob us of our money and our dignity. There is this insidious encroachment of the public commons - pavements, parks, pubs, markets, schools - by armed men and the spies who report to them in the name of national security. We are told to spy on each other in the guise of community policing. And we wonder why sociopaths are taking it to the next logical level: enforcing the law in the manner they believe is best for society.

Take Nairobi as an example. On one side of Moi Avenue is a haven of relative civic peace, where the hoi polloi are encouraged not to visit. If they do visit, they are encouraged to conclude their business as quickly as possible and hightail it out of the area. It is done in subtle ways, this exclusion. There are no benches for them to rest weary feet. Even fast food joints are frequently out of their wallets' comfort zones. They are not encouraged to walk either; barriers are thrown up in their way to make the walking experience as unpleasant as possible. And they are monitored with great suspicion by armies of police and private security wherever they go. The pervasive sense of hostility is deliberate. The message is clear.

On the other side of Moi Avenue, on the other hand, the hoi polloi don't see themselves as such; they see themselves as hustlers in the same league as the most famous hustler of them all. They do not put on airs. They are in a hurry to get to the other side of Moi Avenue. But among them are the ones for whom the pressure of the hustle proves too much. They have been priced out of the housing market. Many of them can't square expenses with even two meals a day. They are left to police themselves; all the police are on the other side of Moi Avenue keeping the hustlers out. It is inevitable that these pressures will find violent expression in assaults of all kinds. That poor woman who was stripped naked by Embasava SACCO thugs is not alone.

The irony of a largely peaceful general election leaving a persistently violent aftermath is not lost on me. Since #TeamJubilee was sworn in, Kenyans have been at the receiving end of an unrelenting wave of violent attacks, some spectacular and others not. It is one of the most violent political epochs in a very long time. The last time this many Kenyan lived in stark fear was when extra-legal means were employed to control the Mungiki, including executions and murders for hire. You cannot trust the police; wasn't one of the explanations for Kapedo that the ambushing party that murdered twenty-three police thought they were ambushing Kenya Police Reserves belonging to the "other side"? You cannot trust the army; after Kapedo, we sent in the army to disarm but now the army is being accused of unfairly disarming one side and leaving the other side defenceless. You cannot trust the godmen either; Prophet Dr Kanyari is not an anomaly. You cannot trust anyone. This poisonous atmosphere will continue to manifest itself in violent outbursts: murders of police and stripping naked of "loose" women.

Wipe away the hate.

They hate each other. It is that simple. The language they use is sometimes a substitute for the simis, njoras, pangas, spears, bows-and-arrows, Heckler & Koch G3s, and the Barrett .50 calibres that they wield with deadly precision every time something comes up between their elected representatives and their educated elite with egos the sizes of small suns. You can see it with the wincing smiles they give each other. Especially their politicians, they are not adept at the pretend-to-be-enemies that the rest of the political world has mastered; they really, truly, with deep feeling, hate each other.

Cattle-rustling is a convenient excuse. So is resource-based conflict. As is "boundary disputes". Whatever else they fight over, the reason they fight is that they hate each other. They have done so for generations. They were encouraged to do so by Jomo Kenyatta's and Daniel Moi's forty year neglect. Their elected representatives, especially, was favoured pets in Moi's court. So long as they toed his line, they were free to build little manyattas of their own at which the young and the nubile would demonstrate fealty. Few are or were men of honour. The few women who managed to escape the manyattas have not demonstrated a capacity for dedicated community upliftment; some have become brazen flower-girls in Uhuru Kenyatta's court.

What is true about their animosities is that the balances always shift. In one season one sid is up; in another season, the other side is up. When one side is up, and some unfortunate officers of the law are killed, the army steps in and conducts a "disarmament" exercise. It does so with violence and viciousness. it does so without mercy or feeling. Then it goes back to the barracks until it is the turn of the other side. Meanwhile, the professionals, elected representatives and sons in uniform exert their political influence, such as it might be, and prevail on the national Executive to "suspend the disarmament exercise" because of "human rights abuses". The national Executive usually obliges when the rest of the nation have forgotten the worst of the dead police story. And again and again the cycle goes.

It doesn't matter how many GSU camps we build there. It doesn't matter how many Chiefs, Assistant Chiefs or DOs we appoint for each side. It doesn't matter how many firearms are recovered. It doesn't matter how many of them escape to urban Kenya in pursuit of education or livelihood. When it comes down to it, few of them have known anything but a hatred for the other side. It is something their mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, grandmothers, grandfathers, cousins and friends reinforced. They know nothing else. They will never find as much satisfaction as in hating the other side, killing members of the other side, embarassing the members of the other side. It is why they strive to be lawyers, engineers, doctors, architects, soldiers or policemen: so that they can show up those other lazy bums.

Until we can erase the hate they feel for the others, until they learn to live without the bitter bile rising in their throats over something the other side did or did not do, the bloodshed will never end. You can deploy the army and the GSU over there until the end of time, but so long as this blood feud lives, the deaths will never stop. It is Joseph Ole Kaparo's job to see to it that they stop hating each other. His predecessor sucked at his job. Mr Kaparo is famous for weeping openly in public. I hope his tears will bring the enemies together and drown out their hatred for each other. Because if he fails to even get the ball rolling, you can count down to the hour when the next "massacre" will take place.

Let us be, Mr Kimaiyo.

Patrick Gathara asked a simple, yet difficult to answer, question the other day: why is it when the billion-shilling swindlers of Kenya are pursued by the forces of law and order, deadly forces is never employed yet the result of their billion-shilling swindles is usually death and destruction on an epic scale? He pointed out that while he deplored the brutal murders of twenty-three police, he did not understand why Kapedo was entitled to a Kenya Defence Forces deployment but not Kileleshwa.

It is not so difficult to observe the manner in which the rich and the poor are treated by the forces of law and order, especially the police and the judiciary. I am lucky enough to have spent my childhood in the City in the 1980s, not because I enjoyed superb civic amenities but because I can remember the general sense of "we are in this together" that united bothy the ruling elite and the hoi polloi. The elite still had their privileges, but they did not rub those privileges in our faces.

That block within the Parliament Road, Harambee Avenue, Taifa Road and City Hall Way square is all government buildings. You'll find iconic ones such as the Kenyatta International Conference Centre, Harambee House, Sheria House, the Attorney-General's Chambers, Jogoo House and Jogoo House "B", the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Trade Building and Commission House, the headquarters of the Public Service Commission. Outside the square but along Parliament Road are Parliament Building and the Jomo Kenyatta Mausoleum, along City Hall Way is City Hall, along Harambee Avenue are Harambe House Annexe, Vgilance House and the National Treasury, but opposite Jogoo House is just Reinsurance Plaza and its sunken car park. Before you roll your eyes over ths long list of buildings, indulge me a little more.

In the '80 and early '90s, the only premises you couldn't enter freely was the Harambee House-Sheria House-Commission House-Attorney-General's Chambers complex because, unlike Uhuru Kenyatta, Daniel Moi actually kept office hours at Harambee House, so his safety was not something we could begrudge him. However, one could walk from Taifa Road to Parliament Road without using either City Hall Way or Harambee Avenue. The processional road between Parliament Buildings and the KICC was open to the public. None of the buildings in the square were ringed with six-feet high steel fences, not even Parliament Building. But it is the benches surrounding the Reinsurance Plaza sunken car park that were a true testament to the acceptance of people from all walks of life the Government Square; those who had come to visit someone in any of the buildings who needed time to rest could sit on the benches as they awaited their appointed hour.

Inspector-General of Police David Kimaiyo, his civilian bosses and his hamfisted minions, and all the securocrats in their orbit of inanity have forgotten that this city will die if it is made any more hostile for those who do not have an ear in the corridors of Government Square. Mr Kimaiyo and his colleagues began by attempting to exile "idlers" from the Taifa Road side of the sunken car park benches by covering them in used motor oil. It never occurred to Mr Kimaiyo and his colleagues that there are inadequate waiting areas in the offices in Government Square and that the sunken car park benches were the only alternative because Uhuru Park and Central Park are so far away. Then Mr Kimaiyo and his colleagues decided to take away walking space for pedestrians.

It has never occurred to these people that the vast majority of visitors to the City are pedestrians, not motorists with private means of transport. Mr Kimaiyo and his colleagues have made a conscious decision to treat all pedestrians as a threat to the occupants of the buildings on Government Square so they are to be kept as far away from the gates to these buildings' premises and their fences. In some cases, walking space has been reduced to a third of what it was serving a walking population that shows no sign of reducing.

Uhuru Kenyatta's government promised to listen to its people. The President demonstrated this when he remonstrated his transport ministry over the incredible, job-destroying stupidity of banning matatu graffiti. It is time he wagged his fingers in the faces of Mr Kimaiyo and his fellow securocrats and ordered them to let the people walk and, when they tire, to rest their feet without being harrassed. The perception that Mr Kenyatta's government is militarised will be reinforced by the siege mentality that the "security" restrictions imposed by Mr Kimaiyo and his colleagues engender.

Thank you.

My friend Jennifer called me yesterday when I was walking down a rain-soaked Harambee Avenue and wished me many warm returns. I didn't have the heart to tell her that I had been holding my umbrella in one hand, my notebook in the other and that as soon as I awkwardly fished out my phone from my pocket, one or all three of us were going to enjoy a bit of Nairobi's glorious rain. I chose to ruin the notebook; paper can be replaced but a cut-rate albeit well-fitting black suit is not something I can replace with the swipe of a card.

Jennifer's phone call got me thinking, though, of all the friends I have made in the past decade. Even Lillian sent me warm wishes even though I hadn't seen her since she upped and married Pius. Of course I had drinks in the evening with Leonard and Maureen, but only because they love it very much when I wake up with a five-alarm hangover. At least that's what I tell them happens when we have drinks. It's nice to help your friends live in the happy delusion that their friends are also suffering from the effects and aftereffects of overindulgence, right?

A score remembered to plaster my facebook page with felicitations and ribald innuendo that is not fit to be repeated for the dis-edificaton of the readers of this post, who may include among them small children and the weak-minded. Needless to say, I will do a bit of nimble footwork to avoid having to sit down with Joseph, Hiram and John, because they are the agents of Beelzebub out to corrupt an otherwise simple public servant trying to make his way in a hostile world. Obviously my nearest and dearest did not even try to spare me the blushes; George and Rei and their kinder, better halves, Polly and Lizz, somehow wrangled the Prof and the Doc to sign a card in which their collective emotional restraint was, for once, quite admirable. (I have no idea what Rei wrote; it was in Cyrillic.)

Even Beryl, who wouldn't want me to reveal the number of summers I have seen, and Don and Andrew sent word that they thought it was pretty neat that I was nearing the greying age with avidity and positivity. I haven't seen Dagi since he flounced off to the USA over a decade-and-a-half ago and I can barely picture Ronnie's face sometimes, especially when I have a five-alarm hangover, but I was chuffed that they even bothered to acknowledge another milestone that only makes an actuary happy. Of course Ngina didn't forget; she's smart that way and one day she's going to either (a) own Mombasa or (b) run Mombasa, which is probably the same thing. 

Edgar and a whole bunch of Old Boys sent word that they were worried that I didn't seem to following the school motto - Ui wii mbee - in the spirit that it was intended; they can't understand why I am not the Solicitor-General yet. If I told them the truth, they'd probably find Tom Ojienda and demand he uses his influence on the Judicial Service Commission to "set things right" for a fellow Old Boy.

But it is what She did that took my breath away. I do not know if you have seen proper cursive penmanship. I have. If I were to describe a moment of utter bliss, it would be to read something in cursive script, in which the flawlessness of the grammatical syntax and the gentle ribbing caused a slow heat to emanate somewhere near my aorta and refused to die down for hours on end. Or perhaps that warm fuzzy feeling was the recurrence of the Man Flu I had conquered two weeks ago. We'll find out as soon as I have flushed out of my system the last of the Martell, Absolut, Finlandia, Peroni, Heineken and that strange concoction Mwatha was peddling on Saturday. (But She really has very beautiful penmanship.)

The day itself ended on a very high note. I hadn't seen Tom for a while; he spends an inordinate amount of time hanging out with very hard men with very hard stares who do very hard things in very hard places. But because Tom looks like the side of a house with the same kind of muscular consistency that telegraphs great will, I am unlikely to entertain doubts that every now and then, he'll shuffle into the Porterhouse, rearrange the Three Barrels with his sheer force of personality, and generally regale us with tales of derring-do which we will doubt until the next time we read his byline. All in all, my friends made it a wonderful three days and it's Jennifer you must thank for my remembering to say, "Thanks guys."

Njoki's debate.

I was prepared to take up literary cudgels against Njoki Chege. Instead I partook of a very large snifter of something that attracted a very heft excise duty, calmed down and considered my hypocritical reaction. At one time I vroom-vroomed around town in a cut-rate Subaru Impreza that I never quite finished paying for before it was written off in a Citi Hoppa-related encounter. My broking agent saw fit to jack up my premiums after that and that was that when it came to cut-rate anything. Njoki Chege is right to stop, and cross the street, when she encounters any of the specimens she described as being out of her league, especially if they even think of expressing amorous intentions.

Ms Chege has presented her CV, in a manner of speaking. She is forthright, she is employed gainfully, she is pursuing what I must assume is a post-graduate degree (perhaps even a doctorate if she is in the same mould as the impressive Yvonne Maingey), she is unimpressed by what I shall ungenerously assume are cut-rate "exhibition" iPhone 4s, and she will need to be impressed by erudition, intellect - and a very fat wallet. That a respected tabloid has given her a byline means that she is indeed a respectable member of the society and definitely not anyone's mother. It is for an equally respectable man to decide whether or not Ms Chege ticks off all the right check-boxes and whether he is prepared to risk his name being splashed in the previously mentioned tabloid if he proves less than advertised.

It is strange for someone who's spent the better part of his adult life meeting accomplished, strong-willed and opinionated women to be witness to the testosterone-fuelled violent misogyny directed at women such as Ms Chege. In this day and age it is no longer the exclusive preserve of men to have ideas about ideal mates, not when more and more women are bringing home fatter and fatter bacon. There are a few biological truths that will only be elided with a more rapid march of biotechnology: menopause will strike, but it will not strike men; childbirth is a natural outcome of conception, but not for men, and at every end of a menstrual cycle, it is wise for men in women's lives to find legitimate reasons to "travel to Kigali" on business for the sake of peace and sanity.

Why are there men who fear women today? I saw on the news last night that men in Garissa would rather murder their daughters than permit them to join the National Youth Service. These must be the same kinds of men who have a very strong abhorrence to a woman dictating what kind of man she deserves. I say the more Njoki Cheges we have out there, the faster everyone will get over the idea of stereotypical gendered roles of little practical utility in the twenty-first century.

There is a catch though. You cannot have your cake and eat it too. Women should be allowed to set standards for themselves about whom they will hitch themselves for the rest of their lives. But they must be prepared for the equality backlash when men give in and relent, especially over gendered roles. Of course here are those biological functions that only women will perform; but beyond that, a true partnership will also mean that Ms Chege's suitors will ask how fat a wallet she brings into the affair; no man will be looking for a voracious parasite. It is time that even the backwaters of Kenya where custom and tradition are as men declare them to be entered the twenty-first century of women who know exactly what they want.

Kanyari and GoK: Siamese Twins

I have the right to believe that Victor Kanyari is a prophet and a faith-healer, even if none has been healed when Victor Kanyari has interceded. I have the right to worship with Victor Kanyari's congregation, even if he demands money from me and my own. My right to believe cannot be restricted by anyone. How will you stop me from believing? There isn't a statutory switch in my brain or an intellectual switch in my mind that could be thrown so that I stopped believing. Secondly, the only reasonable restriction to whether or not I can worship with Victor Kanyari's congregation is if the church at which he preaches is unregistered or has failed to comply with the provisions of the Societies' Act.

I wonder what those calling for "more regulation of churches" mean. The statutory and regulatory environment is not as unsettled as we would imagine or we have been led to believe. The Societies' Act is robust; it follows the same pattern of registration and oversight as the Companies Act. In relation to "churches" the problem is not the law but is enforcement. Victor Kanyari may very well be a crook; his crookedness is not as a result of an inadequate law but the non-enforcement of the law that exists. The non-enforcement of the law, as is frequently the case in Kenya, is a political decision, and the nation's political leadership has had a hand in ensuring that the Victor Kanyaris of Kenya operate with impunity.

It is a spectacle that reveals the deep schisms in Kenya. The gap between the rich and the poor is not imaginary. There are shops in Kenya where the cost of a pair of shoes is equivalent a year's salary of some of its staff, sometimes even two years' salary. Faith-based organisations offer their members hope that a brighter future lies ahead. That brighter future is frequently described in financial and monetary terms. It is explained in the language of investment, promoted with assiduous zeal by banks, pension plans, mutual funds and, yes, the Government of Kenya. It is a language that has permeated many faith-based organisations' operational mantras and it has captured the imaginations of many Kenyans who are poor and who aspire to great wealth and power.

Victor Kanyari is an indictment of public policy, statutory and regulatory frameworks, and social values and mores. Victor Kanyari bluntly reminds the government that in all its iterations, it has failed the peoples of Kenya; it has only benefitted an elite few. Even the so-called middle classes, those with white-collar jobs or are "self-employed" investors, engage in more than one income-generating activity simply to keep their heads above water and stave off financial disaster. Meanwhile, especially in the public sector, there are many who may have had moderate success in the private sector who have leveraged conflicts of interest in their favour and become fabulously wealthy. Victor Kanyari and the other prosperity-gospel churches have merely copied what the State has permitted to permeate among its very own ranks.

It is fashionable these days to give away free gifts for minor tokens. Kenyans are encouraged to participate in essentially get-rich-quick schemes by the biggest companies, with the tacit approval of the government. They stand chances of winning cars, houses, and million-shilling cash prizes. The virtues of thrift and hard work are not promoted as assiduously. More and more Kenyans today believe that there are free lunches and that wealth and power are easy to obtain; all you need is luck and the right connections to the right people. These are the Kenyans who "plant seeds" and expect miracles but end up enriching unscrupulous false prophets who go on to amass political influence which they then leverage to mock the law and act with impunity.

Play your cards right.

It got done. It got done even when all pointed to a damp squib of a plan. It worked despite the snobbish punditry and predictions of utter failure. It didn't work out exactly as had been planned, but the result places him a heartbeat away from the seat of ultimate political power in Kenya. Despite the International Criminal Court, William Samoei Ruto is sitting pretty - prettier than Raila Odinga, and certainly prettier than Martha Karua, Peter Kenneth, Kalonzo Musyoka and James Ole Kiyiapi.

Mr Ruto played a high-risk game with his legal fumbling at the beginning of the process. His choice of Kithure Kindiki at first blush looked sensible - until the good professor started speaking. In short order, Mr Ruto re-assessed hs options, somehow managed to find the fat wallet he needed and he plumped for the sharp-as-a-tack Karim Khan. The narrative from then on was a piece of cake: blame Raila Odinga and blame him good.

But what really sealed it for him was the partnership with Uhuru Kenyatta. Fumbling about for a party took its toll on Mr Ruto, but once he found the United Republican Party, and he sealed his partnership with Uhuru Kenyatta's The National Alliance, he proceeded to whip his political troops into disciplined shape - aping to the uniformed discipline Uhuru Kenyatta instilled in his political troops. (Perhaps this is when Kenyans should have noticed the martial mien of the Jubilee Alliance and prepared themselves for a fatigues-wearing Commander-in-Chief.)

In any case, between September 2012 and March 2013, William Ruto fulfilled a political dream - to be a major political player in his own right. However, again, this may all be another high-wire act by Mr Ruto. Uhuru Kenyatta has a relatively becalmed backyard. Central Kenya, Meru, Embu, Isiolo, Laikipia, Kajiado and Nakuru are without significant degrees of discontent. Mr Ruto, on the other hand, not only has significant pockets of the Rift Valley under the thumbs of Mr Odinga's minions, the whole area is in violent ferment...it may have began with Baragoi but it is most certainly not going to end with Kapedo.

Then there are the tenderpreneurs who felt cheated out of their fair share of the UhuRuto spoils of war. They are not going to be assuaged any time soon without massive dollops of cold hard tenderprising cash. Their marionettes in Parliament are going to have move with alacrity and deftness to ensure that if the laptops tender is ever implemented, there will be enough largesse to go around so that it doesn't seem as if the Deputy President is a nobody.

Finally, there is the impression that Mr Ruto is being shortchanged. After all, it is him and Joshua arap Sang alone who are being tried; Uhuru Kenyatta's trial has not taken off because, some of Mr Ruto's excitable acolytes allege, the Government of Kenya's senior-most State officers and civil servants have entered into a secret conspiracy to stymie the ICC at every turn. But they seem to have been mollified by the epidemic of recanting by witness, hostility and downright non-co-operation; they believe that the same blanket of conspiracy now covers their man.

We underestimated Mr Ruto's capacity for survival and reinvention. We underestimated his intelligence and capacity to seize opportunities as they presented themselves. We naively believed that the rule of law would prevail when it came to someone of his political cunning. We are paying the price for our naivete. In a decade or so we will look back and marvel at how he did it all. One thing is for sure, even those who think they have a handle on Mr Ruto continue to underestimate him gravely. They will regret their miscalculation - unless some of them come to their senses and play their cards right.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

Baragoi. Westgate. Mpeketoni. Kapedo. Major security events. Scores are dead. Score are maimed. Scores of guns and ammunition go missing. Securocrats talk tough. The Commander-in-Chief visits scenes of crime - and talks tough. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. Since 2010 only one securocrat of note has resigned "for personal reasons": Maj Gen Michael Gichangi. What many speculatively declare is that the former Director-General of the national Intelligence Service did not retire, but was fired because many senior Jubilants were uncomfortable with his hand in the indictment of #TeamDigital at The Hague. Whatever the truth may be, Maj Gen Gichangi remains a gentleman of no mean repute and with his resignation, even if he was the most incompetent spy chief ever, he has achieved saint-like status in my eyes.

The Cabinet Secretary-Interior, the Principal Secretary-Interior, the Inspector-General of Police, and the new Director of National Intelligence have chosen to stay put, come hell or high water. The Inspector-General of Police has promised to leave no stone unturned to bring the killers of twenty one of his officers to book. So too have the Cabinet Secretary and his Principal Secretary. To his end, they have called for the Kenya Defence Forces to deploy in Baringo, West Pokot, Turkana, Samburu and Laikipia, the swathe of territory in which the bandits suspected to have murdered the twenty one police allegedly operate. The Kenya Defence Forces have deployed with shock and awe, bombing forested areas. So far, sixteen of "missing" firearms - sans bullets - belonging to the police have been "surrendered" to the authorities.

Affairs are not in order, never mind the securocracy's determination not to rock the boat. The Cabinet Secretary has opened a new front while dealing with everything else the securocrats are throwing at him. He has decided to take a firm line against the online intimidation tactics of a senior counsel, who has accused the Cabinet Secretary of being party to a scheme to grab 154,000 acres of much-troubled land from a mzungu landowner. Meanwhile, after a game of Principal Secretary musical chars, the newish Principal Secretary is doing her best to change the security narrative by redefining banditry and rustling as commercial and not cultural to explain the failure of the police forces in tracing hundreds of heads of cattle that "vanish into thin air" after a raid. We hope that she brings greater intellectual heft to her job in future. 

We can only speculate about what the Director of National Intelligence intends to do; he has maintained a studiously cryptic silence since he was appointed in the wake of the drumming out of his predecessor from the Service. The Defence Forces are doing what the Defence Forces are trained to do - they are going to war against domestic enemies and they will shoot and bomb their way to victory, never mind that Parliament seems to be in the dark about their deployment and human rights concerns are a figment of our civil society industry's overactive imagination. Mt Elgon-like allegations will be treated in exactly the same way they have always been treated: with contempt!

What is certain in this now familiar cycle is that Maj Gen Gichangi will forever remain an anomaly. Mr Ole Lenku will not resign. Dr Juma will not resign. Mr Kimaiyo will not resign. Mr Kameru will maintain his silence. He will not be resigning either. All of them will remind us that they are doing their best. All of us will remind us that they are making progress. Dr Juma will definitely say that the securocracy has "foiled dozens of plots." She will not provide details of the foiled plots for "security reasons." Parliament will fall in line. It has always fallen in line when it comes to security matters. It will fail, again, to summon the securocrats responsible for Baragoi, Westgate, Mpeketoni and Kapedo. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. No wonder Nakumatt is selling so many washing machines. The securocracy has already trained us how to use them.

Love them. Don't leave them.

Pregnancy is not a disease. Motherhood, even single motherhood, is not a social disease. It is not a sin. It is not a crime. It is not wrong. That said, a primary school girl below the age of fourteen should not be having babies. Ever. She should be plotting, just like her co-educationists of the masculine gender, to sneak out of her daddy's house and head for the Jam Session at Dolce or whatever new joint hormonal teens seem to discover these days. Or if she happens to be the more experimental type, she should be working out the various potencies of the various strains of cannabis grown in Kenya. She should not be having babies.

But if she does, the last thing she needs is for her father to condemn her for bringing his name low, her mother to be ashamed of her because she is no longer a "good girl", her teachers to abandon her education, he headmaster to expel her from school, her friends to ostracize her, her church to reject her and her extended family to punish her. What she needs is love, care, support and counselling. What she needs is her father to defend her against the world if she needs him to, her mother to hold her head high and declare her daughter beyond reproach, her teachers to guarantee that a baby will not stop them from getting her to attain the academic distinctions she will surely need, her friends to accept that she has not changed save for having a baby, her church to remember the words of Jesus regarding the fallen woman, and her extended family to rally behind her because it really does take a village to raise a child in Kenya.

I do not know from where this puritanical bent arose in the breast of the Victorian man, but its export to Kenya has been devastating to our sense of community that for so long was the only bulwark in sometimes harsh times. It is drilled into our heads from the moment we can sub-consciously conjugate verbs that sex is wrong, bad, evil - bad manners! By and large our primary schools are co-ed, boys and girls rubbing along together. But our teachers, our parents, our faith-leaders, everyone goes out of their way to reinforce the sex-is-bad mantra with corollaries - talking to boys/girls alone is wrong; touching boys/girls is wrong; walking with boys/girls alone is wrong; thinking about boys./girls is wrong; boys/girls are wrong, wrong, wrong! Generation after generation has heard this message and generation after generation teen pregnancies have defied the sex-is-wrong, boys/girls-are-wrong message.

We have a better understanding of the effects of hormones on decision-making among teenagers. There are still mysteries to how the brain, and therefore the mind, functions, but a lot more scientific data is available about the effects of biochemistry, the environment, parental supervision, physical health, economic status, psychological maturity and much more on why some boys and some girls will experiment sexually and why others will not, and as a result, some girls will fall pregnant, others will not. Instead of accepting what the rest of the educated world has come to accept regarding the choices available to a young mother or her needs, our entire society freaks out on a massive scale and declares that the sky is falling. We abandon them. We make their lives hell. We act with un-Christian cruelty.

Any father who throws his daughter out of the family home for having a child should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, if he will not reconsider his cruel decree. Any teacher who refuses to teach a pregnant student should give up on educating other children. Any headmaster who expels the girl should be shot. And mothers must learn to put their children first, even if it means putting them first before God, family, friends or society. It is the only way we can learn to live with the choices made in hormonal haste and design programmes to cope with them, for they will always be there. The hundreds of thousands of successful, thriving single mothers are all the proof we need that it is not wrong to help them, support them and, yes, love them as Christ asked us to love them.

Safety, not security (Part Deux)

Bob Collymore was blunt: Safaricom will give the police the metadata relating to a phone number, and nothing else, and only after a magistrate orders them to do so. Or of the law says that Safaricom must. It was refreshing to see at least one CEO not drinking the securocracy's Kool-Aid. If even intelligent business news reporters are suggesting that when it comes to security the mobile phone operators should share information about "suspicious" numbers you know we have travelled so far down this road that it is only a matter of time before Kenyans start suggesting that it would be a very good idea for the National Intelligence Service to embed "security" officers with every family.

There was this unhinged former military man on KTN this morning who was nostalgic for the thousands of semi-literate spies Baba Moi employed in the Special Branch. In his twisted imagination, Kenya was secure because Moi spied on everybody; one couldn't trust that the mama mboga, the kanges or the maize-roasting idler were not Special Branch men keeping an eye on the nefarious among us. What this former air force pilot seemed to have forgotten is that because of the semi-literacy of the spies and their absolute and unyielding loyalty in Baba Moi, any and all Kenyans were potential "security threats" and thousands of Kenyans suffered at the hands of Baba Moi's secret police: death, castration, rape, torture, crippling injuries. 

What really shocked me, perhaps because they were having an off day because of the Kapedo massacre a week ago, was the silence from Senators Naisula Lesuuda and John Lonyangapuo over the harebrained proposal to embed spies in every nook and cranny so that the security of the State is not undermined. There is a very good reason why rejected Uhuru Kenyatta and Musalia Mudavadi in December 2002; we believed, rightly or wrongly, that they would sale up the rolled back human rights abuses of Baba Moi's regime. It is why despite our innate suspicions about Baba Jimmi's competence, we overwhelmingly brought him and the rotten apples in his party to power under the NARC umbrella. If Senators Lesuuda and Lonyangapuo are incapable of seeing this simple fact, it would behoove the peoples of their communities to look for new parliamentary representation come August 2017.

Of course every government maintains a spy agency and quite frequently that spy agency spies on its own people. But it has always been the place of the media and the elected classes to reject the attempts of the State and its agents to control he people including by spying on them. Even Jeff Koinange seemed to miss this point when he had, again, John Lonyangapuo on his bench on Wednesday, 5th November. For a reporter who had first hand knowledge of the United States' obsession with the First Amendment's freedom of the press, Mr Koinange betrayed a shockingly callous understanding of what it means for a State to be secure. It is the same kind of understanding that prevails in the corridors of Harambee House, Jogoo House, Vigilance House, DOD HQ and, almost certainly today, State House.

We have known for a generation at least what makes a State insecure; it is not the total number of arms in the hands of private citizens otherwise Switzerland would be the most unsafe place in the world. It is not the number of "radical" preachers among the civilian population, otherwise India (save for Jammu and Kashmir) would be under martial law today. It is the simple things that the State denies the people that radicalise the people. Baba Moi graft-riddled twenty-four year rule guaranteed that roads would not be built, piped water would not be delivered, primary healthcare was a mirage, basic education was of poor quality, youth unemployment would balloon, and the opportunities for advancement would continually favour an elite few. The banditry that prevails in Baringo, Laikipia, Samburu, West Pokot, Turkana, Mandera, Wajir, Tana River and Marsabit is a reflection of Baba Moi's and Mzee Kenyatta's forty years of their peculiar understanding of State security.

We have the opportunity to stem the tide of stupidity when it comes to security. We are missing it by a country mile. Guns and bombs will not build roads, schools, hospitals or markets, or provide jobs or opportunities for advancement. Embedding spies, again, in places of work and leisure is a throwback to Stalinism that only prevails in Putin's Russia or the true Stalinist model, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. It will not work here. Ever harsher penalties for petty offences will only encourage an already graft-riven policing apparatus to redouble its efforts at graft-related activities. Maintaining the focus on the State's agents and the State's guns only guarantees that the State will forever remain a threat to the people.

The United States sometimes learns from its mistakes. Between its invasion of Afghanistan in 2002 and The Surge in 2008, thousands of US soldiers died on the field of battle. Force of arms alone was not going to assure the US and its allies of victory. David Petraeus, learning lessons from the British experience a century before, came up with a counterinsurgency programme that stemmed the tide of blood. Kenya must find its own David Petraeus and its own counterinsurgency programme. Reprisals against bandits and collective punishments have not worked for almost a century. We must shift our focus from the security of the State to the safety of the people. It is what the US did and it is what gave them the long-sought pretext for leaving Afghanistan.

You could always die anonymously.

Even by the standards of the Government of Kenya, what the Cabinet Secretary for Foreign Affairs and International Trade said was a bit harsh. In essence what she said was if any of you were fucking idiots and decided to make a beeline for the sandy expanse of the Arabian peninsula and it all went tits up and you were enslaved or murdered or whatever, you were on your own. Don't go whingeing to the consulate. Don't go whingeing to the Ministry. And for God's sake, die in silence like all the other fucking idiots out there.

The United States has demonstrated that citizens are the stupidest people in the world, and when they do stupid things, they expect their government to sort it out for them. So US citizens will foolishly travel to Syria and Iraq to "tell the truth about the Islamic State", they will get abducted and some of them will be beheaded on gruesome videos. The moment it goes ape shit for any one of those foolish, brave souls, their mothers and their congressman will write to Barack Obama, John Kerry, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs...anyone and demand action to bring their boy back home safe. You will be surprised how many stupid US citizens are rescued by the US government after doing patently stupid things.

The Kenya government, a bit like the UK government, doesn't really like fucking idiots. It likes them even less when they do fucking idiotic things like get enslaved in Saudi Arabia or one of those West Asian hellholes. The two governments will ignore you because at the end of the day, if you are not DJ CK or any member of the Capital Club, if you are not a person of some considerable means whose misfortunes could plausibly become the misfortunes of the State, then your ass is on its own, fucking torture notwithstanding. It doesn't really matter if you follow the correct procedure to verify that the shady woman with the Kiambu accent, Murang'a weave and multiple menacing silent partners has all the proper permits to operate as a labour recruiter, that your prospective employer avers to abide by the labour laws of fucking Qatar, or that everything so far as you can see is on the up and up. If it goes to shit, and it most likely will, Amb Mohammed says you really can't expect your government to do jack shit about it.

Which, I suppose, is how it should be. We know for the most part that West Asia is still living in medieval times despite the hundreds of billions of petro-dollars it has spent on gold-plated loos in gold-plated Airbus A380s. These people are still remarkably backward. It's why they still seem to have princess and princesses, regents and court cryers. Their royal families are a fucked up lot. But it is the religious nutters who make the whole thing surreal, with their penchant for blowing up, in this order, infidels, Jews, apostates and US citizens.

And every prince or princess seems to be connected to one nutter or another. With that kind of networking, it is almost certain that many employers in that part of the globe are not really sticklers for the finer points of the ILO Convention; their idea of "acceptable working conditions" is that they don't use the whip while you are sleeping in the two hours they let you sleep. So if you want to be a fucking idiot about it and sneak into any of the employable bits of West Asia and you suddenly find your ass in sexual bondage, don't go fucking crying to the consulate. Find Rambo. Or Jack Bauer. Let them sort it out for you. Or you could do the decent thing and die anonymously.

Old man, old ideas. Pity.

The more you see, the less appealing it is, isn't it? The Orange Democratic Movement, ODM, the insurgency that rendered Mwai Kibaki's first administration a damp squib on so many parameters, has become a caricature of an authoritarian, Stalinist party. The elected representatives who manhandled their Executive Director, frogmarched him out of a party meeting, and deflated his vehicle's tyres are a harbinger of the intolerance we are to expect the second Raila Odinga is elected President of Kenya - if that day ever comes, that is. ODM is getting away from the hands of its leader, Raila Odinga, and increasingly in the hands of loyal elements who cannot countenance a political future for the country without Raila Odinga.

In the manner that Magerer Langat was treated by Naiprobi City Councy's members of the assembly are vital lessons, lessons that the Men in Black Incident failed to instil in the elected classes. The violence of the 2007 general election was an anomaly because it quickly became ethnicised and flared far beyond the "spontaneous" demonstrations argument favoured by Raila Odinga and William Ruto. Someone took advantage of the general disaffection with the re-election of Mwai Kibaki and Kenya suffered three years of economic stagnation and the ignominy, fiver years on, of their President being an indictee at the International Criminal Court and his deputy undergoing trial at the same court.

Mr Odinga has always rode on his mage as a leader with strong pro-democracy credentials. Until his appointment of Miguna Miguna to his staff, Kenyans were prepared to live with his peculiar demands for carpetted loos and the like. But Miguna Miguna put paid to the idea that democracy is something that Mr Odinga practiced or something that he truly believed in because of the manner he threw his weight around, aping the hardliners surrounding Mwai Kibaki and carrying out Mwai Kibaki's orders. Had Mr Miguna been less abrasive, even as he fought equally viciously for a fair share of the political spoils for ODM, we may have carried on with our rose-tinted-glasses view of Mr Odinga as a capable statesman with his heart in the right place.

Since Mr Odinga fired Mr Miguna in the dying days of the Grand Coalition, much has come to light of the manner Mr Odinga intends to rule should the right number of voters put the right number of marks on the right number of ballots. Kasarani in 2013 was the first example. Party elections that threatened to upend Mr Odinga's carefully crafted leadership cadre were disrupted and the promised report of the investigations into the fiasco is yet to be published. With Mr Langat's violent ejection from the party's management structure on accusations of being a mole despite his long and consistently loyal record to Mr Odinga and the party, it is time for Kenyan's to question the wisdom of having one man wield such a perverse influence on the political affairs of the nation.

My friend Eric will appreciate this; since the election of #TeamDigital, and despite their missteps along the way, Kenyans are not prepared to elect geriatrics in the future. All the dye in the world will not hide the fact that Mr Odinga is an old school politician with old school political ideas about command and control. We may abhor Mr Kenyatta's militaristic tendencies, but we appreciate the youthful vigour with which he is taking on the onerous tasks of being Commander-in-Chief and few of us lack faith that he will strike the right balance before he is forced to seek a fresh mandate from the people. Mr Odinga, sadly, seems stuck to the style of politics that prevailed before the repeal of section 2A of the former constitution, in which it was the will of the party leader that determined the party's fortunes. Mr Odinga is old. Much worse, his ideas are old too.

What have you been smoking over there?

Never pick a fight with a man who buys ink by the barrel. That was the received wisdom. Today, unless you have a penchant for the masochistic, never pick a fight with a billionaire whose ego is the size of a small planet and who isn't afraid to set his own house on fire in order  to win an argument. Joseph Ole Lenku is discovering that when it comes to fighting wars and winning battles, Senior Counsel Ahmednasir Abdullahi is not only willing to lay it all on the line, he will only back down when the Almighty pries the Grand Mullah's cold, dead fingers from his equally cold, dead iPhone 6 Plus. By retaining Donald B Kipkorir, Mr Ole Lenku is determined to bring his A-Game. It will not end well, if it ends at all.

Under Jomo Kenyatta, Daniel Moi and Mwai Kibaki, save for the spectacularly foolish appointment of Katoo Ole Metito, appointed well and truly feared Ministers for Internal Security. Two stand out; John Michuki and Christopher Murungaru. We may question the wisdom or propriety of many of their decisions, like Mr Murungaru's war on the Mungiki or Mr Michuki's war with the Standard Group, but none of us is in doubt that they were respected and feared in equal measure when they headed the internal security machinery of the government.

In President Kenyatta's choice of Mr Ole Lenku as Interior Cabinet Secretary, few were prepared for the problems that would come to bedevil the security sector or how intense feelings would get regarding Mr Ole Lenku. Mr Ole Lenku was unfortunate to have been appointed during a fraught transition period, saddled with an uninspired and uninspiring Principal Secretary in Mutea Iringo, and appointed at a time when the Secretary to the Cabinet commanded greater loyalty in the ministry than the CS and used that loyalty to undermine the CS and his commands. It did not matter that the worst start to the reforms in policing had commenced against the backdrop of escalating terror attacks, an explosion in petty corruption, and rising police-on-police violence and murder. Mr Ole Lenku was dropped into the deep end of internal security affairs; we are not sure whether he is swimming or drowning.

Adolf Hitler invaded Poland on the pretext that Germanic peoples needed Lebensraum to grow and prosper. He should never have turned his attention to British Isles after his conquest of France, Belgium and Luxembourg. Instead he should have shifted his vast and professional military forces to the Eastern Front before the winter of 1941, committed his logistics to the war, blitzkrieged Moscow and occupied it before taking on Stalingrad. In any case, Hitler fought full-fledged wars on two fronts and lost in the bargain.

Mr Ole Lenku is in the middle of a stalled policing reform process, he is mediating a war between the Inspector-General and the National Police Service Commission, one between the National Police Service and the Independent Policing Oversight Commission, an escalation in the banditry and cattle-rustling prevalent in Baringo, West Pokot, Samburu and Turkana, an escalation in attacks against police, a curfew in Lamu, and public perceptions of his competence having hit the floor and carried on plummeting. It would not be wise to open up a new front with a war against the acerbic senior counsel. The Grand Mullah has not made his reputation by being a delicate flower but by being a verbal and litigious sledgehammer against which every challenge is a nail.

Mr Ole Lenku has very little to gain by pursuing Mr Abdullahi in the courts, but he has everything to lose. Mr Kipkorir is an excellent litigator; look at how he managed to set the legal case straight with the Shollei victory in the courts. But he takes on a fool's errand to fight Mr Ole Lenku's war with Mr Abdullahi in the courts. Whether he prevails or not, the damage is done. Mr Abdullahi will drag out the process for as long as it is embarassing for the Cabinet Secretary. By the time the apology is given, if it ever, it is almost likely that more and more mud will have been flung that it won't matter. Mr Ole Lenku may have the National Police Service at his command but he is neither feared nor respected in the same that Murungaru, the late Michuki and the late Saitoti were respected and feared. It will end badly for Mr Ole Lenku; only Mr Abdullahi will get what he wants.

Let's try a ban now.

Kipsang. Ketany. Sumgong. When the rest of the marathon field sees their names, do they weep in despair? Do their hearts sink a little knowing that the hi-tech training regimen, the overwrought nutrition guidelines and the prayers to all the known gods are in vain? Kipsan, Keitany and Sumgong blew away the field in New York to win in that city's signature marathon. They brought glory to themselves and to the long-distance running traditions of this fair land - despite the very best efforts of Athletics Kenya.

Gor Mahia. AFC Leopards. Two names that send a shudder down your entire body. They may have their devoted and dedicated fans - K'Ogalo aka the KDF aka the Green Army for the former; Ingwe for the latter - but no one in his right mind entertains a visit to the City or Nyayo stadium, or any stadium for that matter, when the mashemeji are playing, especially when they are playing each other. The two football teams have a reputation that has survived Baba Moi and Baba Jimmi and will surely survive #TeamDigital - fanatical hooliganism.

The destruction of property associated with a loss - or a win - of the K'Ogalo or the Ingwe is astonishing. Their utter lack of remorse is more so, especially as we are constantly reminded of the humaneness of Kenyans in general. I suppose that every rule has an exception and the K'Ogalo and Ingwe are the exception that proves the rule of Kenyans' humaneness. Five years after the deaths of football spectators at another Nyayo Stadium clash between the mashemeji and Ambrose Rachier and his Ingwe counterpart Allan Kasavuli are yet to instil a sense of responsibility in their hundreds of dedicated fans whose passions sometimes get the better of them.

Prayer, obviously, has not helped. Neither, it seems, has the pain and suffering innocent bystanders undergo whenever the Green Army or its perennial bete noir feels miffed about something to do with a win or a loss. Year after year, the story remains the same - whether the tow are up or not, their fanatical hooligan fans will ensure that their presence is felt on the streets of each and every town that is foolishly audacious to host them. Banning them from the terraces whenever their teams play seems not to temper their violent enthusiasms; rather it only seems to bottle it up ready for the next opportunity to erupt with passionate intensity.

Solutions are not presenting themselves save the obvious: ban the clubs altogether. They may be a source of employment to many youthful men, and they may generate revenues in the hundreds of millions of shillings, but the billions of shillings in property damage attributed to the clubs and their fanatical hooligan fans are yet to be reclaimed in any serious fashion. It is time they were erased from the public sphere, their managers banned from football for a decade, and their players scattered to the four winds of Kenyan football, away from the mad passions of their hooligan fans.

Of course there are those constitutional whingers who will argue that the K'Ogalo and Ingwe are being denied their right to associate with whomever they wish. I will counter that so lone as you are associating with each other for peaceable purposes, I will respect your constitutional rights, even defend them. But when your associating leads to funerals, orthopaedic surgery and insurance claims in the hundreds of millions of shillings that threaten to bring down insurance companies, I will lead the fight in declaring your association to be  terrorist association at worst and a criminal organisation at least. The Mungiki had the good sense to behead people who refused to pay their "protection" fees; K'Ogalo and Ingwe are indiscriminate in whom they target for their misplaced wrath.

Before you argue that K'Ogalo and Ingwe are cultural bastions that should be reformed rather than destroyed, remember that their hooliganism has been a staple of the dysfunction in Kenyan football for twenty five years. I think we have had enough of that particular culture. It is time we started stamping out the culture of violence in our nation's social fabric. If we are to tackle the other cultural hooligans - cattle rustlers, female genital mutilators, wife inheritors, political chauvinists, child abusers, sexual predators - we might as well begin with shibboleths that have for long operated as if thy are protected by the Lord Almighty from On High from the consequences of their violent fans' actions.

Don't snigger yet.

Smugly, some of us are staring down our noses at the congregants at the Salvation Healing Ministry even while we get fleeced at our own houses of sanctuary. This is not a new phenomenon; Kenyans have been paying the price for their absolute faith in their godmen for the past twenty five years. It is not something that will change any time soon, no matter the number of exposes done by news reporters. Victor Kanyari is unpolished, but he is not the only false prophet. He is not the first; he is unlikely to be the last.

Our constitution protects our freedom of conscience, religion, belief and opinion. That means if one chooses to believe that a man is a prophet and that he has performed miracles, there is little that the State or anyone can do about it. And Eric Mutua's assertion that Victor Kanyari has obtained money by false pretenses will be laughed out of the High Court because even if Mr Kanyari solicits money to perform miracles, how will Mr Mutua and his Law Society prove that the miracles did not occur? All Mr Kanyari has to argue is that faith was lacking!

We are raised to believe that what our parents introduce us to is true. Few of us question what our parents taught us. Those who do tend to simply rebel, slightly, while staying true to much of what they were taught. So a son is likely to abandon his fathers Roman catholic ism for his girlfriend's Anglicanism or his teachers Pentecostalism. It is the rare rebel who will change faiths completely. Therefore, Mr Kanyari is unlikely to lose congregants, he is unlikely to lose his gospel-music-singing wife and he is unlikely to lose the millions he has finagled out of the people who have faith he is a "doctor" and a "prophet".

Those of you who are smug in your derision of Victor Kanyari's "victims" best wipe off those smiles. You are in much the same boat. Many of you have absolute faith that the interpretation of the bible by the men and women who speak to you every Sunday from the pulpit is true and is motivated only by your spiritual well-being. Yet you have done precious little to question how and where your tithes and offerings are spent. Does your congregation run a food kitchen? Does it minister to the sick by paying their hospital bills? Does it spend money in rehabilitating the drug-addled bodies of those living on the streets? Do have any idea how many commercial enterprises your congregation pays for? When it comes down to it, you choose to turn a blind eye to what your faith-leaders do so long as they do not directly ask you for money "like in other churches" you are contempt to live under the delusion that yours is a body of Christ founded on faith.

It is amazing how otherwise rational professional adults suspend rational thought and professionalism when it comes to "matters of faith." They will explain it away by anecdotes of paranormal phenomena which they were unable to explain. They will psychologically justify the smug satisfaction of being among the chosen ones on their way to divine glory. They will determinedly turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to what they see and what they hear about the godmen who hold their spiritual loves in their hands. Your godman is engaged and the wedding is suddenly called off? Blame it on "haters". Your godman is pending hundreds of millions on a luxurious lifestyle? God has been very, very providential. Your godman is caught in a lodging house with a another man's wife? Blame it on the devil. We will live in denial about what we see, what we know and what we hear, because our vacuous empty lives would come crashing down our ears if we were to admit the truth: we are just as gullible as the poor woman who was felt up on camera by Victor Kanyari.

Same shit, different year.

Two years ago forty two police were ambushed and massacred at Baragoi. Matthew Iteere, the Commissioner of Police, promised that those who had tested the waters would discover that the waters of the security services' resolve were deep. This past week 21 police were ambushed and massacred at Kapedo. Inspector-General David Mwole Kimaiyo has promised that no stone will be left unturned to bring the perpetrators of the ambush before court to face charges. In both cases, the police lost firearms and ammunition. In both cases the President ordered the return of the weapons and the identification of the perpetrators. In both cases, the Commissioner of Police and Inspector-General, and the President were ignored. In both cases reinforcements were called in from the Kenya Defence Forces.

Some wild-eyed and excited reporters are wondering why the police do not have armoured personnel carriers. There was a particularly excitable character from the Royal Media stable who wondered why the police did not receive "extensive counterinsurgency training" in places such as Israel, England or Germany. The Independent Policing Oversight Authority weighed in with an unseemly hysterically strident demand for the resignation of Davide Mwole Kimaiyo and his two deputies. Meanwhile, most Kenyans were obsessed with the perverse cult-like antics of a psychopathic faith-healing godman with a penchant for feeling up his victims on TV. The civil society industry, as is their wont when police are getting massacred, maintained a very loud and very studious silence.

Ambassador Dr Monica Juma, the Principal Secretary in the Ministry of the Interior and Co-ordination of National Government,was on air on Sunday to assure Kenyans that all was well, that the Nyumba Kumi gambit was a valuable tool in addressing security-related challenges, that security was a shared responsibility between the people and their government, and that the security services had foiled many, many attacks against the people. What is notable is that Dr Juma sounds and seems way more intelligent than the hapless Mutea Iringo; thank God we do not have to suffer through his inarticulate and unpersuasive explanations about national security affairs. But despite Dr Juma's polished and nuanced case for the State, she is still selling something that many Kenyans are not buying. Not when rather combative elements such as Nelson Marwa attempt to come across as caricatures of cartoon characters such as John Rambo or Jack Bauer.

We have been here before. The official securocracy reaction has not changed. The outcome, similarly, will not change. Our focus on the security of the State, rather than the safety of the people, guarantees that Baragoi and Kapedo will recur. The principal difference is that now they will recur in an age where information control is no longer possible. There are more people with more access to more tools of communication than at any time in the past decade. And they all have a taste for the freedom that comes with the ability to communicate with their peers, and their leaders, at any time on any matter and that affects their lives.

A public safety policy should shift focus from keeping the likes of Asman Kamama safe at the expense of the good people of Tiaty. This would include shifting policing resources from "protecting" elected representatives from harm, to patrolling villages and markets. It would mean paving or repairing tarmacked roads, building and maintaining murrum roads where there were none, building and maintaining sewers and surface drains, erecting and maintaining street lights, clearing bushes and stagnant water bodies, lighting up all public buildings including churches, mosques, temples, gurudwaras, schools and health centres, clearly identifying and marking police stations and posts including by posting the names of all officers in charge and their contact information, and rebuilding and maintaining social amenities such as social halls, public parks and public sports facilities. Shift the focus from "leaders" to the people by providing facilities that make their lives bearable and they will partner with the State in programmes such as Nyumba Kumi to identify those who would threaten their bearable lives. Maintain focus on "security" and all you will get is resistance and grumbling which will blow up, time and again, in events such as Baragoi and Kapedo.