The Republic lives like a whimper.

I

Ours, as the Constitution isn't shy to declare, is a Republic. A republic, as we have been reminded, from time to time, is representative government. To form that representative government, we have the other important descriptor of our Republic: a multiparty democracy. Democracy, as Abraham Lincoln bequeathed on the world, is government of the people, for the people, and by the people. For that government to come into being, the peoples' representatives will be elected at regular intervals, five years in our case.

Kenya is a multiparty democratic republic. Taking up after the "great" western democracies, Kenya has for itself a free press, also known as "the media." A free press is the Fourth Estate, after the three traditional estates of the crown, parliament and the judiciary. It is the institution that has taken upon itself the onerous task of keeping a watchful eye on the three arms of government, the aforementioned executive, parliament and judiciary. In the United States, the press has been responsible for uncovering great corruption in the executive, the Houses of Congress and the judiciary, including in the Supreme Court of the United States.

It has recorded the abuses of power by the powerful and revealed the privations of the impoverished. It has witnessed war and peace, and it has written about the cost of both. It celebrates itself with awards such as the Pulitzer and it prides itself as being the envy of the world. Where once people were held hostage to the flattened vowels of the BBC World Service, we are now captured in the culture of the twenty four hour news "cycle" promoted around the world by the likes of CNN.

II

Our Republic has nothing in common with the United States; it was not forged by a revolution. It has not enslaved a people using the bible as its justification. It has not made, lost and remade great fortunes for the greatest number of its citizens. But it is in the area of the press that the United States has much to teach us - and much to warn us.

You would read the newspapers of the day and believe that the press in Kenya, the media as they remind us, continues to keep a watch on the government and its officials. Revelations of great corruption have been alleged; yet, when you read the news stories, and watch and listen to them on the radio and on TV, you are left with more questions than answers. There are many allegations about the abuse of power, yet these allegations are supported by innuendo and rumour. Very few facts are shared with the people, for whom, we are assured, the great enterprise of Kenya's free press speaks. Time and again the law is cited as the reason why names are not named (unless the names are those of minor government functionaries out of favour for the day).

III

Our Republic has a population of over forty million citizens true. Of these many millions, there are a few thousand who are the Republic: the President and his Cabinet; the Chief Justice and his judges and magistrates; the Speakers of the National Assembly and Senate and their fellow members; the Governors and their executive committees; and the Speakers of the County Assemblies and their members. These few thousands, and the hundreds of thousands of civil servants ho serve them, are the Republic. What they do, matters. What they say is important. Whom they do what they do with, and what they say and to whom they say it to, is consequential. Yet what they do, how they do it, whom they do it with, what they say, where they say it, how they say it, and what it means, remain mysteries for which the citizens have no capacity to decipher because they have been let down by the one institution that is supposed to be motivated by the truth and the truth of things: the press.

The Prime Minister of Malaysia, an East Asian Tiger, has been accused of pocketing seven hundred million dollars. The matter has been highlighted in the Malaysian press for months. His government is in crisis. It is almost certain that he will not resign. The Director of the United States Secret Service, the agency of the United States' Federal Government charged with the safety of the President of the United States, resigned after a series of lapses regarding the security of the president, after the issues were highlighted in the press. 

The National Youth Service has been swindled of many hundreds of millions of shillings. The police say the money is missing. The Director of Public Prosecutions says that the sacrificial lambs he has been handed cannot be prosecuted because the evidence submitted by the police is insufficient. The Cabinet Secretary for Devolution and Planning, her Planning Principal Secretary and the Director-General of the National Youth Service have refused to resign. In their words, their consciences are clear. They have done nothing wrong. All this we know from our press. But unlike in the Watergate Scandal that led to the resignation of President Richard Milhouse Nixon, we have hundreds of column inches on the NYS Scandal, but very little information of value.

IV

In Kenya, the press, just like all other institutions, have little in common with their counterparts in the United States. The more obvious similarities are their commerce-oriented focus on profit. They are organised as "media companies"' offering political news coverage, local news coverage, entertainment and advertisement. But the Kenyan press, despite a few fillips here and there, are not revolutionary. Their fate is tied to the fortunes of the government of the day; it is their biggest source of news and their biggest source of revenue. Not unlike a significant number of local manufacturing companies. They will not be bringing down the government in the near future. They will pretend to be a free press; but they will never be the tail wagging the dog.

It is, therefore, surprising that the press would talk of their freedom being threatened by the government. The press has played up the amendments to the Parliamentary Powers and Privileges Act that the press argues will curtail "media freedom." You get a feeling that this is a great distraction, away from the missing hundreds of millions from the NYS kitty. That might sound very conspiratorial, but when the press works so hard to say so little, you cannot help but wonder whether the greatest long con is being played on the citizens. You can discern the tendrils of the conspiracy from the manner in which a story just peters out.

V

Do you remember Kamotho Waiganjo, the imposter policeman? His prosecution has proceeded apace with bits and pieces of it being reported every now and then. But do you know who was protecting him when he was active? Did he get paid a salary? If so, from whence did the funds come? Was he issued with a uniform, firearms and the other accouterments of a policeman? If so, by who and and on whose authority? Did he ever receive fitness reviews? If so, by who and did he pass? How many citizens did he violate their rights when he was active? A simple story, as told by the press, but so many unanswered questions.

We have the opportunity to build for ourselves a republic that is our own, a democratic government that represents our ambitions, values and morals. We have an opportunity to build great institutions of state that reflect what we are and what we could be. That opportunity comes alive with a truly free press. Until the day we get that free press there is little that we will accomplish as a people, as a republic or as a nation. We will only have the shadow of a promise, the whiff of ambition, the what-ifs of regret. Mores the pity, don't you think?

Could corruption be good?

Corrupt. Adj. 1. willing to act dishonestly in return for money or personal gain. ~ Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 12th Ed.

“corruption” means—

(a) an offence under any of the provisions of sections 39 to 44, 46 and 47;

(b) bribery;

(c) fraud;

(d) embezzlement or misappropriation of public funds;

(e) abuse of office;

(f) breach of trust; or

(g) an offence involving dishonesty—

     (i) in connection with any tax, rate or impost levied under any Act; or

    (ii) under any written law relating to the elections of persons to public office. ~ section 2, Anti-Corruption and Economic Crimes Act, 2003.

I

Those two are the popular definitions for "corrupt" and "corruption." But do they cover more than they reveal? Is there a hidden benefit to society from corrupt acts or in the corruption of a government? I do not know. That lack of knowledge might be a handicap; after all, if I am unable to see the argument for corruption or corrupt acts, how can I honestly say that corruption is wrong or the corrupt act wrongfully?

Kenya has had statutes against corruption for as long as it has had the Penal Code, but corruption has defined every single government since the Colonial Secretary appointed the first Governor of the Colony in 1922. The corruption of the colonial government is yet to be detailed in full, but the racial segregationist policies pursued for the establishment of a home for the settler community will surely be a highlight of that dossier. The less said of the corruption of the post-Independence governments, the better.

However, the effects of the corruption of all of Kenya's governments on the peoples of Kenya cannot be wished away. Death, environmental degradation, impoverishment, unlawful expropriation of property, mass industrial actions, human rights abuses...the list of things that corruption has done to Kenya and Kenyans is profound. If there was any benefit derived from all this, perhaps, it would be possible to say that a little bit of corruption never hurt anyone.

It is possible that there might be short term benefits. For example, if local hospitals lose their allocation of essential medicines because they have been expropriated by the hospital staff for private sale, the residents living near that hospital might choose to live healthier lifestyles or buy medical insurance for them and their families. These benefits, however, can only last for so long. If the corruption in the hospital supply chain persists, not only will the people lose faith in the public healthcare system, but they will see nothing wrong in they themselves engaging in fast practices regarding the health facilities available to them, whether public or private, increasing the schisms among the people, fostering mistrust and eventually greater disregard for the rule of law.

II

There is a temptation to compare Kenya today with Singapore in the 1970s or the United States in the 1870s. The comparisons usually fail to account for the inherent corruption of those nations at those periods in history. Take the United States as an example. The US constitution might have been amended for the fourteenth time in 1868, but the inherently racist policies of both the federal and state governments would contrive to deny Black Americans the vote until the Lyndon Johnson administration enacted the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in the 1960s. The United States economy may have profited from the disenfranchisement of its Black population due to the suppression of wages engendered by the civil rights violations, but no one should deny that this disenfranchisement was inherently wrong, or corrupt.

Kenya's economy has not benefitted too much from the corrupt acts of those in and out of government. It has not had a corruption dividend the way the US or the Tiger Economies have. In fact, over the past three years, industrial production has had an uneven performance. Steel and cement production has gone up; but manufacturers of some consumer goods have either shut shop and moved away or have been forced to change the products they manufacture because of the unfair competition they face from corrupt manufacturers or importers of the goods they produce.

What is notable is that despite a decade of economic growth, during which time we have been sold a happy tale of great performance, unemployment among the youth aged 18 to 35 has stagnated and labour unrest in the public sector has gotten worse.  The political turmoil witnessed over the past ten years has also been because of the corruption in the government to a great extent. When the political elite have disagreed on the sharing of the spoils, there have been political crises for which few solutions have been found. The paralysis in the national Executive after 2005 and the violence after the 2007 general election have largely been a reflection of the consequences of not addressing the corruption in the government.

Look at Singapore. A quasi-dictatorship in which the benevolent dictator rode roughshod over the people has bequeathed on the city state an economy that is the envy of the world. This is the rare case where corruption did not sink the state. Singaporeans are no more free today than they were twenty five years ago, but many of them are wealthier than they were twenty five years ago. The unseen parts of Singapore still suffer great privation; the poor are the dirty little secret of the Great Singapore Miracle. Kenya does not have the wealth nor the tools to hide its poor; they are simply too many poor people to hide from the eyes of the world.

III

Before we can hold a rational discussion about the possible benefits if corruption for Kenya, we must acknowledge that corruption exists and that it has metastasized throughout the firmament of government. It is not enough to snigger at the base desires of the county government leadership; these are but a confirmation that the public service we have is not the public service we deserve. When critical-care patients die because they cannot be admitted to hospitals because the funds for expansion have been spent on boondoggles of little value, that cannot in any way be described as a benefit even if one of its outcomes is that private entrepreneurs will now offer critical care for the same patients at a price that the people can afford. That price is a second tax on the people for they have already paid taxes for the provision of those same services.

The pernicious effects of corruption are a loosening of the values and morals of the people.  A simple thought experiment should suffice. A public hospital in an ideal situation should provide basic care for the people living around the hospital. It must be served by a doctor, a nurse, pharmacist and other healthcare workers. The doctor and his staff should have undergone training to the highest standards possible under the circumstances. The facilities should be in good repair and, based on the statistical analysis of the Ministry of Health, should be adequate for the population around the hospital. The public health policy near the hospital when implemented properly should ensure that the population avoids risks that would endanger their health and practice things that would enhance their health, thereby leaving the hospital facilities for those in need.

In a corrupt environment, the chances of the healthcare workers in the hospital would not be trained to the highest standards, the public policy implementation would not de-escalate health risks, the facilities would be in poor repair, and the funds for expanding the services with the growth in the population would be missing. The health problems in the population would spike and the public hospital would be unable to cope, engendering misery and a deep mistrust for the government. Bribes, for example, would see to it that some patients are treated and many are not. Extrapolate this throughout the public service and things get more and more dire. Rich/poor schisms will widen and support for public policies will remain low. Political instability will be built into the political system. The outcome is likely what we are experiencing today: poverty, unemployment, violent crime, despondency.

By all means, let us have a debate on the pros and cons of corruption, but that debate must acknowledge first that corruption is inherently bad and two, that any positive effects are short-lived and only for the few, never for the many.

Forked tongues.

Talk, good people, is not cheap. I couldn't believe that for the impending floods, there is a government in Kenya that set aside thirty seven thousand shillings for soap. Soap! But then again another government spent one hundred and nine thousand shillings on a wheelbarrow. The highest officials of the government have declared war on corruption. That, my friends, is not cheap talk. It is thirty seven thousand shillings worth per bar of soap and a hundred and nine thousand shillings per wheelbarrow.

When you see the rich profiting off of our taxes, the first instinct these days is to ask how one can land a big government tender. This is the state of things today; we are all looking for the chance to profit from the government, making millions and billions off of the taxes that we all pay. This is both an indictment of our government and of our private sector.

When Barack Obama finally deigned to visit Kenya, hundreds of millions of shillings were spent to spruce up the place. We were all astounded that fifty million shillings was spent on flowers along highways and roads that Barack Obama eventually did not see. Months later, the flowers are nowhere to be seen. The Pope is coming; I wonder how many hundreds of millions will be spent.

The government has set aside billions to prepare for El Nino. The short rains have been predicted to be especially intense and floods, mudslides and land;slides are expected. So it boggles the mind to discover that twenty million will go towards "civic education" and, here we go again, thirty seven thousand shillings apiece on bars of soap.

There is no shame nowadays in demanding a piece of the public pie. Sunny Bindra quoted those fateful words, the death knell of civilised society: everyone does it. And in Kenya, today, it seems as if everyone with an angle, an in, is in on the let us swindle the government for all its got. The irony is that those with the loudest whinges about the state of the government, the state of infrastructure, the state of public services, the public wage bill or corruption running rife are the ones with the strongest urge to dip long fingers in the public till.

It is hypocrisy, plain and simple, and it is eating us alive. We have all given up. We don't care any more. We are in it for us and our own. In the fullness of time, no matter how much we try and paper over things, even our children will know that we are forked-tongued, speaking out both sides of our mouths, lying to each other and lying to ourselves.

Friends who were there then.

These are the ones who were there in the beginning. Carl had a knack for sketching the image of the Christ but he couldn't colour worth a damn. That was my job. He remains my earliest memory of a friend and when they moved away, I was never the same again, friendships were never the same again. Not with Richard. Not with Victor. Not with Maxwell. That all changed when I sat next to the Saudi.

Fakhry is without a doubt the most extraordinary man I know - apart from the Soldier and the Professor. Why we became friends is less important as how we became friends. We have nothing in common, absolutely nothing. Even his appreciation of Bob Marley is tempered; it is not like mine: obsessive, nerdy, a bit unhinged. He is the epitome of charisma and good taste and when you meet his son you will understand why. His self-confidence and poise makes the ladies swoon - and they actually swoon and flap their manicured, bejewelled, long-nailed fingers in front of their faces whenever they encounter him. If I didn't love him as much as I did, I would drop him into one of those active Japanese volcanoes, though I have a feeling the volcano would disagree with me and consume me instead.

But we sat along the same line as Eric and Baddie. Eric is the soldier-pilot.  He flies combat helicopters. He is not - NOT! - a bus driver. He flies helicopters that have machine guns and require a great deal of precision flying when you are shooting at bad people with RPGs and MANPADS. He has the hard stare of a man who knows his shit, and the carriage of an officer in these defence forces. In his flight suit, man does he make Tom Cruise look less Tom Cruise-y.

Baddie, on the other hand, is the surprise. The best point guard our year ever had. That guy could place that basketball where he wanted it without even looking. He knew the court and the team on the court by some sort of alchemist instinct. When he shot from the three-point line, sometimes I think he kept his eyes open so that he didn't freak out the opposition. He was - is - that good. I wonder how he finds Mombasa these days. I wonder if he still plays basketball.

They were all there when I asked Schola to dance with me. It did not turn out to be the disaster I feared - until years later when she gave birth and got married. But on that day when I single-handedly kicked Mumbuni's butt on the debate floor, she had eyes only for me and, thanks to Tet and his art supplies, she kept them on me for the rest of the year. I always wonder what could have been if I hadn't gone into exile for six or seven years thirteen thousand kilometres away.

There was Newton who was a brilliant accountant, Tom who had a mzungu last name, was a brilliant accountant and mathematician, played football, basketball and table tennis with panache, and who was remarkably neat, Reuben who played the flute and had penpals all over the world, Joseph who was tall and thin and played football with elan but had atrocious penmanship, Mark, my namesake, who recently took over things after his dad died, who lent me cash to skip school so long as I shared with him my mum's chapatis, and who still remains as big as he was when we were there, and the other Joseph who played basketball and table tennis and was a cop and looked like he wished he had attended Saints. Jack was the glue that kept our motley crew together; he had access to the dispensary where we kept, and quaffed, the Smirnoff.

They were there, they were generous. I discovered words from them that I now regret knowing, after a fashion. They must have been as shocked as I was when it didn't all turn to shit - because I did everything in my power to screw it up. Now here I am, wondering where they are, what they are doing, how their families are, their carers, their achievements. Maybe we'll one day do an Old Boys' thing. Maybe.

Weak, incompetent and useless

I return to my Pet Peeve of the Year yet again after a woman with the promise of youth is killed because Evans Kidero's government is weak, incompetent and useless. Mwiki SACCO's matatus do not operation in a regulatory vacuum; they operate with impunity because the County Government of Nairobi City is weak, incompetent and useless. It's weakness, incompetence and uselessness is demonstrated in the small indignities it imposes on the commuting public - and the risks it places on pedestrians because of its weakness, incompetence and uselessness.

Take Tom Mboya Street, for example. Between Luthuli Avenue and the Fire Station, Tom Mboya Street seems to have become a bus terminus and a tax rank and a hawkers' paradise and a pickpocket's wet dream all rolled into one. We can blame John Michuki, when he was transport minister, for the mess he created when he abolished the Kenya Bus Service's monopoly on the Central Business District, but that was a decade ago. We have a City County Government. It has done little to improve things. It is weak, incompetent and useless.

The consequences of this County Government's weakness, incompetence and uselessness are varied and plain to see: the street is a mess for non-PSV traffic; the vehicular emissions have poisoned the air and blackened the must-be-painted walls of all the establishments that operate along the street; the human traffic is constrained and crammed to too little a space for its size; death, while not common, is usually a heartbeat away from the rising cases of injuries. The Governor has been proud of his street lights and his traffic camera; they ave done little to ameliorate the extremely chaotic conditions on Tom Mboya Street.

But the proof of the Governor's  weakness, incompetence and uselessness is to be seen away from the chaos of Tom Mboya Street and on the most serikali of the serikali part of the CBD, Harambee Avenue. Pedestrians are treated with hostility. Non-serikali drivers are treated with hostility. The traffic jams, once common only during evening rush hour as motorists tried to get onto Uhuru Highway are now a common sight all day long between Parliament Road and Moi Avenue.  How he hopes to turn Nairobi City into a world class city without standing up for the things that make a world city remains a mystery only he can solve.

The Governor is working on grand transport plans for the City, that involve road construction and railway construction and mass transit buses. These plans have one key element that every Governor in Kenya loves - a massive government tender worth hundreds of millions of dollars. We need new roads. We need an urban commuter rail system. We need mass transit buses. But until we get them, we must deal with the mess Michuki and his successors gave this City: the matatu industry on drugs and on our streets. 

Hard decisions must be made and none harder than banning the idling of these monstrosities on our streets. If those Mwiki SACCO buses hadn't been stationary and if their drivers hadn't felt the need to squeeze together so that more buses could park, that young woman would probably be alive today. If this county government hadn't been weak, incompetent and useless, she would be alive today. If this county government doesn't know or understand this, then we are really in trouble.

The danger with purity.

You can never win against a fanatic. It is quite useless to try when the fanatic is intelligent, well-read, erudite and completely without doubt as to the superiority of their ideas and the place of those ideas in the intellectual discourses of the day. It is foolhardy to attempt to engage with them when they have determined that you are beneath them. Yet, to admit this is to admit that discourse, reasonable or not, is quite dead.

With the fanatic there is only one way: theirs. Alternatives are for the unsure, the idiots. When the choice is between their solution and a compromise of lesser rigidity or certainty, there is no choice. This makes for a one-sided conversation, between you and a wall. Walls don't hear. Walls keep things out and keep things in, simultaneously. The impermeability of walls is what calls for doors and windows.

Take yesterday's Twitter hashtag, #NoBraDay. Annually, 13 October is dedicated to breast cancer awareness. On Twitter, this is memorialized by #NoBraDay. It being Twitter, of course, idiots will attempt to hijack the hashtag for licentious and salacious satisfaction, but the objective still remains true: to highlight, for those on Twitter, that breast cancer is a crisis and that, especially though not exclusively, women should get tested for breast cancer. Infantile it might seem to the fanatic, but #NoBraDay has a place in the panoply of campaigns to sensitise everyone on a crucial health matter. After all, many young people today spend a substantial amount of their time online on Twitter and other social media platforms and it would be foolish not to try and reach them in a form that they understand and appreciate.

But to the purists, those who live for the traditional ivory tower discourse, Twitter, Instagram and the other social media platforms are the signs of the collapse of civilisation and civilised discourse. Hashtags and similar devices are proof that we are no longer critical thinkers but mindless drones pre-programmed to only think of ourselves and our bubbles. Rarely will the anti-hashtag brigade supply data to prove their hypothesis; instead they will point to the limited intellectual content of the hashtag by pointing out that it fails to take into account other social problems, like how there are still many adolescent girls without access to underwear or sanitary pads. Perhaps there is a link between breast cancer, underwear and sanitary pads, but the fanatic refuses to find it - or even look for it.

Traditional forms of problem-solving have not solved all our problems. In some cases, tradition has compounded our problems. Trying out non-traditional means of civic education is not an admission that tradition is an unmitigated failure, but that tradition must evolve and may benefit from being complemented by other things. The focus of a hashtag-for-a-day on a particular subject is not because the other problems do not matter but because, for one day, a large number of peoples' minds will be focussed on a single problem in the hopes that possible solutions will be considered.

No one can focus on all social problems all of the time. That is a futile act. In fact, that is one of the ways that all those problems will not find solutions. It might be low-brow, but the hashtag campaign is not necessarily a bad idea; it is just one other tool in the toolbox. Use it or ignore it, but don't live in the bubble of purity when purity ahsn't solved al our problems yet and might not.

Look at the chaos.

Right now, I stink.

Let me explain. It's been a while since I did anything sensible, like buy underarm deodorant or write a legislative sentence that made sense. You can tell that with the latter there are certain quarters that are rethinking everything they thought they knew about public law, because I am the guy they get sent to that they don't really want to see. I don't speak legalese but only because the little Latin they drilled into me at Shivaji U has been defenestrated by a decade of cheap hooch.

It is getting harder and harder to care about The Law these days, not that I am old or jaded. But it is getting harder. It used to be when you drafted a Universities' Act, you had a pretty good idea what it was intended to do. It was not intended to create offenders where none existed. It was supposed to tell you simple things, really, like who was in charge, what they could do, what you could do, what they couldn't do, what you couldn't do and similar shit. But read the new one and if it makes sense then you are one of the people who makes the law such a terrible, terrible burden on the ignorant and the innocent.

The law is now a weapon, wielded with malice and pettiness against the weak and the defenseless by prosecutors and lawyers alike caring little for things like social cohesion or integration. Everyone and their uncle is a lawyer - or they have a lawyer on retainer whose sole job, it seems, is to raise litigation hell every single day without a care for the consequences. It's pretty damn exhausting, specially when you are responsible for putting the statutory equivalent of an AK-47 in the hands of scarcely-grown jurist juveniles with the self-control of five-year olds with ADHD.

Watch how much havoc they wreak.

Look at the chaos that reigns in the education sector. In a few months time, when that Kaimenyi fella is reading out the results of the KCPE and the KCSE, the consequences of the law and their lawyers who wield it like AKs will be plain to see. Then more lawyers will get in on the act pretending to clear up the mess but in reality lining their pockets like their brethren who created the mess in the first place. Or fingerprints, learned colleagues, are all over the scenes of crime. It is time we confessed our crimes and begged for mercy. I fear we won't. Look at the chaos.

About that underarm deodorant: only She gets to decide. So back off!

Friends. What a funny old world.

Now that I am set on this path, there are a few more who should have known better than to befriend me. There's Linah. I always wondered about that name. She's  mum now, and her sons look so much like her. I wonder if they have her smile. She smiled a lot. I thought it was unnatural for someone to be that happy. Until I met her future husband. Then it all fell into place. She owes me a Steers' burger. And a novel. In that order.

Is Sylvia still in Germany? I don't know. She travels widely. She is the singular most aggressively ambitious person I know. She is part-owner of a fine-dining establishment - she's want me to say that - and she knows more about the law than is healthy for someone with her unbridled ambition. She is honest to a fault and that worries me sometimes because honest, ambitious people who go to Germany are simply part of that horrendous brain drain that leaves us with morons in charge. I have a feeling she will one day run Kenya.

I wonder how the other Lilian - the one with the dreadlocks - finds public service. Sure it's the DPP's office, which many of us are envious about, but still the public service. I have a suspicion she is already in charge of her district; she won't admit it, of course, but she must be in charge. I used to think she was too thin. Then she wore that grey skirt-suit number and I am now fully on board with grey skirt-suits. I just hope the DPP doesn't assign her to one of those prosecutions that seem to end up with the prosecutor having to explain sudden lifestyle changes or having to dodge 7.62mm cartridges travelling at high velocity.

I haven't seen William who deftly handled 7.62mm cartridges once for quite a while. He got married on Valentine's Day some time ago. Cliche, you say? Not really. It seemed fitting. Especially when I remember his mysteriously slicked back hair and the missing eyeglasses. John, Hiram, Paul -I haven't told you about Paul yet - were all there. He's an IP genius nowadays. One day, perhaps, he'll let me in on what IP is.

Paul is my brother-in-arms. He's ODM. I'm ODM. At least that's what we pretend. I don't even know how that nickname came to be our nickname. No...I do. It was that wild-eyed lawyer when we were still in Law School who almost wept when we told her that Agwambo would win the election but would never be president and that the US would elect a Luo president before Kenya did. I think we must have hit a nerve because, I swear,, she must have shed a litre of tears that afternoon. Anyway, Paul is the one who seems to have to volumes: loud and loud cranked up to eleventeen. Sometimes I hide from him, because it is almost impossible to disagree with him without looking like a complete heel.

There's Salim about whom everything is a mystery. His present chubby-cheekedness is a mystery. He is a brilliant lawyer. He's a brilliant drummer. He is a remarkably reckless driver, that is, he seems to get to places in speeds that defy the laws of physics. And all in one piece and the car in working nick. Another mystery that will remain unsolved. He has these wonderful tall tales that have just enough kernels of truthiness to sound totally plausible. If he lived in Antarctica, he'd have the leading refrigeration business in the area. He's that good. And loyal too. And for a chubby fellow, quite the athlete too. I wonder if his SL500's wheels have fallen off yet. Knowing him, DT Dobie probably gave him a lifetime deal on replacements.

I only found out that her name is Rose the other day. That's not what we called her. She smiles entirely too much. Another happy, happy soul. How do I know so many happy people, anyway? She got married too, the other day. He smiles too. And he wants to steal my tree. And no! I'm not jealous. Or anything. I don' see her as much, these days. I tend to leave the house at unreasonably early hours these days. Those drafts won't write themselves. She always said "Hi" when I slunk past her gate at 9am looking like I had been hit by a sofa-sized Black Label ice-cube.

Maybe tomorrow I'll have more memories of the fond kind about the kind people who saw fit not to shrink in horror when they first met me. Not even my first landlord did. Instead he and his family had me over for lunch every Sunday. It's a funny old world, isn't it?

Friends, how I love them.

I have tried to say this for the longest time. I always lose the words somewhere between my latent narcissism and my acute shyness. It is impossible to say what needs saying without losing myself in the various moments when something happened, then something else happened, then we smiled or some such shit. Anyway, let me give it one more try.

I remember when I first made an ass of myself with John. He told me, in that casual way of his, that his dad was indeed that Judge. That was after I had told him I thought the Judge needed to work on his judgments. They did not float my boat; not like that disgraced former anticorruption czar. Well anyway, we became firm friends. He's a dad now, twice over, and I must say, daddy-ness suits him. But then again, if you knew John, you'd see that this too was something that was meant to be in the way it should be. I am proud to call him my friend, though I am less a friend than an almighty headache.

Hiram is a whole other kettle of fish. He's a dad too, but that was years before when we were still trying to figure out what the School was supposed to be all about. He has a wicked sense of humour, sometimes a little too much on the risque side. But, like the ones in Texas say, different strokes for different folks. He is a legal eagle of no mean repute - if you are ever in the crosshairs of those pesky speed traps along Naivasha-Nairobi road, Hiram's your guy. He takes a perverse pleasure - yes! I said it! - a perverse pleasure in making fools of Boinnet's boys. I don't think they like him enough, but he's motor vehicle club thinks he's the bees' knees. So do I.

I'm still trying to work out when I even spoke to Leo and Maureen. Was it before they became Leo and Maureen? I don't know. It is definitely after that night that I spent longer than was normal on one of those really comfy stools at the invisible end of that place we like so much with the Three Barrels. They are one of the reasons why it seems as if men and women were meant to be men and women. They are sunshine and ice-cold beers. Thank God they don't think I am an idiot. That would just be awful. Awful! No...I haven't had them over for lunch yet. I don't have a house made for entertaining, though She doesn't think so, bless Her heart.

Jennifer and Liz were the first people I saw when I reported on the Eighth Floor. That first month was quite harrowing; I had no clue what I was supposed to do, or what I was supposed to say. They were remarkably caring and helpful. Funny too; you have to have a sense of humour to put up with my thousand-and-one inane questions about legislative sentences and whatnot. They've moved on, but they keep me in their orbit and that is a testament to the value they place on their friends. I wish I could do more, be more. Maybe this is the beginning.

Marion is the sweetest woman you will meet. You get a sense that she is ready to listen to your secrets without judgment or preconceptions. She is the glue that keeps the whole office together. Without her, I have a feeling we would be at sixes and sevens all the time. When she smiles, you know that the world is right side up. You have to meet her at least once in your life; it's the only way you will know that life is full of endless possibilities.

Tom is full of bombast, but not in a bad way. He is full of ideas and they always seem to end with him taking over the world, though he doesn't say so. He is the level-headed chief of the whole floor. He knows more about out line of work than anyone else I know. A bit scary when you are trying to get a word in edgewise, but an excellent counsellor when you need one. He is the Uber role model. He can write. He can argue. And he can negotiate the wings off a fly.

This inadequate post will not reveal the blessed feeling I get waking up in the morning because of them. I haven't said anything about Her, but you know why. She wouldn't appreciate that, much. Especially as I can't say much without digressing to matters to do with The Wiggle, which is a sight to behold. It doesn't bounce, my friends. It Wiggles. It needs a chapter all to itself. Enough, or She will use That Tone when she says "Oh Wow!" and then I will be in trouble. All you need know, for now, is that She just IS.

Our soul is dead.

Bob Marley, it is attributed by some, said that money can't buy you life. Politicians seem it can buy everything else, including honour. I can't seem to find in Kenya a credible argument against that presumption because I am watching things play out that would have been anathema even ten years ago, the go-go days of the Kibaki Era.

Seven years ago very bad things happened in Kenya because of a presidential election count that went awry, to put it very, very kindly. The reverberations of those bad things are still being felt today. The line between the bad, bad things and the Money-buys-Everything-but-Life philosophy goes through the International Criminal Court, where Kenya's soul went to die. You would thnk that the deaths of thousands of Kenyans because of a election would have killed Kenya's soul. You would be wrong.

You would think that when hundreds of Kenyans are mutilated, maimed, disfigured and gang raped, that when hundreds of thousands are pushed from their homes in the dead of night, dispossessed even of their underpants, watching as the last living thing on their farms is set on fire, including the bedbugs and the cockroaches - you would think all this would have killed Kenya's soul. You would be absolutely, tragically wrong.

It is, I am sad to report, the small, obscure indignities in faraway places that killed the soul of our nation. There was no fanfare to it. There was little publicity. Indeed, there are some who would deny that our soul is dead. They either are responsible for this murder - or they do not know where to look for proof.

I do not care whether the Ocampo Six were guilty or not. I do not care whether Ruto & Sang are guilty or not. I care very much that tens of thousands of Kenyans were violently dispossessed of their properties and essentially forbidden, including by their very own government, from ever reclaiming their property. The ones who did the dispossessing never saw the inside of a jail cell, let alone a criminal court room. There are tens of thousands of the mutilated, the maimed, the disfigured and the gang raped who must confront their attackers in silence because these are well-respected men and women of good standing in their communities. We have accepted, we have moved on. The "two communities" are at peace with each other.

But in that faraway court, Kenyans who bled, Kenyans who dies, Kenyans who lost everything, must watch as the big powers and the small powers play games while at home tokens - a billion here, a billion there - are strewn at their feet with casual take-it-or-leave-it arrogance. The faraway court made promises. It has kept none. It will keep none. Our soul is dead. It is not getting resurrected if the recent goings on are any indication.

It isn't enough to erase the victims from view. It isn't enough to erase the crimes against them from view. Now we are rewriting history. They say that the victor writes the story. That is surely truer and truer every day that it becomes a question of who fixed who and for how many pieces of silver. Our memories are scoffed at for their feebleness. The written record is sneered at as a fabrication. The video is one of River Road's finest productions - which isn't saying much. All those intelligence officers on the public payroll were on one side or the other of a political disagreement and they did not hear, they did not record what they purported to have heard or recorded. They are all lies!

How do we know all this? The man of God, the preacher with the silky-smooth voice, the casual misogyny, the sleek look and even sleeker Mercedes, the "congregation in America" and the mistress in Dubai - because this man and his brothers have said so. And if they have said so, so has Almighty God. And if Almighty God has said so, then your memories, your written records, your videos and your audio recordings are Satan's Lies. Yes! Our soul is dead!

The SME conundrum

The logic is unimpeachable: if you should happen to read through a strategic plan, it should at the very least provide a goal and a work plan to achieve that goal. I find no flaw in the Nitpicker's logic. Save for one tiny, inconsequential, little detail: the maker of a strategic plan wants you to know what his goals are and what he intends to do to make sure those goals are achieved. In the public sector, that is sometimes a costly assumption.

The last true truly strategic plan was the Vision 2030 blueprint, on which every public sector institution was to base its plans. Even with the fingerprints of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank all over it, it was quite remarkable. It covered every major base and it did so with sufficient detail to persuade even the most tightfisted banker that this time around, the Government of Kenya was serious about the economy, politics, the education of its children and its workforce, the environment, manufacturing and public sector reforms. Even the European Union was impressed; Free Primary Education was dead in the water without its largesse.

Twenty-four years of KANUism, Nyayoism, Moism, should have taught us better. In Kenya, history tells us, the skinning of cats has led to innovations that would make the Renaissance Period feel like the psychedelic 1960s. Peter Anyang' Nyong'o and the planning boffins who set down our national ambitions in Vision 2030 must look at the past eight years in despair; their ideas have been debased, hijacked by KANUist special interests, leaving the principal makers of policy to flail in confusion in the dark as a generation of experienced boffins flee for the comforts of the private sector.

Take small and medium enterprises, SMEs, for example. Not the exporters or potential manufactures' exporters that the Nitpicker has in mind but the for-the-domestic-market jua kali "artisans" to be found in Kamukunji. These are entrepreneurs of incredible resilience and innovation. That bit of Kamukunji jua kali between City Stadium and the Retail Market at the intersection of Landhies Road and Haile Selassie Avenue is a sight to see. Manufactures from this zone include those mabati sandukus every mono brings to Form 1 come February every year, wheelbarrows, poultry feeders, chips fryers, water tanks, door-frames, roof gutters, and dozens more.

The zone is crowded, dirty, noisy and very, very dangerous. I do not believe that the relationship between the "artisans" and their governments, both national and county, is cordial. It is why I am surprised that the Nitpicker is surprised that there is no information about the kind of information an SME entrepreneur would need in order to export to Uganda or Rwanda. If she remembers those business prayer breakfasts held at the Safari Park every year, she will see the "true" Kenyan manufacturer: Vimal Shah, Manu Chandaria, Chris Kirubi and their polished, IMF-/World Bank-/IFC-friendly ilk. She will never have seen Lawi of Lawi Metal Works who still operates, thirty years after he started, out of somebody's back yard in Buru Buru Phase Three, or Martin, who got shoved out of the NCCK "garage" along Rabai Road, Makadara, to make way for The Point, another real estate development and now repairs cars along the side of Kangundo Road.

Kamukunji is a hotbed of innovation. The workarounds these manufacturers have found for poor sanitation, erratic power supply, irregular water availability, limited interior road networks of notoriously bad quality, a spectacular lack of public hygiene facilities coupled to a hostile City Hall and an indifferent Industrialisation and Enterprise Development Ministry are the stuff of legend. You wouldn't know it because we aand our governent have been mesmerised by the Steve Jobses. Jack Welches, Richard Bransons and Bill Gateses of this world - after they became billionaires, and not the Henry Fordses or Jamsetji Tatas of the past - before they became billionaires.

There is a reason why the SME sector is treated as a red-headed stepchild: not even Adan Mohammed is confident that it has what it takes to take Kenya to the next level. Not like the "billions in pledges" the President secured when he visited New York last month. Not like the "billions pledged" by Barack Obama the month before that. Our national strategy for the moment seems to be to borrow billions of dollars in order to attract billions of dollars from foreigners to extract billions of dollars of our natural resources while paying very little if no tax and exporting the profits overseas while the government sucks out every cent in credit from the market, guaranteeing that Lawi Metal Works remains an SME in perpetuity.

Does everyone do it?

"Everyone does it!" is the exclamation whenever you confront someone who does something that should offend the conscience. That, at least, is the excuse we give whenever we refuse to deal with the collapse of public morals. We refuse to accept, we refuse to admit, that we are responsible, passively, for the collapse of public morals. When we use the exclamation "Everyone does it!" we are, passively, admitting that we are responsible for the state of things.

It used to be that when we observed wrongdoing, we would speak out. Even then, we would do it passively: we'd wait for the brave among us to point out that something being done was wrong, or was being done wrongly, like a respected preacher or an opinion leader whom we automatically deferred to regarding matters of public morals. Those days are long gone, or at least they seem to be.

What happened at the Volkswagen Group, the venerable German manufacturer of cars, seems to confirm that we no longer even care that bad people are doing bad things with our tacit knowledge. Closer home, we look at the big questions of the day and bemoan the state of things without admitting that we are responsible for the state of things.

Every now and then I take a drive in Nairobi and I am surprised, though I shouldn't be, about the way motorists take liberties with the Highway Code without any consequences. The result has been a traffic mess that seems intractable. The economists point to the millions of man hours we lose every year to traffic jams, the National Transport and Safety Authority records the numbers of deaths and injuries caused by traffic jams and the courts prosecute thousands of traffic offenders for petty traffic offences every year. Yet few of us are willing to take responsibility for the state of our roads.

We are all responsible, yet none of us are: Everyone does it. Each one is in a hurry to Get There First, regardless of the cost or the inconvenience to others. We will cut in front of others, we will speed when we shouldn't, we will disobey the commands of the police or the traffic lights. We will do what it takes to come out ahead even if the advantage is short-lived or costly in the long term. There is a fear that pervades our psyche that if we do not do what we fear the other guy is doing, we will somewhat come out the worse.

The fear that if we play by the rules, we will lose, consumes us. We got to this point by allowing the bullies and the thugs among us to take what they wanted without paying for it, we allowed the corrupt among us to steal without paying the price, and when we allowed the little indignities visited on us to come to pass without standing up for what was right. That fear now lets the madness consume us in every little way, whether it is a smooth drive to the office or the slight discrepancy on our change from the supermarket.

It isn't that we are willing to engage in sharp practices because everyone does it. We engage in them because we are afraid of not being ahead if we do not. Unless we are honest with ourselves about our fear of losing out, we will never be able to take the first step to sort out the state of things. We must be brave enough, once again, to point out that if we stand up to the bullies, the thugs and the corrupt, life could be better for all of us.

Eighteen Hours

I know I should be outraged, in addition to being sad, that a road accident victim is being kept alive by machines because, perhaps, he was confined for eighteen hours in an ambulance while waiting for one of the twenty one beds in Kenyatta National Hospital's Intensive Care Unit to become available for him. His ambulance had been to two other private hospitals which couldn't admit him because their ICUs were full up too. I should be outraged. Instead, I am sad.

I am sad because it doesn't seem to matter anymore, these tragedies, that is. It has been a hard year and the elected classes are about to make it harder. Did you hear of the joke that the National Assembly is about to play on us? It will set up a society, at the taxpayers' expense, to tend to the post-parliamentary life of waheshimiwa. One of the boons in this sweet deal is a $1,000 stipend so that they don't lose the respect these waheshimiwa engendered when they trolled the hallowed halls of Parliament.

How can Kenyans die because the biggest referral hospital in Eastern Africa can't expand its ICU facilities while the body charged with holding the national Executive to account for such things is busy lining its members' pockets as if money is going out of fashion? There should be outrage about this state of affairs; it is the sadness that remains once the outrage has abated and the mind has been becalmed.

We make choices every day. We prioritise things every day. We pretend to value human life, but we value mammon more, and this is starkly apparent in the health sector. Private hospitals will not admit you unless there is a cash deposit. All hospitals will hold you hostage until the final shilling is paid. If you happen to die while undergoing treatment, the doctors will rally around each other and deny your loved ones justice - or information. You don't even have to be a doctor to enjoy the benefits of this big white line; it took the combined outrage of people on TV and on the radio that a rapist masquerading as a gynaecologist was arrested and charged in court.

The family of the road accident victim now faces an agonising choice: when to allow the doctors to switch off the life support equipment. I do not know if the eighteen hours he spent in the ambulance was critical to his care or recovery; I don't think it was helpful. He will die. We will be outraged. Some of will get over it, but the sadness will always be there, how callous we are about life while the people we choose to do something about it live like they are in the last years of Pompeii.

Getting out of hand

This thing is getting out of hand. If Kenya's fearless political reporters are to be believed, Oburu Odinga has decided to wade into the Who-Fixed-Ruto? saga with an offer to testify on behalf of the Deputy President to show that indeed, he was fixed and that the fixing was done by current coalition partners. 

When Moses Kuria claimed that he had been involved, together with Martha Karua, Anyang' Nyong'o and Raila Odinga, to fix William Ruto, and that he was willing to testify to that in any court, few paid him any mind even with the promise of more Moses Kuria drama. Martha Karua threatened to sue him unless he withdrew his statements. He, in typical fashion, doubled down even more loudly, explaining that in the aftermath of the 2007 general election, PNU and ODM were busily shopping each others' members to the ICC, that it was all part of the post-Grand Coalition maneuvering. What he cannot explain is how he managed to get into bed with ODM-ists so that together they could shop William Ruto to the ICC when ODM was busily, if he is to be believed, shopping Uhuru Kenyatta to the same ICC.

Now with the entrance of Oburu Odinga, things are about to get really interesting. The 2007 general election and the violence it visited on Kenya is sufficiently ancient news that key events are subject to the revisionism of politicians with axes to grind. Between the general election and the formation of the Grand Coalition, Mr Ruto and Mr Odinga were bosom buddies, in each others' corners, so much so that everyone believed that Mr Ruto was to get the ODM Deputy Premiership on offer. The rift, no pun intended, between the Prime Minister and his canniest Rift Valley operator began when the PM chose Musalia Mudavadi instead.

What must have informed Raila when he overlooked Mr Ruto for the milquetoast Musalia must have been Mr Ruto's KANU diehard credentials, especially when the Ghai Draft was published when he served in Baba Moi's government, and when he stood foursquare behind Uhuru Kenyatta's failed first stab at the presidency.

If Mr Ruto had not been so hellbent in sabotaging the PM's efforts in 2008 and 2009, either Martha Karua or Mutula Kilonzo would have overseen the establishment of a local mechanism for the post-election violence cases and perhaps, just perhaps, Mr Ruto would be as free as Mr Kenyatta from the clutches of the ICC. In the event, Mr Ruto allied himself with Mr Kenyatta, kicked the local-mechanism gambit in its teeth, celebrated the virtues of the ICC in rally after rally, and watched the Waki List being handed over to the ICC Prosecutor. Having believed that it was the principals who would suffer the consequences of the move, he was shaken to his core when it turned out that Mr Justice Waki's principal suspects were him and Mr Kenyatta.

Their strategy of using the ICC to win the 2013 elections paid off. Their strategy of painting the ICC and the ICC Prosecutor into a corner has had mixed results. Of the Ocampo Six, it is only Mr Ruto and Joshua Sang who are on trial. A Rule change that Kenya did not fear has come back to bite him in the butt too. Mr Ruto wants to win the political battle now, but why he has allowed Mr Kuria to lead the troops is a mystery we will never solve because Mr Kuria, by his own admission, is not exactly Mr Ruto's greatest fan. Mr Oburu promises to make this fact as plain as possible with his offer to testify as to how PNU fixed Mr Ruto.

This thing is getting out of hand.

Pay attention.

If you weren't paying attention, son, know now then that school is in session. Kid, things have taken a turn for the stupid these past few days so you'd best sit up straight and pay attention because this might not be important stuff but it surely affects important stuff.

First off, the frivolous shit. Did you know Parliament ran out of money to pay off its electricity Bill?  Yeah, that happened. It took the President's Chief of Staff for Kenya Power to get off its high horse and switch the juice back on. I don't know how you run up a bill of ten million unless you are Bidco or East African Bottlers Company, unless you are having a bad day with your bankers. But for whatever reason Parliament's beancounters seemed to have missed the impending Kenya Power kaibosh. Who's is in charge in that place, anyway?

Did you ever, ever think that the Commission for the Implementation of the Constitution would hold hands with the national Executive to stick it to Parliament? Me neither, but that's what is happening. Some Rift Valley MP - variously lampooned as a greenhorn, a mole and a renegade - has decided he's had it with a powerful Cabinet Secretary and he's going to get the CS impeached. The wing of the coalition the CS is associated with cries foul. Totally unrelated - wink, wink - the CIC goes to the High Court and asks the constitutional court to declare certain bits of the Standing Orders - the Parliamentary Rule Book - unconstitutional. The Court agrees. 

Of course the Speakers are having none of it. Knowing full well that the "sanctity of Parliament" will not be violated by process servers, the Speaker of one of the annoying chambers declares he has absolutely no idea whether a court has "stayed parliamentary debate," only that they will have the impeachment debate come hell or high water. It's only a matter of time before he gets yanked back into line and told in no uncertain terms is his chamber impeaching the CS - or any CS for that matter.

Turns out last week was the last good week to hold onto your dollars,  kid. Now that the Central Bank has made 48 billion for itself in profits because of a "weak" shilling, you might start to hear talk of market operations or some esoteric central bank speak and the shilling will make a miraculous rally against world currencies. It's not the first time that I have been shafted by the CBK.

But the thing that you need to keep an eye on is all the praying taking place around the country these days. Well not really countrywide; this praying seems to be loudest in certain parts of Mt Kenya and the deep Rift Valley. The last time there was all this praying some guy had his case thrown out of court because it turns out many witnesses against him were lying little shits who had been coached and paid to make up stories about how he met with militia leaders and gave them money. If prayers worked then, revealing the unholy truth for all the world to see, why can't they work this time round even if the ones praying loudest have the whiff of the porcine around them?

So pay attention. Things are happening. If you can stand the stench, you might yet find truffles in the troughs.

There are limits.

I can't help everyone. No one can. Not even the Gateses and their billions together with the Oracle from Omaha's billions. For each and every one of us, there is a finite number of people we can help in our whole lives. That should give us pause, but it very rarely does.

Obviously there are at the top of my list those whom I have no choice but to love and to help, even if they still think I am an idiot: the two Old Gals, Her and Her's future mother-in-law. They come first. Always. So what if its nepotistic? I love them very much. Deal with it. Then come the Necessary Evils and the Siku Kuu Brigade, though I think the Chairman still trumps them all. Then come the nicer friends, the ones you know you love but won't admit it to them. After that, I have to prioritise.

That sounds harsh. But that's because you think I should walk around with sackcloth on my black and my hair covered in ash. Maybe the Dalai Lama can pull it off, but no one in this world can care for everyone and anyone that pretends to love the whole world quite likely will one day pick up an AK-47 and set the world on fire.

What makes this beggar worse off than that one, this crippled child worse off than that one, or this blind woman worse off than that blind woman? This world is full of suffering and my heart is simply not big enough to carry all that suffering. I will pick and choose, where I can, those for whom I will direct my charitable efforts. If it turns out that that is one person, what's it to you?

Cast iron? I think not.

The legislative authority of the Republic is derived from the people and, at the national level, is vested in and exercised by Parliament. ~ Article 94(1)

1. Executive Authority derives from the people of Kenya and shall be exercised in accordance with this Constitution. 2. Executive authority shall be exercised in a manner compatible with the principle of service to the people of Kenya, and for their well-being and benefit.~ Article 129

The national executive of the Republic comprises the President, the Deputy President and the rest of the Cabinet. ~ Article 130(1)

Judicial authority is derived from the people and vests in, and shall be exercised by, the courts and tribunals established by or under this Constitution. ~ Article 159(1)

That, in essence, is the separation of powers in the constitutional scheme we promulgated for ourselves in 2010, three years after neighbour set neighbour's house on fire, committed beastly acts against neighbour, and murdered, rampaged and pillaged like a marauding hyena in a pack of fellow hyenas.

The checks and balances part would take a keener reading of the Constitution. Take public finances; you would think that with the financial autonomy of the three arms of governemnt, things would finally be simpler. But it is the national executive, through the Kenya Revenue Authority, that has the authority to collect taxes nationally, which, in turn, become the national revenue, not only to be shared shared between the two levels of government but among the three arms of government. The sharing, ironically, is done by Parliament, even though it does so based on the very strong recommendations of the national executive through the National Treasury, the Commission on Revenue Allocation, the Auditor-General, the Controller of Budget and the Kenya Revenue Authority.

Or, think of the "judicial authority vested in and exercised by courts and tribunals" and remember that when the Judiciary decrees something, the only institution with the coercive power to enforce the decree is the national executive through its police or its agencies with police powers. The Judiciary can pass a sentence of imprisonment for life, but it is the Kenya Prisons Service that will actually enforce it; the Judiciary does not run its own prisons.

What about Parliament, you ask? Can it really do what it is threatening to do without seriously jeopardising the constitutional scheme of things? It all depends on whether you believe that Parliament is primus inter pares or not. Twice now, parliament, in the guise of the Senate, has been thwarted by the Supreme Court when it came to the impeachment of the Governor of Embu County. More recently, it emerges that without the intervention of the Chief of Staff of the President, a functionary who appears nowhere in the constitutional scheme of things, Parliament would be without lights today as the President of the United Republic of Tanzania came to give his address before the National Assembly.

Ignore the bombast and rhetoric of the one who would have you believe that the Constitution is cast in cast iron, immutable to the laws of politics and human emotion. As with every other human relationship, this document we tend to venerate, is subject to compromises that would seek to make it smoother to read and live by. Sometimes it is the national executive and the Judiciary ganging up against Parliament; sometimes it is the national executive and Parliament taking on the Judiciary; and sometimes it is the Judiciary seeing the wisdom of not standing in Parliament's way as it confronts the national executive. 

So long as mad men do not spill onto the streets with simis, rungus, guns, Molotov cocktail and hatred for their fellowman in their hearts, this is the best constitution scheme that we have at the moment and it is in our best interests to see that the compromises and accommodations are not against the "well-being and benefit" of the people.

Mali ya uma.

If you want to, you can pretend that you don't want to pay for things you want. It's okay; those are the little white lies we tell ourselves in order for us to believe that we are not like them, you know? them? the greedy, grasping, amoral denizens of that imperturbable, impassive, impregnable (the "imp-" part of my thesaurus caught my eye this morning) Leviathan we all know as "Government." (The upper-case "G" is how you distinguish it from Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda and the perennially benighted South Sudan.)

So go right ahead. Lie to yourself. Deep down, though, tell me, honestly! don't you think that being the Director-General of the Communications Authority isn't simply divine? No, don't get me wrong; I am not saying that he is the reincarnation of the Jesus you pray to; no, no, no. I mean, the office he holds, the position he occupies, the throne he settles his hindparts on must be a pretty nice place. I mean, in 2014/2015 an uppity auditor reported that the D-G got 6.13 millions of our shillings as travlleing allowances. That is a six and six other zeroes after it! (No one counts the a hundred and thirty K anymore, though I have a feeling the D-G most definitely did.)

What was that you were about to say? You were going to say something officious, weren't you? You were going to take That Tone of Voice and use words like "unconscionable" and phrases like "ballooning wage bill," weren't you? I would probably do the same, and just like you, I am not going to admit that half the outrage comes from the fact that I don't have a 6.13 million shilling year and given my particular skillset, well, at least my mother loves me.

There is very little in common between our stated national objectives and the facts on the ground. We are like the termites my father studied for his PhD. When we burrow inside the wooded frame of your home, or some badly laid concrete, we will, quite literally, eat you out of home and hearth. That is us and Government; it is never, ever "our" money so we see nothing wrong in spending it as fast as the taxman collects it. We have also, in the bargain, become the pastmasters at rationalisations and justifications. Do you remember the mta-do? attitude by the Elgeyo-Marakwet MCAs who had gone to the DRC to benchmark "athletics facilities" before coming home and jetting off promptly to Mombasa to write their report?

Now, I have met people who treat money very seriously. They may be profligate, but they are profligate with money they have worked their butts off, and I don't mean shaking their money-makers at "sponsors" or serious arse-licking for serikali tenders. These people might spend, every now and then, like pirates on shore leave, but they keep a beady - a very beady eye - on their fundamentals. Keep costs down. Keep expenses down. Extract maximum efficiency from your resources. And never, ever trust a stranger with your wallet. In case you haven't noticed, these guys are not batting their eyelids to be appointed to a cozy sinecure like the Director-General's; they are sitting pretty wherever they are.

The ones who did bat their eyelids are the one who had the gumption, the moxie, the chutzpah, the cheek of it, to stare us in the eye and use oily, unctuous phrases like, "It is an honour to serve the nation" and "I will dedicate myself for the good of the country." The moment the camera lights went off, the ink barely dry on their "letters of appointment", they were lining their pockets so fast you would have though money was going out of style! (Just ask Edward Ouko to publish the reports on office refurbishing between 2013 and now and marvel at how quickly desks, chairs, coffee tables, corner tables, shelves, curtains, nets, vases, telephone handsets, carpets, mats, toilet-paper holders, and shower heads are worn down so as to need replacement.)

What we have is a perfect symbiosis between hypocrisy and apathy. It is how w can simultaneously be angry at wastage on a colossal scale, envy that it is not us doing the wasting, and indifferent to it all because, "Ni mali ya uma."

Our damn job!

Graft assails the public administration of this country at every turn. The President has unequivocally declared a war on graft, but he faces hurdles at every turn. He started with his own office, but even there, there were obstacles. Removing them has been like pulling teeth: painful and tough. But he seems determined.

The Chief Justice has joined forces with the Inspector-General of Police to clean out the murk in the corridors of justice, attempting to streamline the process of dealing with traffic offences where the collaboration between the police and judicial officers has been blamed for the endemic corruption in the Judiciary and the police service.

But it is recent revelations of graft in county governments that have fired up the ire of the people. Wheelbarrows have been priced at over a hundred thousand shillings; social media accounts have been set up at a cost of millions of shillings; mobile phones have been purchased for twice their retail prices in the market; hospital supplies have been priced at rates that boggle the mind. It seems, as one wag put, that graft has been devolved with the devolution of the government. This brings up, every now and then, doubts about the viability of devolution.

Yet, the train has left the station. Devolution has advanced in fits and starts, but it has advanced all the same. What we face are the vestigial remnants of KANU-ism, a virulent resistant strain of corruption from the 1980s that simply defies the odds and keeps on keeping on. Many of the men and women overseeing the implementation of devolution in county governments are holdovers from the KANU era, having survived Mwai Kibaki's nascent reforms. Kenyans are determined to see devolution succeed and it is these holdovers who threaten the entire project.

Once you're in, you're in. We made the choice, consciously as voters, to ratify the draft harmonised constitution in 2010. We have no choice but to ensure that the scheme we chose for ourselves works for us. Keeping an eye on those we have elected to govern us to do their job without threatening the scheme is our responsibility and it is one we must take seriously if we are to make a better nation. It is not enough to mouth the platitudes that politicians spout every now and then.

This is the Information Age, and the information available to us is available as a right, not a privilege. Even with the retrograde provisions of the Official Secrets Act, we still have available to us information that is vital to protecting our democracy and our form of government. Few of us have the money to run recall elections, but that shouldn't stop us from holding our elected governments to account. While we can't simplify our relationship with our elected representatives to that of employer and employee, but we can demand certain things of them: probity, integrity and good judgment.

Things like overpriced wheelbarrows and curtains threaten to distract us from the tasks at hand, but if we are farsighted and committed to the big picture, we might yet succeed. If we play our roles as electors properly, we will surely come out of this transition period stronger and better. We must have faith in our institutions, enough faith for us to take hard decisions, such as foregoing the frisson of satisfaction we get by electing the men and women we have been familiar with for ages. If we elect the men and women who share our desire for development and good government, we shall be in with a chance. It is time for hard decisions. We can't foist it on future voters. This is our time and it is time we acted like we had damn sense!

A dose of its own medicine.

The Old Guard lives in fear that the Young Turks are out to rob of them of their cozy sinecures. When Paul Muite was appointed the chairman of the Law Society, with Willy Mutunga as his deputy, Baba Moi may not have quivered in his boots, but he was no longer at ease. The Law Society, even after some of its members came after its Council for "engaging in politics," distinguished itself for living up to its ideals, especially that of civic education on the law. In the annals of the Second Liberation, the Law Society was a Young Turk in and of itself.

That is not the case today. Thirteen years after we saw off Baba Moi's project, things have come full circle. The Uhuru Kenyatta we rejected in 2002 is now President of Kenya. The William Ruto who stood foursquare behind him in 2002 is now the Deputy President. The Law Society, just like the moribund KANU, is riven with factionalism and corruption. The abortive Annual General Meeting on Saturday, the 26th September, exposed the Law Society's dark secrets, if only for a few hours.

Perhaps it has something to do with the period of relative political peace after Mwai Kibaki was sworn in as Kenya's third President or the wave of optimism that washed over the nation after that seminal day. For some reason the Law Society stopped playing the unofficial role of the Fourth Arm of Government that it had played all through the 1990s. It no longer cared to hold the government of the day to account, maybe because so many of its members were serving on commissions, boards and committees of the government or representing the government if fee-paying briefs that proved to be quite lucrative.

Either way, the Law Society turned inwards and became just another association. It engaged in may of the behaviours that we had collectively abhorred, none as abhorrent as the campaigning for places on the Council of the Law Society. Big money spending became the norm and the Chairmen and members of the Council became just another group of politicians out to line their pockets.

If it wasn't for the International Arbitration Centre and the spectacular overreach by the Council, most members of the Law Society would have been content to make their views made only during the ho-hum AGMs. But when the Council made it an express rule that all practicing advocates must contribute to the proposed arbitration centre, even after the Council had indicated that it was securing a very large credit facility with a bank, many youthful members had had enough. Their agitation will expose more than the avarice of the members of the Council and their KANU-era thinking. 

These new Young Turks may not have the gravitas that Paul Muite or Willy Mutunga brought to the game, but they are a harbinger of the less-polished things to come that nevertheless change the game. These are not lawyers prepared to let "decorum" act as a fig leaf for the profound money-grab perpetrated by the Council; they have worked hard for their fees in extremely hostile circumstances and they will not sit idly by as the Council threatens their livelihoods. If it means destroying the Law Society in order to save it, so be it. I can't say that I disagree with their tactics or their objectives.

We are frequently asked to venerate the old, the aged, because of their experience and wisdom. But the harsh reality is that these are the same people, an entire generation, that has impoverished our nation and destroyed venerable institutions, such as the Law Society. The old deserve respect and veneration when the sum total of their experience and wisdom has been  for the good of the people, but the deserve neither respect nor veneration when they have been the source of unfairness and untold misery. The Law Society is getting a dose of the medicine it had given the government of Baba Moi. Like they say in California, payback is a female dog.

Don't go crazy.

Ever noticed how some people lose their shit when they read online comments about what is and what isn't...cool? or some such shit. Some random person you follow on Twitter decides to declare some random act the coolest thing since Jesus brewed chang'aa in Cana, and suddenly you life has taken a turn for the worse and you obsess over that thing for the next month, driving everyone crazy in the process. Until some other random person you follow on Instagram declares pig entrails sautéed in a 2003 Sauvignon Blanc and garnished with parsley-fused real Kenyan kachumbari to be the Meal of the Year and off to the races we go.

We are not immune to this craziness; many of us, especially the active ones online, get influenced to one degree or another by what we read from those we follow or those who follow us on a variety of subjects. How we react to the online peer influence is important; it either helps us understand our world better, or it crushes our spirit and deadens our soul.

There are many in my online community who make authoritative declarations on a range of subjects. I respect some of them well enough to not dismiss their ideas out of hand. But many are the equivalent of the village mad man; they may have the grammar or the chutzpah to say some things, but I seriously question their motives or their intellect, especially when some of them purport to declare with finality that they have the answers to some of the most intractable problems faced by humans: what do men or women want? How do I raise my children? Who was better: Tupac or Biggie?

Do you want to be the one to take advise about the person you care about most from a person you have interacted with only online, who sometimes declares things to be what you know to not be, and who's sanity is in doubt given the vehemence with which they hold onto certain shibboleths close to their hearts? I think not. Life is not, I think, meant to be lived in fear that what someone says may contradict what you know, deny the value of your experience or shatter an illusion that makes your life bearable.

I am not you; you are certainly not me. If I want to listen to Bob Dylan while reading Proust and downing substantial volumes of Kenya Cane, I don't think that your opinion on the subject is valuable or necessary. If you want to call people you disagree with mean names, that is no skin off my nose. You are you; I am me. I will make my choices and whether they make me happy or not, they are not intended to make you happy or seek your approval. You're free to laugh when it all goes tits up so long as I get to do the same when it goes tits up for you. If not, you can block me and I shall return the favour.

Demand the best

Some of my online interlocutors ask why our service industry, apparently vaunted, does not live up to its reputation because of the quality of certain services they have paid for. One of them wonders why when she leaves her vehicle at the mechanic's to be repaired, the quality of service is low; while another wonders how it could take a tailor two weeks to repair a pair of trousers without repairing but ruining it in the end.

One of them has written a book on crowning the customer and his trousers would not be ruined if he recalled the words of wisdom in his book. He shouldn't feel bad about that; few of us raise a ruckus about the poor services we receive. We let it slide. We do not want to cause offence. We do not want to confront someone whom we treat as a friend. I think that is a mistake.

People who work for me or who's services I pay for are not my friends. Ours is a contractual relationship. I don't owe them anything other than their fee; they owe me nothing other than a job well done. If I ask for a cold Heineken and the barman offers me a cold Tusker, I will reject his offering, even if he has opened the bottled and poured me a glass. That is not the service I asked for; I will be damned if I pay for it. If the proprietor of the bar takes the price of the Tusker out of his pocket, so be it: I was not at fault.

If I ask the mechanic to replace the brake pads on my car and he chooses to adjust them instead, I will not pay him for the service. If I ask my tailor to adjust my trousers so that they fit better and instead he tears them apart, I will not only not pay him but I will demand compensation.

Because of our instinct not to cause offence, because of our desire to go along in order to get along, because we do not want to be seen as troublemakers, we are prepared to suffer poor service and petty criminality. It is how supermarkets get away with blatant theft: handing out sweets in lieu of cash as change. Assuming that because of their pricing mechanisms, each transaction requires a three-shilling change, and there are a hundred similar transactions a day, in a supermarket chain with twenty venues, that is a daily theft of six thousand shillings. In a month that is sh 180,000. Petty theft of such scales should piss us off.

One of my online interlocutors, despite the amount of evidence adduced, will keep dealing with a poor service provider because it is the patriotic thing to do. I tried the patriotism route; I ended up on the tarmac in Bujumbura, scared shitless every time the cleaning crew stomped past my seat hauling blue buckets - BUCKETS! - because the hoover "has broken down." Kenya Airways is the choice I will make long after I have worked down the list of alternatives, including Air Bujumbura, Fly540, JamboJet, Precision Air and JetLink - airlines, one and all, that don't overpromise and always underdeliver. With them, there are no nasty surprises.

We must demand excellence for the services we pay for. It is the only way things get better. If we are prepared for mediocre service, simply to save a shilling, we cannot complain about the quality of service we get. Thus, if your mechanic operates in the shade of an acacia tree out in the highway, doesn't seem to have a business licence to his name, asks you to fetch your car before sunset, and will only do a "good" job if you keep a beady eye on him, then, my friend, accept his services and fees at your own risk.

Trouble comes knocking

She.

Yeah, Her! Phone calls. Texts. WhatsApp. Twitter DMs. It all feels like a dream, somewhat. I don't choose my words. I say what I feel, I say what I mean. I hope She does too.

There is a simplicity to it all that is so complex. It means something, I feel. It feels...true. That discombobulates, a bit.

It's 9 O'clock. The power is out, so I don't know if this device will hold out a bit longer. But all that is meaningless because all that occupies the mind is the sense of Her. The fact that after all this time there is much to reveal, much to discover fills me with anticipation. Is this what the Prof and the Doc went through? I don't know. They say very little about that.

Panic. That's the word. Panic. One minute I'm staring at a hundred lines of a draft that I have worked on for months, years. The next minute her face, uncharacteristically hiding behind Ray Ban frames (yes, I noticed) was there and I...panicked. Was something wrong? Why was She there?

Purple. I remember purple. But I don't remember what happened next. Did I tell Her that she looked completely bewitching? I don't know. I know that for three and a half minutes, my heart skipped so many beats that my phone's heart-rate monitor thought that it was a coronary incident. Believe you me, my friends, when I tell you that it was the best two hundred and ten seconds of my life. Bar none. (Maybe not Jamhuri Day, but pretty close.)

Now I am in trouble. Mary, Lilly, Olivia and Maureen have all these fancy ideas about what it all means. Spoilsports! I need time to work out through the fact that I panicked. And then promptly wished for a snifter of the Double Black.

Thank God there are only nineteen of you who read this blog and that all of you are remarkably stoic. If you were the chatty commenting type that would be mortifying. I wonder what you make of my musings? Are there some of you who think, "What an idiot?" Probably. I doubt very much you read these musings and rethink your deeply held convictions. Anyway, I'm in trouble now.

There is a chance that I am now in a headspace where everything tends towards the panicky when it comes to Her. What did you do when your life got upended the way mine has? Did you confide in your BFFs? Did the "gang" weigh in on the pros and cons? I don't know. What I do know is that for once I am putting on the kilos simply because I have no reason to think of the what ifs and the what might bes. That is a good thing, right?

So, there she was, looking all svelte and shit and I was thinking, this room is all women. That can't work. So, after the "What are you doing here" panic, I spirited Her away from the door, hurriedly made perfunctory chit chat, got Her in the lift and then went completely nuts for three or four minutes, cooking up sentences in my mind about who She is, what She means to me and why Olivia, Maureen, Lilly and Mary need not concern themselves with Her and why She smiled so prettily at me. I am so in trouble.

Gods and Kings

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. ~ St Paul's First Epistle to the Church in Corinth, 13:11

What did you make of the spectre of grown-assed men and women in the school uniforms of children, ostensibly making the point that the education of children and the protection of the employment rights of teachers were their stock in trade on that particular Wednesday? It would have been believable if the run-up to that display of juvenility had not been marred by the disturbing image of a grown-assed man with a massive red lollipop in his mouth declaiming with gusto something about his mummy, or the smug refusal by a grown-assed woman to accept that the institution of which she is a member is the principal reason why everyone wants a fat cheque from the government every month, teachers included.

It is stated, over and over, by Kenya's political leadership that their leadership is ordained by God Himself. The people who hearken to the blasphemous words of the politicians should remember Samauel's admonition ot the Israelites when they demanded a king for themselves, like other nations.

¹⁰ And Samuel told all the words of the Lord unto the people that asked of him a king. ¹¹ And he said, This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his chariots. ¹² And he will appoint him captains over thousands, and captains over fifties; and will set them to ear his ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his chariots. ¹³ And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers. ¹⁴ And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants. ¹⁵ And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants. ¹⁶ And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work. ¹⁷ He will take the tenth of your sheep: and ye shall be his servants. ¹⁸ And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the Lord will not hear you in that day. ~ 1 Samuel 8

It is for this reason that when our leaders debase themselves in the agora, offer expiation to false gods, lie with impunity, engage in the most licentious behaviour, and do all this without an ounce of shame, that we must ask ourselves whether we have committed an unspeakable sin against the universe for it to shaft us so royally.

The dispute between teachers and their government offered the opportunity for the self-proclaimed God's Anointed Ones to sit down and reason as adults, not engage in the brinkmanship that children engage in when they are discovering themselves. All the parties involved behaved atrociously, some more than others. Neither will bend because neither thinks of the children or the future; all are thinking only of their embarassment. None of them, as St Paul asks, has put away childish things, including their hubris. We will suffer more because of these "kings" and not even all the gods we pray to will intervene.