More listening, less regulation

Ezekiel Mutua, speaking as the Chief Executive Officer of the Kenya Films and Classification (or so it was reported by unpatriotic, possibly immoral layabouts who do not love Kenya and are enemies of Kenyan moral values and culture) does not think that television advertisements (and other forms of advertisement) for prophylactics (that's "condoms" for the semi-literate reading this blog) should not be broadcast during the broadcast watershed period (that would be between 5:00 am and 10:00 pm).

Let's have some fun.

Article 34, on the freedom of the media, at clause 2 states,

The State shall not—
(a) exercise control over or interfere with any person engaged in broadcasting, the production or circulation of any publication or the dissemination of information by any medium; or freedom of expression.
(b) penalise any person for any opinion or view or the content of any broadcast, publication or dissemination.

Of course this constitutional freedom may be limited under the circumstances contemplated at Article 24 (1), that is,

(1) A right or fundamental freedom in the Bill of Rights shall not be limited except by law, and then only to the extent that the limitation is reasonable and justifiable in an open and democratic society based on human dignity, equality and freedom, taking into account all relevant factors, including––

(a) the nature of the right or fundamental freedom;
(b) the importance of the purpose of the limitation;
(c) the nature and extent of the limitation;
(d) the need to ensure that the enjoyment of rights and fundamental freedoms by any individual does not prejudice the rights and fundamental freedoms of others; and
(e) the relation between the limitation and its purpose and whether there are less restrictive means to achieve the purpose.

The broadcast watershed period is, among Mr Mutua's many justifications, meant to protect children. (A "child" in Kenya is any individual who has not attained the age of eighteen––Article 250). Therefore, Mr Mutua's broadcast watershed period condom ad ban is for the protection of children––which could be a new-born babe or an individual who is one day shy of his eighteenth birthday. Mr Mutua is not known for the nuanced application of his guidelines.

However, Mr Mutua has not justified his condom ad ban, only qualifying that it shall not apply to condom ads by the Government or public health ads by the Government. (It would have been interesting to see Mr Mutua attempt to censure the Ministry of Health over its condom ads.) First, pornography (if that would be Mr Mutua's anti-condom ad argument) is not within the KFCB's mandate, but that of county governments (Fourth Schedule, Part 2, paragraph 13). 

Second, if he relied on Article 24 (1) (b), that is, "the importance of the purpose of the limitation," explained as the protection of children, he will have skipped over one or two discomfitting facts including the increasing incidences of young people having unprotected sex because their knowledge of prophylactics is limited.

Third, protection of children is the principal aim of Article 53 (2), which would, presumably, include their protection from the ill-effects of unprotected sex. Information is power and Mr Mutua would deny sexually active children available information about sex and protection, endangering their lives, contrary to the demands of Article 53.

I am not sure children should be denied key information about sex. Of course, the information has to be age-appropriate, but a blanket condom ad ban is asinine and gravely risky, especially in a country where current public health statistics reveal an increasing rate of childhood pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections. Mr Mutua may not realise this, but when he claims "cross-jurisdictional responsibilities" as the reason for his encroachment into administrative spheres beyond the KFCB's ken, he forgets that without a keener appreciation of that area's policy implications, he would be best served by listening more and regulating less.

Mr Wangusi is wrong

I have not seen the ruling but definitely we are going to challenge it...There is nothing unconstitutional in that Act since it conforms to section 33 of the Kenyan Constitution. ~ Francis Wangusi,Communications Authority

This is the second time we have had to confront the thinking of a senior public officers regarding the limits of the institution that he heads. The Attorney-General is the principal legal advisor to the Government. In this case, "Government" includes all ministries, departments and agencies, such as the Communications Authority. The Judiciary, that is, the High Court, has the constitutional authority to determine whether or not a right or fundamental freedom has been violated or might be violated by any person, including a public body such as the National Police Service, the Communications Authority or the Director of Public Prosecutions.

What Mr Wangusi did was to remind Kenyans that senior public officers are more enamoured of their powers than they are of the role they play in turning Kenya into a vibrant and successful nation. By his own admission, Mr Wangusi has not read the judgment of the constitutional court, has no clue what its rationale is, but he is nevertheless persuaded that the judgment is wrong and he is not.

This is not the first time section 29 of the Kenya Information and Communications Act has been challenged. It is a victory of sorts because the section has become the basis for the unconstitutional detention and trial of critics of the Government, its Cabinet's members and other senior government officials. Mr Wangusi is alive to the limitations of Article 33 of the Constitution, especially sub-Article (3), but he is not the principal legal advisor to the Government who can claim with authority what the constitution might or might not mean, nor is he a member of the constitution court who can determine with finality what the constitution actually means and he should stop pretending to be.

The Communications Authority is a powerful agency and it doesn't need more power. It can determine to a very great extent what kinds of information most Kenyans can have access to. It doesn't need to become the arbiter of whether or not a persons rights or reputation have been damaged; that is the realm of the courts and the Defamation Act. As a communications' regulator, the Communications Authority should ensure that those who offer communications' services to us do so at fair prices and of good quality that are reliable while protecting the privacy of our communications. It is not the Authority's job to decide whether or not a thin-skinned politician has been defamed, slandered or libeled. In other words, if you think your reputation is worth twenty million shillings and you think certain statements have damaged that twenty-million shilling reputation, put your mouth where your money is and take your accusation to court. Don't ask the Communications Authority to be your heavy.

Mr Wangusi and Mr Mutua, the Kenya Film Certification Board are working on our last collective nerve. But we have learnt; the Judiciary, every now and then, gets of its fat ass and does something useful. These two should learn the proper lessons from the Mumbi Ngugi judgment or forever suffer our undying and undimmed hostility.

The quality of state officials

It will not raise the quality of state officials. What? you may ask. The requirement that they must have a minimum academic qualification to hold elected office. Kenya is looking for the magic bullet that will guarantee its future as a stable polity and successful economy. That magic bullet is not an academically credentialled membership of its legislatures. It can't hurt, for sure, but it is not the panacea that we have come to believe it is. You only have to see the acrimonious mudslinging between two "professors" - one, a politically connected one and the other a US-based academic - to see that formal education, even university education, is no reason for men to be reasonable.

It is like the misleading proposal that the more we legislate "integrity" the better our chances of controlling graft. When "corruption" was punished under the Penal Code, there was rife corruption in Kenya. The situation did not end with the enactment of the Anti-corruption and Economic Crimes Act, the Public Officer Ethics Act, the Public Procurement and Disposal Act, the Public Finance Management Act or the Leadership and Integrity Act. What happened is what always happens in Kenya: the crooks got smarter, the law enforcement became poorer, the scams got bigger.

We assume that an educated Parliament, for example, will "read Bills and contribute meaningfully to parliamentary debate and pass laws that make sense." Obviously, that is not accurate. The majimbo Parliament may not have had as many university graduates as the post-KANU 10th Parliament, yet the 10th was incapable of solving some of our most intractable problems. Indeed, the 10th is notorious for making things worse. The quality of debate was abysmal and the plethora of new laws made things worse. Wit and wisdom were noticeably absent; no one had the surefootedness to pull off a Jean-Marie Seroney-like "You cannot substantiate the obvious."

Our problems do not stem from a lack of credentialled elected representatives capable of navigating the information age or the twenty-first century's challenges. Our problems stem from a leadership class that is more interested in self-aggrandisement than leading their constituents. It matters not whether leadership is in the public sector or the private sector, the principal aim of all Kenyan leaders is wealth accumulation at all costs. Few Kenyan leaders are interested in new ideas, or learning for the sake of advancing the knowledge base of the country. Now that scores of elected leaders are pursuing university degrees, I will wager that the outcome will not be better government.

The false narrative that MPs, Senators, Cabinet Secretaries, Governors, MCAs and the lot must be well-educate din order to lead forgets that they do not govern on their own. Government has a public service, and it is this public service that does the actual governing. Parliament and county legislatures need well-educated staffs. Without the lawyers, accountants, economists, and other policy professionals, even a well-educated MP is at sea on matters outside his professional competence. It is these professional civil servants who draw up policy papers, draft Bills, audit reports, financial statements, budget documents and the rest of it that MPs rely on to make laws or debate effectively.

I don't mean that MPs or similar state officers should be ignorant louts. I mean that they should be intelligent enough to consider the information at their disposal so as to make better decisions for the good of the nation. Intelligence is not always measured by the number of academic credentials one has acquired. There are senators who have recently graduated from university; no one is under any illusion that their relatively brand new academic qualifications will be used for the publication of better laws or for holding the national executive to account. 

Back to Jean-Marie Seroney; he was Martin Shikuku's contemporary. The former was a respected member of the Kenyan Bar while the latter did not seem to have been beyond secondary school. But between the two of them, the quality of debate in Parliament was the result of careful reasoning, innate intelligence, a capacity to read widely and an ability to consume complex information and process it quickly with a view to solving a problem. None of the current lot wants to solve problems other than the problem of their relative poverty.

Why is the Laico so expensive?

Are you thinking of booking a conference at the Laico Regency? I hope you're a patient and forgiving client, like me, and are willing to suffer minor indignities that would drive the finicky among us (yes, you, Samoe!) to utter distraction. I'm currently sequestered in a stuffy conference room that has sucked the last morsel of goodwill out of me, staring at conference tables designed by Beelzebub, lacklustre Tropical mints (yes, the ones offered by sweets' vendors on Landhies Road) and thinking dark thoughts because even after I bitched about it, my buffet lunch was not accompanied by my preferred beverage: ice-cold Coca-Cola.

About that lunch, Lord Jesus better take the wheel. The food is not bad, that is, it won't murder me tonight (I think). It isn't the best, but what do you expect for bottom-dollar anyway. The food is not the reason why I wanna murder a member of the Laico's management; it is the whole restaurant experience.

Those Java House people do one thing and they do it well (never mind their crap chicken curry): they will separate you from the contents of your wallet with a smile, and excellent cup of coffee and and ambiance that even at the height of lunch-time traffic never falters. The Laico, sadly, is not good at what it does. In fact, it is abysmal. I don't know how many conferences the Laico is hosting today, but it is clear that there are too many conference attendees for the restaurant facilities to cope.

It feels like a rugby scrum when we go up to our lunch, pushing and jostling and suffering from what is now becoming a signature effect of the Laico, the stuffiness. The managers must love the stuffy, musty smell because even with the windows wide open, the damn place just feels confined and claustrophobic. It is an oppressive atmosphere and I am keen to get out as soon as the workday is over. I don't even wish to try out their bar (do they have a bar?) or the spa (that they have). I just want to get out.

And yet...remember when the Grand Regency first opened its doors? It was all gilded this and gilded that and the eye-watering charges just made it all the more exclusive and classy-feeling. The Summit Club was the place to be seen in. Those halcyon days are long over and the Laico today feels like an over-the-hill, once great hotel. It is and feels old. Lift buttons? Faded and scratched. WiFi? You've got to be kidding me! Bathroom facilities? Small, stained and whiff-y. Car-park? Small and I-will-break-your-neck cobblestoned. It isn't even trying to feel good or look good; it just wants money without doing anything for it. It feels, forgive me, like a parliamentarian who keeps promising to do his job next week when he gets back to bunge.

About the food, if you like boiled-to-death meat...

The KFCB trial balloon

In conclusion, we reiterate our commitment to continue working closely with all stakeholders to create an environment that supports the growth of the film and broadcast sectors while at the same time protecting national moral values. - Kenya Film Classification Board

I challenge you, dear reader, to find the phrase "national moral values" in the Constitution of Kenya. Go on; I'll wait. Really. Okay, that was unfair. See if you can find it in the Films and Stage Plays Act, chapter 222 of the laws of Kenya. Go on; surely it must be there, the way the Kenya Film and Classification Board seems to bandy it about with enthusiasm these days. For the anal among us, "morality" is mentioned seven times in the Constitution of Kenya and in none of those circumstances could any reasonable reader contemplate the KFCB as the arbiter of  morality.

If you have been paying attention, you will surely realise that the KFCB has suddenly become very prominent over the past two years, since it put its foot down and declared that the Wolf of Wall Street would not be screened in Kenya because of its threat to national moral values. In the past month alone, it has entered into a contest of wills with Google Inc. over a music video broadcast over YouTube, a Google property, and Coca-Cola over a TV ad that shows young people being intimate over a bottle of Coca-Cola. In every instance of its muscle-flexing, the KFCB has claimed that it is doing so in the name of "national moral values."

The KFCB is exercising a mandate that does not exist. The Constitution has not established a moral police; the Films and Stage Plays Act, where the KFCB draws its authority from, does not deal with the moral values of the nation. We may snigger as the KFCB thumbs its nose at us, the consumers of films and stage plays and the targets of adverts, but this creation of a power out of thin air might be a trial balloon to see how much coercive power might be created out of thin air and how that power might be wielded.

In one of his delightful posts on Facebook, the KFCB CEO details how he and a former Cabinet minister met with heads of state in order to calm them down in the run up to the 2013 general elections. He was responding to cruel sniggers about one of his other delightful posts which he made about the KQ business class lounge some time back.  He finishes by puffing his chest out by all-capping thus,

NOW SHOULD A BOY FROM A VILLAGE IN MWALA NOT PRAISE GOD FOR ALL THIS?

But it is the sentence, "The president sent his 'trusted men' to assure our neighbours..." that gives me pause. In Moi's regime, "trusted men" were responsible for some of the darkest episodes in our nation's history and the revival of that language by a self-styled protector of national moral values should worry us.  Frequent allusions to "God" and "protect the children" in addition to the enforcement of a non-existent national moral values mandate are signs that the KFCB does not know its constitutional or statutory limits and will keep pushing the envelope until it is stopped or it becomes akin to a Moi era monster. The KFCB is a trial balloon. If it is not stopped something much worse will seize non-existent power. That power will not be wielded for our benefit. Such powers never are.

Messianism and the semi-literate

The KFCB, Kenya Film Classification Board to the uninitiated, or Kenya Film Censorship Board to the pining-for-the-'80s lot, is an interesting bureaucratic animal. It has a strange mandate: to review and issue classification certificates for all films broadcast in Kenya and every play staged in Kenya. Or so you would think. It is now, so far as I can tell from the statements of its Chief Executive Officer, a broadcast regulator and a communications' regulator. I wonder why the Communications Authority still exists.

You may find this to be a strange state of affairs and if you do, you'll be forgiven for missing the essential ingredients of a Kenyan bureaucratic animal, which are the complete and utter rejection of the confines of statute and the inexorable encroachment into potentially lucrative unrelated statutory environments. Given the increasing public profile of bank runs and bank collapses, it wouldn't surprise me if the KFCB expressed a deep desire to regulate the banking sector for the sake of Kenya's "moral values" or some similar schlock.

But the KFCB is not alone: the Communications Authority and the Competition Authority have been wrangling over the whether or not one or the other has the power to declare a telecommunications company as dominant, the Kenya Wildlife Service and the Kenya Forest Service have had their differences over wildlife in forests, the National Environment Management Authority and the Water Resources Management Authority have wrangled over the right to collect water licence fees, Administration Police officers and Kenya Police Force officers have shot at each other because the former are merely a riot police organisation while the latter is a crime fighting force, and so on and so forth. 

 

In Kenya, the law is not the problem and it has never been. Those with the power to interpret it or enforce it have always attempted to read more into a law than the law warranted. It is how, more than a decade after the KFCB stopped censoring films and started classifying them in order for audiences to choose their poison, in a manner of speaking, its current CEO is hellbent in rolling back the clock and resorting to film censorship in complete rejection of the legsilative boundaries established by the Films and Stage Plays Act, chapter 222 of the laws of Kenya, and section 46I of the Kenya Information and Communications Act, 1998.

The KFCB CEO is not alone. He is part of a grand tradition of ignoring statutory limits because, just as the colonialists taught us, it is better to err on the side of statutory excess than to allow "anarchy" to reign free. It is why KFCB is on a jihad against immorality and why, if it follows the same path as all that have come before it, it will not stop at censoring Coca-Cola TV ads but will carry on until it decrees what we can think and when we can think it. It is Charles Njonjo's injunction against imagining the death of the president as enforced by an institution with a massive Napoleonic complex mixed with the Messianism of the semi-literate. It will not end well for anyone.

The generosity of stray lions

A few weeks ago, if you have been keeping track, I was underwhelmed by the Maasai Ostrich Park. In my angry disappointment, I forgot to look at the Big Picture: the Nairobi national Park is not what it was five or ten years ago. Not even the Kenya Wildlife Service, KWS, can hide that the Nairobi National Park is now, for all intents and purposes, a very large zoo.

The conversion of that unique ecosystem has proceeded unabated since the Kenya Meat Commission became a political plaything, or more particularly, its real estate assets became the equivalent of a billion-shilling post-dated cheque. Once upon a time, if you were one of the lucky few who could afford to travel the ridiculously bad Nairobi-Mombasa Highway, ones eyes were not marred by human development along the Athi-Kapiti Plains, that stretch from the edges of the Tsavo right inside the Nairobi National Park and south-wards towards the Mara.

What was the Athi River Township was nothing but the DC's camp and the KCB branch. Kitengele didn't even exist. Neither did the EPZ, though Bamburi and Portland were thriving. On the other, smellier side of the highway were the industrial-sized Kuku Mfalme coops, Mohan-Maekin's smelly distillery and Tuff-Foam's factory. There were no houses in sight. But that zone was dominated by the KMC abattoir and its holding pens which stretched almost all the way to the Machakos Town turn-off. "Conservationists" had done a very good job of keeping the Athi-Kapiti to themselves, for a few of them owned spreads right on the edge of the Nairobi National Park and to protect their cachet, they were determined to be the only residents in or around the Park, other than the KWS, of course. It didn't work out that way. Not by a long shot.

The 1980s, after the fiddles with settlement schemes had fizzled out, came the rapacious conversion of land-rich parastatals into private fiefdoms of Moi's Boys, and the Athi Kapiti was a major victim. The KMC holding grounds were swiftly and dubiously privatised. To hasten the process along, the KMC was starved of managerial talent and government subsidies; its mounting debts compelled it to sell off its holding grounds and that is how the area is now festooned with new cement factories and steel manufacturers of dubious repute. What was once the fiefdom of the KWS came to fall under the rapacious sway of county council chairmen and successive ministers of lands and what was known as the chief wildlife corridor between the Tsavo and the Mara became home to massive real estate developments.

If you want to understand why lions are increasingly being found outside the Park, the destruction of the lions' ecosystem by a series of policy decisions that have shrunken the original size of not just the Park but of the Athi Kapiti should b a very big clue. This problem will be exacerbated by the relentless human encroachment and development of the Athi-Kapiti; already the subdivision of large settler-era ranches is further worsening the changing fortunes of the Athi-Kapiti. When the Konza Technopolis is finished, that change will be irreversible and not just lions, but leopards, giraffe, antelopes and buffalo will wander more and more outside the Park. All the tranquilizer darts in the world will not prevent it and the calls to relocate the wildlife out of the Park to either the Tsavo or the Mara will grow and the Capital City will have finally lost one of its few precious natural gems that we can all agree is important.

I saw Gideon Moi, Senator of Baringo, extol the virtues of giving in the context of his father's twenty-four year presidency. For sure, the former president gave and gave and gave, though more often than not, what he gave he never possessed in the first place. It is how the Athi Kapiti is filled with Chinese-built flats, steel mills, cement manufacturers and "escaping" lions. When we encounter a stray lion we should remember Baba Moi's spirit of "generosity"; one day that generosity will cost us dearly, if it hasn't yet.

Kissing liberty away

If I was the Chief Executive Officer of the Kenya Film Classification Board and the chairman of my Board of Directors was a 'bishop" with a complicated political past (there was all that unpleasantness about save-the-IDPs trips to the USA...Colorado, was it?), I would definitely have a problem with Coca-Cola and the un-African way the actors on its ads, uhmmm, kiss. I would definitely have a big problem. And I would ask the mighty Coca-Cola Company, or whoever its idiot agents are in East, Central and Western Africa are, to censor the ad such that all that unseemly, un-African kissing is banished from this godly, Christian land known as Kenya. Na hiyo itakuwa funzo kwa wengine wenye mienendo kama hayo.

We have done quite a bit to help the inept get their sea-legs, but I think it is time we accepted that KFCB's jihad against Coca-Cola is the the last straw. No Government can make the distinction of what is moral and what is not. Certainly no Government censor can do that. This is not to say that the libertarians should be permitted a free hand; where the effects of something remain largely unknown, it should be controlled. But kissing? Surely, the KFCB jests.

I will not argue that children have access to far more scandalous material than Coca-Cola ads; that is the argument of a child. I will argue that the KFCB has not demonstrated a compelling governmental interest in whether or not children will be harmed if they witness acts of intimacy, such as kissing, between obvious friends. If the KFCB, hand in hand with the Department of Children Services in the Ministry of Labour, Social Security and Services, wants to reduce the moral harm children will suffer because of witnessing acts of intimacy, let them present their facts, and data, for us to make a judgment, one way or the other.

In return, we have a few questions for the good bishop and his loyal henchman: what moral code is being applied? Is it a Cristian one (all those homosexual allusions in the first four books of the New Testament didn't catch your beady little eyes?)? Or can we apply the late and lamented Islamic Courts Union's (of Somalia) version of Islamic morality? How about the many strands of Hinduism or Buddhism? Judaism?

What was that? It is an African morality? Is this the one that privileges the rule of primogeniture over female circumcision? Is this the one that sees no evil in the infanticide of the bowlegged, cross-eyed, misshapen-headed, the blind, deaf and mute? Or is it the African morality that decrees an eye for an eye, a cow for a cow, and a village for a village...unless the slight can be assuaged by the delivery of village wenches for the pleasure of the affronted? Don't make me puke.

Governments don't have moral codes. Those that do tend to eventually ;consider all their subjects as immoral and to exact penalties far in excess of the moral offences. There is a reason why the phrase "moral turpitude" no longer features prominently in anti-corruption statutes; no one can properly interpret what "moral turpitude" means anymore, not in a world where judges, cabinet ministers, senior civil servants, ministers of religion and law enforcement officers are busily thieving and lying their way to great wealth. For a Government agency to behave like the equivalent of the House of Saud's Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, and for it not to expect ridicule, we must have entered some sort of twilight zone.

The craven managers of Coca-Cola who bent to the will of the KFCB are encouraging this monster to greater feats of inanity. Someone has to stop it in its tracks or one day we will be told what we can't and cannot read. Imagine the day they discover the homosexual themes rife in the Bible!

Of foundational myths

According to the online version of Merriam-Webster, there are two possible definitions of "founding father", that is,

"a person who helps to create or establish something : a person who founds something"

or,

"a man who had an important part in creating the government of the U.S.; specifically : a member of the American Constitutional Convention of 1787."

The one apposite to our circumstances is the first definition: "a person who helps to create or establish something : a person who founds something." The phrase "founding father" has been used in relation to Kenya's independence in 1963 and in many respects, it is an accurate description. But it also hides a lot that has happened since then.

Few of us care enough to wonder how the Lancaster House Constitution became the foundation for a one-party dictatorship that lasted between 1969 and 1990, a full twenty-one years, or how it became the foundation for a presidency for life, literally, and a twenty-four year hegemony that saw Kenyans' human development almost wither and die.

Whereas the Unites States celebrates its founding fathers, even as its citizens question many of the individual deeds by their founding fathers (such as Thomas Jefferson's rape of Sally Hemmings), Kenya has, of late, been reminded again and again of the largely dispiriting role its founding fathers have had on the fate of over forty million people. From land to banking, the odious influence of the founding fathers pervades everywhere, like a blanket of mustard gas, choking the life out of the miserable who didn't have the foresight to put on their gas masks.

David Ndii makes a remarkable claim in his latest article: The founding fathers quarrelled over whether to grow rich first and share later, or to share first and grow rich later. This was anathema to the Ujamaa ethos that Mwalimu Julius Nyerere attempted in neighbouring Tanzania, where sharing was decreed by the ruling party and whose effects can be felt today where more Tanzanians identify themselves as Tanzanians than those who don't, mainly the peoples of Zanzibar and Pemba, whose politics has always been very complicated. 

Mr Ndii asks a simple question: how many Kenyans see themselves as Kenyans first? Are they more than those who don't? In his mind, more Kenyans identify with tribe first before they identify with their nation. He argues, persuasively, that we are a nation only in name; but in neither cultural nor civic ways are we a nation.

Kenya may have its foundational myths, burnished by decades of the institutionalised hagiography of the founding fathers, but most of what we think is true, is not. First, the Mau Mau were first known as the land and freedom army and their insurgency was deeply rooted in the colonial government's land policies that privileged white settlers and colonial home guards over everyone else, with the Mt Kenya and the North Rift suffering disproportionately compared to, say, Ukambani or Luo Nyanza.

Second, the Mau Mau didn't have a plan other than to get their land, then their freedom, back. There was a lot of thought put into the kind of government they wanted, but it wasn't reduced to a draft constitution. It is how Kenyans who had very little to do with the "freedom" struggle (by then they had forgotten all about the "land" part) travelled to the United Kingdom in 1960, 1962 and 1963 in what came to be known as the Lancaster Conferences, and engaged in a negotiated end to the colonial experiment in British East Africa. Kenyans did not know that they had been sold a bill of goods until the famous 1963 "Forgive and Forget" speech and the betrayals and corruption of the Million Acres programme. We already know the sordid story of settlement schemes and forest excisions.

Third, the seeds of the overt ethnicisation of the Government were planted with the proscription of the Kenya People's Union and the detention at the president's pleasure of Jaramogi Oginga Odinga and, later on, of Jomo Kenyatta's personal secretary, Ramogi Ochieng Oneko. The assassinations of the socialist Pio Gama Pinto, the hyper-critical JM Kariuki and the ambitious Tom Mboya, and the accompanying insinuations of a "Kiambu Mafia" at a time when many real life mafiosi were fleeing Southern Italy for Kenya's North Coast, especially Malindi, put paid to the idea that the Government was interested in a cohesive nation.

Fourth, the Nyayo Philosophy of Peace, Love and Unity, was a cruel mockery, because between 1982, when it was officially espoused, and 1990, when section 2A of the Constitution was repealed, Kenya may have known a measure of Special Branch-enforced peace, but the love of the people for their Government and, by extension the  nation, had been poisoned and the only people who were united were those high government officials who were squeezing the last shilling out of the national treasury using a mix of guile, coercion and insider knowledge.

Mr Ndii agrees with the contention that nationalism does not have the deep intellectual support that even odious -isms like Marxism had, or continue to have. It is an assertion that exposes the nationalist to ridicule when all his pro-nationalism rhetoric is exposed for the hot air that it is. However, it is not without a deep tradition; the founding of the United States of America is one such example, as is the Indian nationalism that came about with the Free India Movement of the late nineteenth century. The Federalist Papers and the counterarguments of the royalists provide a rich and vivid detail about what compelled the founding fathers to challenge the United Kingdom and strife off as a new nation. The letters and papers of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Dadabhai Naraoji, Syed Ahmed Khan, Gopal Krshna Gokhale and Lal Lajpat Rai propose a moral and political foundation for the Quit India Movement. It has been almost 60 years since Dedan Kimathi was hanged by the colonial government, yet what he thought and why he thought it are not required reading for Kenyans or their patriotic overlords.

It isn't enough to whine that Dr Ndii is simply praying for the bloodshed that he predicts if we don't change only so that he could say, "I told you so!", a trap that has ensnared many a quasi-public intellectual. For a proper debate, 5there must be a true intellectual foundation for the argument that Kenya is a nation and that David Ndii's divorce is an extreme reaction to a historical bump in the road. So far, Kenyans have been denied that debate by the cheerleaders of the build-the-monument bandwagon busily burrowing inexorably towards the national treasury. By the time they are building the ten millionth laptop-for-tots, they may yet find their factory surrounded by the remains of their victims. Before a nation is seen in its monuments, it must come alive in our minds and our hearts. I don't think it has.

Illiterate and cruel

Wallace Kantai tried to warn us that the Chase Bank debacle also affected the bank's employees. We did not listen. I doubt many of us would have. Few of us have an understanding of how a bank operates, especially in Kenya, and the relationships between a bank's principal shareholders, directors and employees. That, I believe, is to our greater loss. Our illiteracy engenders a Schadenfreude that is quite uncalled for.

I do not know how true this is, but a bank that has shown tremendous growth in the past decade and run by a superstar billionaire CEO has a very high turnover of staff. The CEO is known to fire summarily employees who defy him or who cause him even the slightest displeasure. Allegedly, he has fired female employees for wearing trousers to the office.

Another bank that was in the news in relation to a major financial scandal is notorious for low pay, poor working conditions, long working hours and the ever-present threat of dismissal at any sign of rebellion. If these two banks are representative of employee-employer relations, it is not too far-fetched to imagine that employees of Chase Bank, just as employees throughout Kenya, may have been innocent pawns in the problems bedevilling the bank.

What we have been unable to do, even in this Information Age, where digital tools of communication are increasingly within the reach of millions, is to educate ourselves on Kenya's labour market and labour conditions. Indeed, the education that we need most - financial education - is distinct by its absence in an ocean of financial data and information available online. We do not instinctively turn to the business pages when - if - we purchase newspapers, but more often than not to the political news and entertainment, including sports, pages. This illiteracy leads to cruel statements about the motives of Chase bank's employees.

Fred Matiang'i has launched an ambitious new programme to review the 8-4-4 curriculum. If the outcome is still an exam-focussed content-delivery system where rote memorisation is promoted at the expense of both knowledge-acquisition and skills development, then our financial illiteracy will persist. Policy-makers and public commentators must seize the moment and ask what we want from our education system and if, based on the reactions to the Dubai Bank, Imperial Bank and Chase Bank failures, our education system could deliver.

We can't compel people to educate themselves about financial affairs, but we can make it easier for them to understand phrases like "insider lending" and "non-performing loans" without having to rely only on newsreaders on TV. This means that how we educate our children must include how they see their world when they walk outside their classroom doors. When a child finishes Form 4, they must be able to understand their world in order to navigate it with a measure of maturity. From what has taken place at the University of Nairobi, we are no longer educating our children or young people; we are merely warehousing them for limited periods in the hopes that osmotic acquisition of knowledge will occur.

I am sorry that Chase Bank's employees will not receive a measure of sympathy from a largely financially illiterate population. If they ever get their jobs back, we will never know. If they fall into bankruptcy, we will never know. If they are ever forced to sell cars and houses, we will never know. If their children are forced to change schools, we will never know. If treatments for life-threatening ailments are postponed because of financial troubles, we won't know. We won't much of these and we probably won't care. That is what illiteracy does: it makes us unintentionally cruel because we don't know and we don't understand what we hear.

I stand with Diogenes

While according to the Chief Justice his actions may not be criminal, they are unethical, immoral and plain wicked - iniquities that cannot be charged within our judicial system. The prosecutor can only be Ndii’s Conscience, but even then, only when he undertakes to free it from those whose interests the article serves.—Daisy Maritim, The Star, 11/4/16

There are three assumptions in the startling declaration by Ms Maritim: that Mr Ndii's assertions of March 26 are not criminal; that they are unethical, immoral and plain wicked; and that he made the assertions in the service of some other person (presumably one who wants Raila Odinga to be elected in 2017). Ms Maritim is right that Mr Ndii has not committed a crime. On her other two assumptions, she neither profers proof nor realises that her assumptions are based on a terrible misconception of Mr Ndii's March 26 assertions.

Mr Ndii seeks to warn that unless Kenya finds a way to reignite the spark that led to anti-colonial unity among the people's of Kenya and helped rally the same peoples around an idea that was Kenya after the colonial era, Kenya's breakup will occur, whether it is a peaceable enough process or, as Ms Maritim fears, one accompanied by piles of bodies on the doorsteps of the US embassy. (She seems not to have read Mr Ndii's followup on April 9 either. She should.)

Ms Maritim states unequivocally that Mr Ndii's article serves some other person's interests and bases this declaration on the fact that [Mr Ndii's article's] "purpose is to subliminally condition the populace to a choice of two extremes - a favorable poll outcome for Raila or death and anarchy. His is to begin an intense peddling of a ‘Kenya will burn’ narrative." Nowhere in the March 26 article is Raila Odinga mention; this a frequent bogey for those launching ad hominem attacks on Mr Ndii.

Whether one agrees with Mr Ndii or not, he certainly did not declare that he wanted Kenya to divorce itself; I hope what he really wanted was a debate on whether Kenya's nation-making project has stalled or if it can be revived. The devolution programme has thrown up some unpleasant truths; few counties, save maybe for Nairobi, have a cosmopolitan county government, the instincts of governors and their parties being to employ or elect "their people." The ostensible reason is economic devolution, but what we seem to have devolved are, in Ms Maritim's words, the unethical, immoral and plain wicked behaviours that have been bred into the national government by decades of tribalism, nepotism and corruption. These behaviours have disconnected Kenyans from each other, and no matter how many patriotic kumbayyas we sing, that remains true today as it did when Jomo Kenyatta proscribed the Kenya People's Union in 1969.

The disconnectedness is most manifest in how county governments have organised themselves. Not even Nairobi City County's is a true melting pot. Reflecting the ethnic mix of the National Government (as indicted by the Nation Cohesion and Integration Commission), it is a coalition of a few tribes, held together by a web of corruption that continues to immiserate the lives of Nairobi's long-suffering residents. This is reflected in all forty six remaining counties. We may never divorce as a country, but our political separation seems well and truly underway. In Mr Ndii's latest reflections, he warns that unless one reads the signs and draws the proper conclusions, it is likely that one will see more new monuments as proof of the existence of a nation. The signs of dysfunction have always been there; all the white elephants erected since 1969 are proof of it.

The bough will break

You must be stupid.

That is the only explanation for the way you are treated by the One Percenters. Your stupidity is the principal reason that even The Monk thinks viral tweets contributed to a run on a badly-supervised bank, bringing it down, and why a billionaire investment banker, with three previous failed banks to his name, sees the fall of this other bank as an assault on "indigenous capitalism", whatever that shit means.

Your stupidity means that when One Percenters talk, the only thing you'll remember is the inane and the mundane, like this nugget from an aspiring One Percenter: "Mafisi tibim!" If you have the effrontery, the temerity, the balls! to ask difficult questions, such as why a bank lent its directors more money than its shareholders invested in the bank, you will be dismissed by tame newsreaders as the cause of bad, bad things on social media.

Your stupidity is like a drug. The greater the extent of your stupidity, the ballsier the One Percenters get. There's one minuscule One Percenter wannabe who's spent the past three years (I hope he has, anyway) taking a keen interest in the history of a hunting lodge that became the Binnenhof that became a city of judges, who is hearing voices in his head. He's listening to those voices as they persuade him that in 2017, because of our stupidity, he will be a Senator...or a Governor! He isn't that far off; a man obsessed with another man's penis is "elected" unopposed, and a man who has more gold on his person than the now-empty vaults of a recently-dead bank, elected to the Senate in a landslide, has not just taken a keen interest in other men's penises, he would like a certificate of authenticity about certain penile surgical procedures from god-only-knows-who. The Minuscule One would probably fit right in.

You are stupid enough to not notice when you are being condescended to. You are too stupid to understand P & L statements, balance sheets, qualified and unqualified audited accounts, management letters, letters of credit, credit notes, bank supervision or bank regulation. Your stupidity is why, between 1986 and 1998, there were 24 bank failures. It is why venerable Kenyan institutions like KENATCO, Kenya National Assurance (remember the ditty? Kenya National Assurance, kwa bima ya maisha, Kenya National Assurance, ni kampuni ya taifaaa...), Uchumi Supermarkets and, lately, Kenya Airways, have become bywords for graft, grand theft and shareholder/customer misery.

Your stupidity—our stupidity—emboldens the One Percenters. When one of them, having lurked in the shadows of the civil service for ten minutes, decides to build two-billion-shilling castle in the middle of you village, and you say nothing because you are too stupid to know better, he becomes a harbinger of the scores who will come after him. If that castle is built using the stupidest labourers in the village, without the whispers that accompany such mysterious eruptions of Croesus-like fat stacks, every village on the ridge will sport just one like it, occupied by even more odious buccaneers.

Our stupidity exists only in the One Percenters' febrile imaginations. We may not swan around like Mughals, and we may not run the world like the tech-geeks of Silicon Valley, but not much gets past us. We may be cynical and jaded, but few of us think that the end is nigh. We have seen what we have seen, we have heard what we have heard and we have been afraid to speak up because that only leads to crushed testicles, but we aren't fools. Our patience is running thin. When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall, and the last thing the One Percenters will want to be doing is to be holding the Silver Spoon.

Shut down the 'net?

I don't believe Kenya can claim to have a free press (media) any more. It can claim that the press (media) is partly free, but if it does, it will have to admit that that freedom is shrinking. Fast. The Governor of the Central Bank of Kenya must know enough about causality to be confident enough to partially blame social media for the decision he took to place Chase Bank in receivership for twelve months this morning. But not even he could have predicted how much to heart some would take his words.

A reporter with one of the more rural TV stations declared,

We desperately need a law to regulate social media in these country. It's doing more harm than good to many. #chasebankkenya #truth

Ignore for a moment the troubling pronoun and ponder the irony of a member of the supposedly free press (media) asking the State to regulate social media because it does "more harm than good to many." 

About a decade ago, when John Njoroge Michuki warned that if one rattled a snake, then they must be prepared to be bitten, the press (media) was under siege. Kenya was enjoying a mini-golden age of fearless investigative reporting and Mohamed Ali and John-Allan Namu became household names. Today, not even editorial cartoonists' jobs are safe anymore as press organisations (media houses) sidle up to the football jock and bat their eyelashes in the hope that when he does finally have his way with them, he'll remember the prophylactics and K-Y jelly. Make no mistake, the jock will get the eyelash-batting lass over a barrel.

It is why self-censorship in the mainstream press (media) is increasing. Since 2008, when the press (media) stood over the corpses of hundreds because of what they reported, we have witnessed the steady rolling back of "media" freedoms, not at the hands of the State, but at the hands of "media" barons. This latest call by a newsreader to regulate social media is of a piece with the sacking of critical news editors and editorial cartoonists and it is proof that there are more quislings on Kenya's Fleet Street than ever before who have learnt nothing from the upheavals in the way "news" gets disseminated today. (I bet our newsreader will have a difficult time wrapping her head around "quisling".)

John Michuki's strong-arm tactics worked in an era when anything went and he had the muscle to get away with murder. The past is a different country and not even John-Allan Namu and Mohamed Ali dared to cross Old Liver Juggler himself. The late Michuki's successors don't have the muscle or the backbone for his kind of governing; they rely, more and more, on co-opting their targets and getting just enough of them to turn on their peers. Ms Regulate Social Media has been co-opted and if she knows it, she is full of guile for keeping it well-hidden. If she doesn't know it, she is a fool. (That troubling pronoun bothers me a lot.)

Many commentators on social media fear that in 2017 the Government will "shut down the internet" in order to control the narrative during the general elections. They have missed many signs of what I believe the Government will do; it will control the media narrative because it will have tame newsreaders and news editors in its pocket. It won't need to shut down the internet. It never ever wanted to.

The solidity of ephemera

Internet rumours should be dismissed outright. Mostly. Quite often, in open democracies, where the State doesn't actively discourage an open press, internet rumours are scoffed at. In less open democracies, where anti-press sentiments have morphed into press co-option tactics, internet rumours are sometimes legitimate sources of information because you can't trust the press or State regulatory agencies.

Fighting internet rumours in Kenya is difficult, especially when many Kenyans do not have access to formal news sources such as radio, television or newspapers. Companies like Safaricom and the Nation Media Group have tried to bridge this gap with the subscription-only SMS-based 411, but its premium rates (premium for very many price-conscious Kenyans) remains inadequate in disseminating accurate and timely information about current affairs or time-sensitive events, like whether or not a bank is going under, suffocated by a mountain of Non-Perform Loans and Bad Debts.

The traditional way of getting a handle of rumours in Kenya usually involves ham-fisted attempts at "messaging" and "controlling the narrative" by the publication of press releases, which are now also published on online platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Tinder. Few organisations, public or private, have able messaging (or corporate communications') experts, and it shows every time there is a crisis. More often than not, institutions in crisis attempt to tug at our heartstrings by reminding us that they have been in business for decades and that our deposits, if these institutions are banks, are safe in their custody.

Many Kenyan institutions, including public ones, now have an army of so-called social media influencers on retainer, often given the unsavoury task of manipulating the so-called Kenyans on Twitter, about specific events. Many influencers have proven to be worth not more than a bucket of warm spit. Few of the rest have any real communications or messaging skills. What they often have is a social media following in the thousands, a following that is more often ephemeral than real and incapable of appreciating nuance or subtlety. More importantly, an online following is no guarantee of offline influence, where real people make real decisions with real-world repercussions.

A bank is rumoured to be in trouble. This news is first whispered in the unruly streets of the internet. The rumour is bolstered when senior managers either resign or are given the steel toe. Either way, the rumour gathers a head of steam when its quarterly reports are examined in depth and it is discovered that the bank's own auditors have qualified their report of its accounts. In the fast-moving world of tweets and retweets, numbers don't lie, and the audited numbers are not pretty. Pretty soon enough influential directors of the bank, including lawyers, weigh in with strong statements about the solidity of the bank and the longevity of its operations. No one cares. In fact, there is a collective "Meh!" from the online horde. The damage has been done.

In recent months our faith in the press has been shaken, first by the dismissal of a newspaper editor for a hard-hitting editorial that rubbed the Establishment the wrong way and then by the dismissal of one of the most incisive cartoonists for his thought-provoking editorial cartoons of and on the Establishment. Our faith in the Establishment itself has never been high, but it is almost surely irretrievably shattered now that even the President doesn't seem to know what message to send when it comes to anniversaries of painful events. We are left with the internet where if one sifts through enough chaff long enough, one will find a nugget of gold, such as the imminent collapse of a third Kenyan bank in three years.

Forgeting and moving on.

A circus, as I understand it, never having been in one or at one, has a clown, a strong man, a magician, a soothsayer, a snake-charmer and beasts. The International Criminal Court is not a circus. Neither is the Judiciary of Kenya. They are both arena at which innocence or guilt is determined based on the strength of evidence adduced and proven to be true or false. They both rely on technicalities, rules of procedure and the ability of legal counsels to persuade supposedly impartial judges that one side has proven its case over the other. Courtrooms are not the place for weepy soliloquies or angry tirades; only sound reasoning, persuasive interpretation of statutes and astute applications of rules of procedure will do.

 

Karim Khan, for William Ruto, and Katwa Kigen, for Joshua arap Sang, have managed to persuade the Chamber V(a) of the International Criminal Court that the two surviving suspects of Kenya's Second Case at the ICC do not have a case to answer. Two of the three judges agreed; the third, Herrera Carbuccia, dissented. The house that Luis Moreno-Ocampo had built lies in ruins.

Since Judge Philip Waki created a secret list of the people with the greatest responsibility for the 2007/2008 post-election violence, Kenya has been treated to a grand theatre, in which victims and accused alike begged for the indulgence of their fellow-citizens. Both stated their cases before the people, but increasingly the voice of the victims became an echo, unpleasantly reminding the supporters of the accused that the past is never really gone, just that it is another country.

Had Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga rallied their political troops in 2009/2010, it is not difficult to speculate what could have happened had a "local mechanism" been established to investigate and try the perpetrators of the PEV. Would the local mechanism have named Uhuru Kenyatta, William Ruto, Henry Kosgei, Gen Hussein Ali, Amb Francis Muthaura or radioman Joshua arap Sang as suspects? Knowing what we know of the National Police Service and the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, that is an answer that will never be given.

We are on firmer ground in presuming that the victims of the violence, no matter which court was seized of the affair, would almost certainly never have found justice. For justice to be done to them, we would have had to admit that the Government of the day, Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga both, bore responsibility for the pain and suffering of the victims, for the loss of life and the destruction of property, and that the institutions of Government refused to support the victims at their hour of need and that they would forever be on their own because of their poverty and lack of political influence. That will not change simply because Mr Ruto and Mr Sang have no case to answer at The Hague.

We are adept at forgetting the past and sweeping unpleasant truths under a carpet of graft, sloth and greed. We will do so now. A few lone voices, madmen in the desert, will attempt to keep the issue alive. They will soon enough discover that the vast majority of Kenyans, while saddened at the plight of the victims, don't care any more. It was, after all, eight years ago, and eight years for a population that finds Bob Collymore's latest marriage to be of greater interest and public commentary than David Ndii's treatise on the state of the nation, is enough time for the past to be firmly put in the past.

It is a campaign year and you can put money down that Mr Ruto will be hardpressed to remind voters that he is the Deputy President and that, together with the President, his government has built railways and ports, dredged harbours and opened Huduma Centres. Mr Ruto will accentuate the positives and downplay the rest. If the ICC or the PEV comes up at all, it will only be because of the tenacity of a few and the indulgence of a quisling Fourth Estate. We have moved on. Soon enough we will forget.

Students, the GSU and 2017

I have no truck with hooligans, whether the target of their ire is public property or private. I will not shed tears for them when they are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. I will also probably discount their pleas for mitigation because mobs can never mitigate the damage they do when they go on a rampage. Be that as it may, I also have no truck with the excessive use of force by policemen, especially paramilitary police forces such as the Fanya Fujo Uone General Service Unit, GSU.

It is only the dimmest police commandant who forgets that university students the world over are the most indisciplined animals on God's Green Earth. University students are flush with their first full opportunity at hedonistic freedoms and for most if not all of them, hormonal imbalances tend to rule them. The University of Nairobi student population might go to extremes, but it is no different from the sniffy mummy's boys of Harvard or Yale. So it beggars belief that neither the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Nairobi nor the Inspector-General of Police could have anticipated that the sham of an election that saw Babu Owino "re-elected" as SONU Chairman would lead to "heightened emotions" and, as is normal for the university when emotions are heightened, street riots and violence.

Prof Mbithi is not a stranger to student elections at the university having been a senior don for many years. He is intimately familiar with the psychology, some would say psychosis, of the average University of Nairobi student. Why he, his Council and his Senate have failed to come up with a viable strategy for addressing student politics, and its aftermath, remains a mystery. What is even more baffling is the continued leaden-footedness of the Inspector-General and the Central Police Officer Commanding Station; every time there have been student elections, violence has not been far behind, whether in jubilation or frustration at the results. Why he and his officers haven't deployed their famed counter-intelligence officers to prevent the violence, is another mystery, or why they never deploy it police at well after private motorists have tasted the wrath of irate students still one more.

I wonder if it is Uhuru Kenyatta's absence that allows such asinine policing decisions such as to deploy the GSU against university student-idiots. Yes, they destroyed private and public property. Yes, they were getting out of hand. Yes, the GSU have always been deployed to quell the restive madmen of the University of Nairobi using a combination of teargas, combat boots and rungus. But none of this means anything, knowing what we know about the University, its students and their poisoned history with the Government and the police. Especially in the President's desire to continue with the facade of "police reforms," deploying the GSU simply further undermines this comfortable fiction. The GSU, when deployed against university hotheads, are the proverbial thermonuclear weapon deployed against a mosquito, that is, they are a massive overreaction to a minor problem.

What happened yesterday was asinine, both on the part of the students and the police, and it has led to the inevitable: an indefinite closure of the University. History repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce. It is no longer farcical what happens every time students protest some unfairness at their universities. It should not be normal to deploy a terrifying armed paramilitary force to pacify protesting students; instead, the police should be deployed to redirect human and vehicular traffic (yes, it will be inconvenient) away from the protesting students, and the University should have expert negotiators at the ready to listen to the students' grievances. A rapid pivot to violence sends sinister overtones, like is this how the massively grown GSU going to be deployed if we are unhappy with the 2017 general election results?

Jewels in the rough, they are not.

I dedicate [two hours] a day to interact with my fans.—A Senator of Kenya

Members of Parliament are either elected or nominated to serve in the Senate or the National Assembly. The voters who elected them to those offices, or the party nabobs that nominated them, are not fans. Any elected representative who does not understand this simply reinforces the base idea of the elected representative as celebrity.

Celebrity-status is not necessarily a bad thing; it is, after all, acknowledgment of some form of fame for the person and an appreciation of that person's status in society, whether for base or honourable reasons. But where an elected representative forgets that his constituency is not made up of fans but of voters, you know that he or she has gone off the deep end and has eschewed his principal responsibilities to represent his constituents in Parliament, to make laws and to hold the Executive to account.

A casual examination of this particular Senator's parliamentary record paints a woeful picture. It is difficult to measure how much representation a Senator can perform for his constituency, but on the more crucial law-making and oversight functions, a casual examination of the Hansard and the Votes and Procedures of Parliament should give one a clue. He has done little of either. In fact, one would be hard-pressed to find a Bill sponsored by the good Senator or any Senate departmental committees where he has held a cabinet Secretary's feet to the fire. His fame, such as it is, lies outside the marble-laden halls of Parliament Buildings.

We cannot pretend that we did not know what we were getting when we elected him to the Senate. He has had, to put it mildly, a very colourful political career, in which bejewelledness has been a key unique selling point for him and sexual innuendo has dominated a large part of his public discourse. In recent days, he, like a new-ish member of the National Assembly known for bombast and little else, has taken to reducing national leadership to certain penile surgical procedures associated with rites of passage among certain ethnic communities. We got what we wanted, and we have no choice but to live with that choice till the occasion to review that choice is upon us.

Indeed, 2017 couldn't arrive any sooner. Many of the "saviours" we elected in 2013 have turned out to be charlatans or worse. We have come to regret many of the choices we made in 2013, none more than in the leaderships of counties, whether it be Senators or Governors. The President, in his ruinously boring State of the Nation Address, wasn't far off the mark when he painted most county governments in the worst light possible and the enabling laziness of the Senate is partly to blame for the sleaze and graft that pervade most of them. We have a chance to make better choices in August 2017, just as we did in March 2013 and December 2002. Whether we do, only time will tell.

Monsters of our own making

Before someone attempts to sanitise it, let us agree on one thing: what the hooligans of the University of Nairobi are engaged in is not a student protest or a student strike but a riot. There is no logical reason why Kenyans should become the targets of students who are unhappy about one thing or the other. Today, students are rioting at what they perceive to be an unfair state of affairs regarding the re-election of an elder student, Babu Owino, as the Chairman of the Students' Organisation of Nairobi University. Riotous students believe that Mr Owino should never have been permitted to stand in the election for a fourth term. In any case, they have vandalised university property and damaged private property. It is unlikely that these students will compensate anyone for the damage.

Before we point our fingers, let us remember that these young men and women are a reflection of the state of our public institutions in many cases. I would put money down that if the members of the disciplined services were permitted to form unions or to go on strike, this nation would be brought to its knees by their demands because the dysfunction in these institutions has already gotten out of hand. The state of education in Kenya is witness to the mismanagement of public institutions; the constant teachers' and lecturers' strikes are proof that sooner or later, something has got to give.

Mr Owino is nobody's fool, and his expert manipulation of the University of Nairobi Senate is proof of his chops. Mr Owino is more like the sneaky A.F. Sen Mike Sonko, exploiting his large following (and its potential for extreme violence) to get his way on a myriad of things, the least not being multiple bites at the apple of SONU chairmanship. He has re-branded himself on several occasions, but at his core he remains the gauche quasi-politician he has always been. Mr Owino may be a millionaire student leader, and he may have rubbed shoulders with the President and other serious men and women, but he is still the spanner boy looking for a seat at the table. That day isn't coming.

Mr Owino is a reflection, too, of the rot in leadership in this period of transition. There isn't a public official who leaves their position willingly when their time is up. The Deputy Chief Justice, on some of the most specious grounds, has refused to retire from the Judiciary upon attaining the age of seventy years. Prof Olive Mugenda fought her retirement all the way to the Supreme Court. And until Uhuru Kenyatta fired them, the six Cabinet Secretaries who had "stepped aside" still insisted that they should be "allowed to serve the people of Kenya" until their terms of office expired. Mr Owino is no different from these "leaders."

The frustrations of Mr Owino's constituents are similar to the frustrations of other kinds of constituents who have been disappointed by their leaders and who know that the only way they can register their displeasure is through violent acts. Mr Owino and the leadership of the University of Nairobi have fed the monster and now they are witnessing the backlash of a monster that has outgrown the both of them.

The Minority Party is a national embarassment

Some of the stupidest people in Kenya are elected representatives. They are not stupid in the sense that they are incapable of memorising a set of facts and recall them for the benefit of an examinations' certificate; indeed, many elected representatives are elected representatives because of their innate capacity to memorise and to recall facts. No, they are some of the stupidest Kenyans because they are incapable of contextualising their acts, acting only in their basest and most selfish interests.

Few members of the Eleventh Parliament's Minority Party have warm political thoughts for the President of Kenya. The memory of their March 5th 2013 rout at the hands of the Majority Party still stings. The largest opposition party in Parliament feels this sting more than the rest of the Minority Party, and its members never miss an opportunity to remind us that it lost in 2013. The 2016 State of the Nation Address by the President of Kenya before a Joint Sitting of the two Houses of Parliament on March 31st 2016, presented the Orange Democratic Movement parliamentary party with an opportunity to show their feelings for the President like never before.

President Kenyatta has many flaws, and some will haunt his presidency for the rest of his term, or terms if he gets re-elected, but he has managed to get his impetuous temper under control. During his State of the Nation Address he witnessed first hand a child's tantrum by adults Who Should Know Better. Elected representatives of the ODM, having met as a parliamentary party and having decided on a course of action, purchased whistles with which they attempted to prevent the President from reading his State of the Nation speech.

Of course the Constitution guarantee's everyone's right, including the elected representatives' right, to picket the Government. Just because you enjoy a right doesn't always mean you must exercise your right. It certainly doesn't mean that you should exercise that right in futility. What the idiot members of the National Assembly attempted was bound to be of no effect and to paint not just themselves in a poor light, but also their voters. No Kenyan elected his member of Parliament to behave like an ass. (And that idiot who refused to stand in honour of soldiers and policemen who have died in the line of duty should never show his face in decent company ever again. What he did was low and low class and he should be ashamed of himself.)

Kenyans have been fed the lie that the Minority Party is a government-in-waiting. I think it is time we put that lie to bed. The Minority Party is not a government-in-waiting. It is, instead, a perverted and ravenous mob of hyenas intent on gorging itself at the public trough. The interests of the people who elected the Minority Party might as well be the wishes of four-year olds for ponies and pink unicorns! What the Minority Party demonstrated at the President's State of the Nation address is that it is not animated with the desire to make Kenya better; it exists solely to behave like an indisciplined child. It is now a national embarassment. 

When Kenyans are called upon to elect their next government, and if Kenyans are disappointed with the Jubilee administration, they should not make the mistake of placing the Coalition for Reforms and Democracy in power. The alternative that the people might look for instead of the Jubilee administration will not be found in the Minority Party. On March 31st, this fact was made plain.