What is Miguna's plan?

The following statements about Miguna Miguna were made by Sarah Elderkin in 2012:

...a person with deeply worrying issues and insufficient personal morality...a man with a good brain [who is] tortured and destroyed by emotions he cannot control, so that he ends up a victim at the mercy of his own self-destructive inner turmoil...overbearing ranting and raving...[Judge] Warsame said that Miguna was a man “who exhibits mental and emotional fits in his defence of issues”...[Judge] Warsame added, “He is described as a man living in [a] mental darkroom”...His actions have [...] everything to do with Miguna Miguna, his lack of balance, and his distorted sense of self.—Daily Nation, July 16, 2012

I had a few questions for the independent candidate in Nairobi's 2017 gubernatorial race. What happened next took me completely by surprise. Mr Miguna's online team challenged the foundation of my previous post on the basis that I was a supporter of thieves, the corrupt, the incompetent and drug-dealers, which is how the describe the incumbent governor of Nairobi City, the Cabinet Secretary for Water and Irrigation, the Member of Parliament for Dagoretti South Constituency, the Chairman of The National Alliance Party, the Senator of Nairobi City and the former Member of Parliament for Starehe and Bishop of the Jesus is Alive Ministry.

For the record, I do not intend to vote for Evans Kidero, Eugene L Wamalwa, Dennis Waweru, Jonson Sakaja, Mike Sonko or Margaret Wanjiru if they offer themselves for election as Nairobi's second governor. Mr Kidero has failed to do much to stay the rot in this city, Mr Wamalwa is a carpetbagger, Mr Sakaja is a lightweight, Mr Waweru doesn't seem to do much except act as a cheerleader for his party leader and Ms Wanjiru has demonstrated previous lapses in judgment that were quite troubling. However, let it also be abundantly clear that simply because I will not vote for them does not mean that I shall automatically vote for Mr Miguna. That is not how the game s played. Mr Miguna and his team seem to have missed this basic fact of retail politics that at some point I feared I was a target in Ashton Kutcher's erstwhile eponymous show, Punk'd.

The basis for my inquisition of Mr Miguna is his three-part screed on Facebook that he and his team call a "vision" which he published in April, 2016. Other than its erudition, I did not find it that much different from similar "vision" statements made by candidates for high office. Mr Miguna claims that he is the best candidate in 2017; on Twitter, I challenged him and his team to prove it. The proof was not to be based on what the other candidates had failed to do or were incapable of doing but on what assets Mr Miguna possessed that made him better than the rest if not the best. Again and again, I was reminded that Mr Miguna's assets are "Integrity, Vision, Honesty and Competence" in that order.

I have no doubt that Mr Miguna and his team believe that he is honest and competent, a man of integrity who has a vision for Nairobi. Those are mere words. They are not assets in the true sense of the word. Mr Miguna was an advisor in the defunct Office of the Prime Minister. He headed a secretariat on coalition coordination. When he was suspended, he was accused of

...refusal to sign Local Agreement forms, harassment, intimidation and use of abusive language to colleagues and misrepresenting the Office of the PM.—Business Daily, August 11, 2011

My tweef with Mr Miguna and his team revealed a shocking lack of understanding of the constitutional, institutional and administrative arrangement of government, both at the national and county levels. I didn't expect Mr Miguna's online team to have a nuanced or sophisticated understanding of Article 96 of the Constitution or section 43 of the National Government Constituencies Development Fund, 2015, but I expected better from Mr Miguna. I was disappointed in Mr Miguna's and his online team's reasoning on both.

But what gave me pause was Mr Miguna's response to a series of questions regarding his plans for Nairobi. his was his response:

My Manifesto will not be influenced by your Tweets. It will be a Manifesto, not a LAUNDRY LIST!

Then he blocked me from reading his tweets. Mr Miguna faces a daunting task in 2017. Mr Kidero may be incompetent, Mr Sonko may have the CIA's allegations hanging over him, Mr Waweru and Mr Sakaja may be scrambling to fend of Mr Wamalwa's riposte while Ms Wanjiru may have her own skeletons to deal with, but none of all that means a hill of beans for Mr Miguna if he alienates voters. Most of us have no problem with his arrogance or acerbic tongue, but we are not children either. If he cannot engage patiently with an inconsequential blogger like me, I imagine that he will fare no better than the self-entitled residents of Nairobi who don't give two shits that he is a barrister, solicitor, poet and author. If he can't persuade us, his campaign will be akin to the one described by Miguel de Cervantes in 1605.

A few questions for Miguna

I have read and reread Miguna Miguna's "vision" on Facebook. It is longwinded, to say the least. More importantly, it is a declaration of  new kind of governance for the county of Nairobi City. What differentiates it from other similar declarations and political promises is that it is being made by a self-confessed independent candidate. It requires interrogation.

Mr Miguna, better than anyone else, understands that even at a municipal level, governance is a partnership between the executive and the legislature. If he is elected, his agenda for the county should be supported by the county assembly. At the very least, it should not be actively opposed by the county assembly or else he will face five years of residents' frustrations expressed in colorfully profane ways on his Facebook page. Mr Migunaa's "vision" is quite thin to the point of absolute anorexia on how he will forge a political, administrative and developmental partnership with the members of his county assembly.

Mr Miguna watched from a front-row seat how cabinet ministers undercut each other in Mwai Kibaki's poisonous government and how senior civil servants became pawns in the games that ministers played. He witnessed first hand the shenanigans surrounding all the major Kibaki-era scandals so he knows what is required to manage a team designed to deliver on political promises. Beyond public vetting, Mr Miguna does not spell out what qualifications the members of his county executive should possess or what degree of experience they must have. He does not spell out what he will do to reform City Hall and what legislative or administrative tools he will rely on to achieve this goal.

Third, some of his plans are too vague. Take this little gem,

Within three months after assuming power, we shall actively source funds and embark on the construction of pedestrian walkways, bicycle lanes, under-passes and over-passes in all parts of Nairobi...

Either he has forgotten the basic rules of the funding of a government or he assumes that we are oblivious of them. Public infrastructure projects, whether in Kenya or overseas, are the lifeblood of municipal governments and their financing has always been highly politicised. When Mr Miguna proposes to "actively source funds" for his infrastructure plans, does he mean that he will raise the fees and levies charged by the county government, or does he mean that the county will float a municipal bond? Does he mean that he will go with a begging bowl to "development" partners or will he borrow from commercial banks at eye-watering rates?

One of his signature proposals is the establishment of the

Nairobi City County Asset Recovery Unit (ARU), which shall be headed by an internationally head-hunted and respected chief executive. The ARU shall review all previous Auditor General’s Reports, Parliamentary Audit Reports, the Ndung’u Land Commission Report, Kroll Investigative Report and other investigative reports for purposes of initiating public asset recovery proceedings against past and present looters.

How, exactly, does he intend to accomplish the goal of recovering Nairobi City County's assets that have been looted by past and present leaders? Will he push through his county assembly an asset recovery law or will he rely on the good offices of the Director of Public Prosecutions and Attorney-General to do the heavy lifting? He must know that the investigation and prosecution of offences, including corruption and economic crimes, remain the preserve of the nation government. The least he can do is to sue for recovery of public assets belonging to the county.

But what gives me pause is that Mr Miguna doesn't seem to have a slate of professionals whom he intends to nominate for confirmation as members of is county executive. It is a year to the election and we do not know whether his county executive will be split evenly between men and women, how many will represent persons with disabilities or youth, how many are coming from banking, law, engineering, healthcare, commerce, accountancy, nursing or academia, how many have held public office before, and other similar matters. Does he intend to spend the first three months of his administration headhunting men and women willing to work in his county executive or does he have a slate of people ready to work with him?

It is not enough for Mr Miguna to claim that his

opponents are a miss-mash of political potato salad: people without any clear progressive ideological commitments or agendas; a group of people driven by unadulterated greed and chauvinistic tendencies. Virtually every single one of them has presided over the looting and desecration of Nairobi City County.

Mr Miguna must concretise his proposals and publish a more detailed manifesto, long on the mechanics of a government and short on polemics and longwinded disquisitions on the unfitness of his opponents. Maybe then, we shall pay heed to his prophecies.

Tulikosea Mungu wapi?

1,300km of rds have bn repaired, 6 bridges built, 2,000km of drains maintained & 25,000 new street lights installed.—Evans Kidero

By now, unless you have had a long exoplanet sojourn, you are painfully aware of the failings and failures of our Governor and if you are not, perhaps this video will give you a taste of the thing of it. Now, to be fair, the video doesn't purport to blame the governor for the utter decrepitude of the city; but it is what he is doing about it that should give us all pause whenever he retweets something being peddled by that rag, the Star.

What the governor has done is to waste our time and finances. By "our", of course, I mean the long-suffering residents of our fair city. Nairobi did not need "benchmarking" trips to Guangzou or Franfurt; Francis Gichaga, the former vice chancellor of the University of Nairobi, will tell anyone that cares to listen that Nairobi's masterplans have always been the masterplans others based their masterplans on. Just ask the beancounters of Singapore. Others come to us for benchmarking.

Valuable time was wasted as the governor and the County Assembly flexed their muscles, as the governor and the city's senator flexed their muscles, and the as the governor and the city's woman representative...I don't even know what that was between the two of them. There are dozens of photo ops by the governor and his acolytes at various sites of gubernatorial quasi-action at which even more promises than were made during the campaign have been made.

What we have observed, now that Esther Passaris's Adopt-a-Light met an oncoming train while searching for a light at the end of its political tunnel, are instance after instance after instance of a paucity of fresh ideas it almost begs the question, how did this man win an election? These past three years have been a disappointment on a scale that not even the Nairobi City Commission ever engendered. I wonder where those one thousand and three hundred kilometres of roads are to be found and if they include the newly-potholed Argwings Kodhek Road. I wonder if the 25,000 new street lights include the ones along Mumias South Road that are almost always even spaced between lit ones and dead-as-a-dodo ones.

Nairobi under Mr Kidero is now almost as renown as Beirut when it comes to the scale of its rubbish problem, except Beirut actually collects its trash and dumps it at the beach. Nairobi even can't be bothered to collect the trash most days. Then comes its remarkable predatory hostility of itinerant traders aka hawkers by the City's inspectorate department that has led to dozens upon dozens of criminal assaults, trespasses against the person, destruction of private property, unlawful detainment of private property (we call that theft) and even murder. Yet somehow, despite Beirut being a war zone, there are those who would still prefer Beirut to Nairobi. Because of Mr Kidero. And he thinks that retweeting the Star is a good thing. Tulikosea Mungu wapi?

Only children can afford carelessness

First, there was John Harun Mwau. It was the sugar barons that got him. Then there was Aaron Ringera. He said the wrong thing to John Githongo at the wrong time, in the wrong place and in the wrong tone and his ass was grass and Anglo-Leasing was the lawnmower. He managed a whole term, though. Then came PLO Lumumba. It was a family foundation that came riding in on the Citi Hoppa that ran him over. Mumo Matemu fought all manner of wars in the courts to get the job. They still shoved his ass out the door without so much as a "Thank you, kindly." Philip Kinisu is the latest deer in the headlights. The words "conflict of interest" will mean so much more when they are done with him.

If that woman had not become a Cabinet Secretary and if she hadn't fired that man (never mind all that happy talk of "transfers"), no one would have paid any mind when that organisation got an extra twenty five billion shillings from Uncle Exchequer. (On a much, much lighter note. The guy that got fired must thank the Good Lord every single morning that he was not the one left holding the bag when it all went tits up.) They really stared paying attention when that other woman who had never, ever handled sums larger than the four million she got to buy hair salon equipment, was suddenly supplying all manner of things to that organisation, eventually racking up an invoice of seven hundred million shillings. Give or take a billion.

The Banking Fraud boys of the Directorate of Criminal Investigations made a lot of noise, none of which amounted to a "Eureka! We caught the digitally-savvy crooks!" Internal auditors, both at that woman's ministry and that organisation, were no use either. When the anti-corruption boys finished their preliminary investigations, they declared the minister to be whiter than the driven snow. Then the wheels fell off the wagon and now there are hard men and women answering equally hard questions in Courtroom No. 1 at the Milimani Law Courts. (You'd better ask a friend what Courtroom No. 1 is all about in terms of prosecutions because it certainly isn't child support.)

By the time Philip Kinisu was getting his name in the Kenya Gazette on Christmas Eve, 2015, a lot of blood had been washed off the streets and bodies were already putrefying in Nairobi's unseasonably hot December heat. He came to the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission with solid credentials. He avoided Mwau's focussed publicity-obsessed crusading zeal. He refused to take an arrogant, verbose stand about whom he'd go after. He definitely did not come across as the litigious combatant that Mumo Matemu was. He kept Lumumban verbal bellicosity out of his wheelhouse. He just forgot three key words": conflict of interest. For that he may yet have a shorter career than PLO but not as short as Boss's seven months and change.

His first mistake was to deny knowing anything about Esaki's dealings with the NYS. His second mistake was to defend his wife's connections - and, by extension, his own connections - with Esaki. Third and most egregious was to declare with finality, "I will not resign." Don't these people ever learn? They all said they would never resign unless proven guilty. Not Mwau, not PLO, not Matemu, not anyone of them has been convicted of as much as squinting in the wrong style. If Mr Kinisu is awaiting a conviction before being shoved off the hot seat, well, let's just say a guitar-playing goat is more likely to be found.

At this point no one cares whether Mr Kinisu is guilty or not (and that is a terrible flaw in our body politic) but what all can agree on is that when you declare "I will not resign," you are basically daring your enemies to get rid of you, the law be damned. No matter how many friends Mr Kinisu thought he had, they became his enemies the day he became the anticorruption czar. They won't be rushing to his aid any time soon. Some of them are looking forward to applying for his old job (once it becomes his old job, see?) It doesn't matter whether Esaki's dealings with NYS were entirely above board, he and his wife should have cut all ties with all companies doing business with the Government. That is a mightily unfair rule, but if he wanted half a chance, he should have swallowed the bitter aftertaste and severed all links with Esaki.

But now it is too late. They will find out everything bad that Esaki has ever done. They will pile these bad things on Mr Kinisu's broad back until he squeals. Then they'll bury him underneath it all. He shouldn't expect mercy until he resigns. Only then will they take a step back. Not a moment sooner. Never, ever say, "I will not resign" not unless you love being the matador's muleta, used to goad the seeing-red-mad bull. And now that his colleagues have shoved him in front of the speeding Nyayo Bus, his chances of victory have effectively been halved. If he survives, Mr Kinisu will have learnt the only lesson that matters for men in his position: only children can afford to be careless.

Who will stand up to Mr Mutua?

We wish to bring to the attention of the members of the public that this lesbian hook-up party has been banned by the Kenya Film Classification Board (KFCB) and will therefore not take place. Any breach will be met with the full force of the law.

The owners of the premises have denied ever organizing the event or generating the poster being circulated online. The Board has reported the matter to the police for further investigation. The owners of the premises are fully cooperative.

Bearing one of the variations of the Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (GLBT), the so called colours of pride, the notice suggests that attendees will be lesbians. The use of "Girls Only" further implies that that the party will be an orgy of lesbians. Like in the case of the foiled Project X, the Board is privy to information that there will be filming of pornograhic content during the orgy.

The Constitution of Kenya 2010, Article 45 outlaws and criminalizes homosexuality. Section 181 of the Penal Code prohibits the distribution and exhibition of indecent content.

In light of the foregoing and in order to uphold the law, public decency and morality, the Board has banned the party.—Ezekiel Mutua, CEO, Kenya Film Classification Board

There are certain disturbing implications from this post on Facebook by the chief executive of the Kenya Film Classification Board. The first is his insistence that beyond its mandate of classifying films, it is now charged, by law no less, to police public decency and morality, that it has the capacity to identify acts of public indecency or immorality, that it is empowered to determine where, when and why people may peaceably assemble and associate with one another, or that it has the power to decide for what purpose persons are meeting, declare those purposes to be unlawful and to intervene in force to prevent that meeting.

The proprietor of the venue where the meeting was to take place have been accosted by law enforcement officials and coerced to admit or deny that they intended to host a sex party on their premises. Their business, I fear, may have been adversely affected by the salaciousness of the situation and the association with immorality that the events of the past few hours have engendered.

It is important to remind Mr Mutua, the aforementioned chief executive, that though his agency is tasked with the classification of films to ensure that they are wholesome and not injurious to vulnerable persons such as children, he and his agency are skating pretty close to the line where Kenyans used to be hounded by agents of the State on charges of sedition and treason. Many of them were tortured for their alleged crimes. Some of them were murdered.

The Bill of Rights in our Constitution is robust. There is a reason why we require a referendum to amend even a punctuation mark in the Bill of Rights. Vigilant Kenyans will not permit Mr Mutua or his acolytes to amend the Bill of Rights by the backdoor. So far, because of the political environment in the country, few Kenyans have challenged Mr Mutua's overreach, either in the media or in the courts of law. One day soon, someone will challenge Mr Mutua's interpretation of the Films and Stage Plays Act and I fear that Mr Mutua will come out the poorer in that contest.

Kenya's identity is changing and there are those who are deathly afraid of the change. So what if some Kenyans do not wish to conform to a moral or "traditional" idea of sexual morality that has been left behind by teh sands of time? It is not the business of the State or State agents like Mr Mutua to tell them whom they can love and how they can love them. If their love is no danger to children or the mentally unstable, Mr Mutua should not purport to intervene. Kenya faces far more dangerous foes than the rainbow brigade. Who will stand up to Mr Mutua's incessant bullying?

Godspeed, Njeri

My friend Njeri wants to be Nairobi City County's next Woman Representative. If she does so merely to represent the interests of women voters, I shall disown her. If she does so merely to acquire the post-nominal letters "MP" after her name, I shall disown her. If she does so merely so that she can get a fat salary, even fatter allowances and the chance to wangle an uji tender out of the Ministry of Education, I shall disown her. In fact, if she behaves in any way like the current Woman Representative of Nairobi City County, I shall disown her.

But she assures me that she has a programme that will be of benefit to the voters of Nairobi City County. Her focus will, obviously, be on woman empowerment and I hope that her focus will not just be for the upliftment of women but also that such upliftment will lead to an overall improvement in the quality of life for the residents of Nairobi City.

Since the promulgation of the constitution and the election of the Jubilee government, there have been a few incidents that have given us pause. Woman police officers are discriminated against by their superiors. When one recalls how Grace Kaindi, the seniormost woman police officer, was hounded out of office to how Linda Okello became the subject of disciplinary proceedings and salacious gossip because of her officially-provided tight-fitting uniform to that unfortunate woman police officer who was assaulted by the Deputy President's helicopter pilot, the question of the place of women in this man's government is plain for all to see. Let us also recall that the Jubilee government did the bare minimum when it come to the representation of women in the national Cabinet.

We recall, too, the remarkable judgment on appeal of a court in Mombasa where the female victim of a sexual offence was blamed for enticing her attacker. The reasoning of the male judge in favour of the male offender paint  picture of a system that simply doesn't recognise the worth of women in Kenya. We must surely recall the murder of a thirteen year old girl, in the dead of night, by armed police who attempted to cover up their crimes. Despite the progress made int he education of the girl child and the empowerment of women in society, we have a long way to go and perhaps, Njeri may offer her services to this worthy cause.

Njeri must be careful, though, and not lose her way. Our Parliament has a very long and unenviable history of taking intelligent and honourable parliamentarians and turning them into caricatured gargoyles hellbent on robbing the poor taxpayer blind. She must never forget that we do not owe her anything; she came to us, she sought out our vote, she campaigned for the office. If she is elected, so be it. But if she is elected, she must never forget that we are her voters and her constituency, not her serfs or indentured servants to be talked down to and condescended to. If she adopts the same attitude that the current Woman Representative has, she will be no better than the charlatans who have promised the moon but instead delivered chaff.

A word of caution, however. The office of Woman Representative is not an office for the representation of the interests of women but an office established ion order to raise the participation of women in Parliament. If it is seen as an office for the exclusive representation of women's issues, it will never amount to much. Those elected to that office could, of course, focus on women's issues but that would merely expose them for the uncritical thinkers they are. Woman Representatives represent the entire county in Parliament just as do senators, but they do so in the National Assembly, a vastly more important House of Parliament than the Senate. Woman representatives have an opportunity to influence the national Executive in important ways through their participation in the budget-making process. That so far they have failed to do so is an indictment of their paucity of ideas and their tendency to behave like socialites or flower girls of the current crop of woman representatives. I hope Njeri doesn't fall into this trap when she is elected.

Do the simple stuff first

This may be the time to introduce quotas in our traffic department. Each traffic officer is given a target to raise a certain amount of money in the form of penalties from dangerous driving...—Carol Musyoka, The Nitpicker

The continuous catastrophic loss of life on our roads has yet to be acknowledged by the powers-that-be to be the epidemic that it is. They have only gone so far as to admit that there is a crisis. The solutions they have implemented have been solutions that have taken on a life of their own since Mwai Kibaki was the resident of the house on the hill: establish new agencies, enhance penalties, install speed and traffic cameras, et cetera, ad infinitum.

The causes of the epidemic are not that difficult to fathom, and corrupt police are not the principle reason why road fatalities refuse to go down. Among others are poor road design and construction, poor driver training, poor road maintenance and, ironically, extortionate statutory penalties, but I believe that it is poor road design that contributes the greatest share to the causes of road accidents and fatalities.

Our highways, which contribute a large share of death and injuries, are poorly designed even though their workmanship is of the highest quality. The shoulders are inadequate for vehicles in distress to safely pull off the road. Actual road width is too narrow, reducing the space available for motorists to use if they are in trouble. Pedestrians are hardly catered for and road drainage is rudimentary sometimes. The effect has been to narrow the margin of error by all road users, placing a premium on precision road use for many road users incapable of much precision.

Poor road design wouldn't be too great a problem if driver training were better. I remember an episode of the eponymous BBC Topgear where the hosts visited Finland, a nation with some of the most stringent driver requirements in the world. If I recall correctly, it takes two years for a probationary driver to get their full driver's licence. In that period a driver is constantly assessed to ensure that they do not pose a risk to other road users. Finland epitomises my philosophy: driving is not a right; it is a privilege that can and should be taken away from dangerous motorists.

One of the most dangerous accomplices to poor road design and construction is poor road maintenance. It isn't enough to fill in potholes when they form, but lane markings, road signs, traffic lights, street lights, entry/exit ramps, speed bumps and similar facilities must be well-maintained. Especially when it comes to lane markings, if they are not well-maintained, the risk factors inherent in poor road design and poor driver training are significantly heightened.

Finally, enhanced penalties have long been a double-edged sword in Kenya. In the selfsame Finland, traffic fines are linked to ones annual income. The complex points' system means that the higher one earns and the nature of the offence means that the traffic fine in Finland could be as high as $200,000! If we imposed such a fine in Kenya, perhaps in due time we would see the first police billionaire! 

When it comes to the law enforcement side of the equation, Kenya is in an abyss with almost no hope of rescue. Simply enhancing penalties will not solve the underlying challenges in the integrity of the police. Solve those and perhaps, we may yet enforce the law with impartiality and fairness. But for now, quotas and stiffer penalties will simply create policemen with billion-shillings Mpesa transactions. It is the small stuff that we need to do in order for the big stuff to work.

Bitter bile

Earning a living is easy; earning an honest living is not. If you doubt this, my first and only exhibit is the lengths the government of the county of Nairobi City will go to in order to prevent you from earning an honest living. If it is not the plethora of meaningless, yet extortionate, rules it is the overzealous interpretation of the very same petty rules and their enforcement in the most cruel manner possible. At the top of this cruel and inhumane edifice is the Governor of Nairobi, a man whose promises now give rise to bitter bile in the oesophagus.

In the past ten days, the residents of Nairobi have been reminded why their faith in the Governor or his government were singularly misplaced. First was the 14th Session of the UN Conference of Trade and Development that took place right across the road from City Hall. It fast became clear that the County Government of Nairobi City, having squandered three and a half years wasting time and money, does not yet have a plan for hosting hundreds of foreign officials and other dignitaries in comfort and safety beyond the cordoning off of "red zones" and the eviction of street families from the CBD. It is the hardworking office drones of the city who paid the price; either they were hours early to work or they were hours late.

But it is the manner in which hawkers and other informal or itinerant traders have been treated that the inhumanity of the system is apparent. On this very Monday, a video is doing the rounds on social media showing a woman, in fear for her safety and perhaps her life, cowering under matatu, hiding from the County Government's Inspectors (known as kanjo) for the offence of hawking onions on the streets without a permit. That she knew that an arrest would not end well for her, than a risky gambit was preferable to an arrest, is an indictment of devolution in the city of Nairobi. Nairobi is proof positive that devolution has been an abject failure. Nairobi is the cautionary tale.

The county government needs revenue in order to provide the services that the city needs. This revenue is quite easily raised from the sale of licenses and permits to all manner of traders, including hawkers and other itinerant traders. If the trade rules were administered fairly, trade offences would be few and far between and would most likely be by organised criminal syndicates and the inherently incorrigible. But trade rules are not enforced fairly in Nairobi. They never have. They remain colonial in their application and colonial in their enforcement.This county government and its governor know of no other way of raising city revenue that doesn't involve women hawkers quivering under matatus in fear of the odiously and malevolently violent kanjo.

Yet it need not be that way. The lies about new markets must end, of course. But the market that do exist need to be restored to the true users of those markets and not uptown real estate developers building apartments for Russian mafiosi and Chinese import/export businessmen with a focus on animal trophies. It is not OK to deny them an organised space with stalls and public amenities only to turn on them when they descend on our pavements in a disorganised manner to sell onions off of the ground in unsanitary and dangerous situations. Check out the stretch between Wakulima Market and the KPCU factory on Haile Selassie Avenue to get my meaning. If you think that the situation is normal, you deserve the government you have and the lunacy it brings to our lives in small and humiliating ways.

A pox on both of them.

Yesterday, in a fit of sheer madness, I spent eight hours waiting for Kenya Airways, the Pride of Africa, to shift my unhealthy mass from one of the East African Community to another, the lovely Dar es Salaam. It is with great feeling that I say this: if the management of the national flag carrier were ever to be infested with fleas, lice or ticks, I would not feel bad. Not for eight hours, any way. And I would hope, fervently so, that the ticks, lice and fleas would infest them for eight hours in creatively violent ways that years later these men and women would jerk awake in their slumber having experienced nightmares of that terror in the dead of night.

In the twenty first century, when the world is devising new and exciting ways to communicate, it is astounding that an airline that aspires to greatness is run like an office in Nyayo House, where secrecy, obfuscation, cant and sloth define how it communicates pertinent information to its paying passengers.

We are not gargoyles, incapable of accepting bad news and forever stuck in rictus grins over bad news. So it pisses me off that when KQ discovered that, for operational reasons, its flight KQ484 would be delayed to Dar es Salaam, it waited until the penultimate minute before it informed us that the flight would be delayed and that "further information would be provided after thirty minutes." Thirty minutes turned out to be more like an hour and a half. The apology was perfunctory and impersonal: the flight would be delayed for a further three hours. (May those fleas, lice and ticks feast with great vigour on their flesh.)

Terminal 1A at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport is a fine place but only if you aren't going to miss your flight or there are no delays. For the two hours after you check in, it is just fine. Any longer and its deficiencies are glaring. T-1A is KQ's base of operations for all intents and purposes, but it is quite clear that the KQ partnership with the Kenya Civil Aviation Authority is in name only and some of the decrepit facilities at T-1A are only the most obvious.

First, the PA system is shit. The echoes and the hubbub in the terminal ensure that many announcements by KQ staff are garbled and inaudible. When we were first informed of the thirty minute delay, few heard the message clearly and the confusion was writ large especially on this group of elderly travellers who struggled to keep up with the Swahili and English announcements.

Second, the whoever updates the touch-screen terminal's data took his sweet time. (I especially hope he gets a visit from fire ants too in addition to the lice, fleas and ticks.) Some of us are usually quite sanguine about things; what will be will be and information paucity is not a big deal. But unless you are used to the Kenyan Way, a common effect of it is panic which is usually magnified by many orders of magnitude when you try, alternatively, to seek clarification from a service provider, like KQ, or a government official, like KCAA's yellow-jacketted drones. Neither encounter will leave you with joy-joy feelings. They probably leave you enraged.

Third, power points are falling apart. I saw exposed sockets that seemed to have been that way for months. I saw non-functioning sockets where no matter how much you wiggled your plugs, your device remained stubbornly without juice.

Fourth, and most egregious, is the price-gouging that is the airport WiFi. I can just about accept the Sarova Stanley charging me swingeing fees for use of their WiFi whenever I accidentally find myself detouring through the Exchange Bar, but when I am being held hostage by both the airport's operator and the national flag carrier, free WiFi doesn't seem like too much to ask. But as KQ and KCAA blithely squeeze the last cent out of me while keenly ignoring the things that make air travel bearable, they shouldn't be surprised that when they do screw up, there will be little understanding for their indolence and malafide incompetence.

Kama kawaida, the only people who think that KQ is a fine, fine airline and T-1A is wonderfu, just wonderful airport terminal are people whose experiences do not involve queues or personal service. They have a bevy of flunkies to schlep for them. That is not ninety percent of the flying public. Say it with me, good people: I hope, fervently so, that ticks, lice and fleas would infest KQ's and KCAA's managements in creatively violent ways.

A better police?

In keeping with the spirit of constructive criticism that I have adopted, I wish to turn my attention to the small matter of national security which Article 238 defines as "the protection against internal and external threats to Kenya's territorial integrity and sovereignty, its people, their rights, freedoms, property, peace, stability and prosperity, and other national interests." Anything that undermines "national security" is bad. This past Thursday highlighted one of those bad things.

As you very well know, the National Police Service is a national security organ (Art. 239(1)(c) and therefore, it must uphold the principles of national security found in Art. 238, and perform to the best of its capacities its functions, including "train staff to the highest possible standards of competence and integrity". In Kapenguria, on Thursday, the National Police Service failed to live up to its objects or perform its functions.

From what we have been permitted to know, a police officer who was one year out of training at Kiganjo arrived at the Kapenguria police station with the intention of securing the release of a "terror suspect." His superiors, according to unnamed sources, had been concerned with his behaviour and had done nothing. (I think this assertion is unsupported; it might be that his posting to Kapenguria was in the time-honoured tradition of the National Police Service: as a hardship posting meant to compel him to rethink his life choices while in service.)

In any case, on this fateful Thursday, the policeman walked into a police station with the intention of securing the release from police custody of a man suspected of radicalising pupils at a Kapenguria primary school. His efforts were in vain. He grabbed a weapon and murdered the station commander and several of his erstwhile colleagues. Reinforcements were sent from other stations but he repulsed them, using the ammunition from the policemen he had slain. An elite commando unit was sent in from Nairobi. It prevailed, eleven hours after the the first shot was fired. One of the commandos was killed and another was seriously wounded.

A few things emerge from this tragic event. How we recruit policemen, train, manage and deploy them still permits a few rotten potatoes to get through. This risk can be mitigated to a great extent if the recruitment of policemen is not compromised by what has become commonplace: bribes. How we will achieve a corruption-free police recruitment drive in the future remains one of our most difficult challenges.

Second, police training might include the relevant finer points of criminology, criminalistics, criminal law, criminal investigations and criminal prosecutions as well as theoretical units on human rights and fundamental freedoms, but it focuses overwhelmingly on instilling discipline (through parade drilling) and firearms training, especially the use of assault rifles such as the AK-47, the G-3 and the US-made AR-15. To my knowledge, psychometric and psychological screening does not seem to take place at any stage between recruitment and deployment, and this seems to have contributed to increased cases of indiscipline in the ranks and violent acts among policemen or against their superior officers. Psychological and psychiatric care needs to be made part and parcel of the police welfare system.

Third, firearms in the hands of well-trained offenders can be tragically deadly and when the offender is a policeman, the consequences are catastrophic. There are pockets of Kenya where policing must be backed up by an armed force, but the increasing incidents of misuse of firearms by policemen, either against fellow police or civilians must drive us to rethink arming most of the police we interact with. An armed police service that is trained more like a paramilitary army than a law enforcement agency, for which psychological or psychiatric services are unavailable and in which risk assessment before recruitment is still rudimentary at best and which is faced with increasing cases of indiscipline in which firearms are used is not best-suited to deploy armed men in the field in large numbers.

We have copied the iron-fist approach to policing of the United States, India and Israel without the resources to make it work effectively. It is time we rethought the strategy. I am not saying that we should abandon it altogether but that we should tweak it to make it work for us. For one, against whom the police is deployed must be determined with greater clarity in order to arrive at a decision of how many arms will be put into the field at any one time. The other is whether it makes sense to have a armed response for every incident. If we are to look at the police, not in fear, but in appreciation, the police can't feel or be seen as an occupying army.

Five-point transformations and other parables

I am a downer. I find all that you find good in the world and dump on it. Big. Massively big. No more. I am now in the psychological space needed to offer constructive advice. I am emotionally stable and I want to help. Really.

Today I shall offer my well-meaning though unsolicited advice to the boyishly charming Inspector-General and the ramrod straight Cabinet Secretary for the Interior and Co-ordination of National Government. I want to help them restore the glorious National Police Force to its former respected self. After all no one wants more stories of police murdering civilians, do they?

First, obviously, is the preparation and publishing of a Five Point Transformation Strategic Plan. (I know a very, very good consultant who can help; he has operations in eighteen countries and finds twelve-and-a-half million shillings a pittance that he can wire back to serikali coffers on a whim.) This strategic plan should cover all the bases: re-branding, new uniforms, new titles, community outreach, tenders!, expanded recruitment and enhanced budgetary allocation to cover all that plus the consultant's very, very reasonable fees. (If he charges twenty five million for a one day publicity stunt, swallow your pride and cough up the dough.)

Second, equally obviously, scapegoat the scapegoat-able. Underlings with crooked teeth? Check. Minions with a "bad attitude"? Check. (Anyone who thinks "Baba deserves a chance" definitely has a bad attitude.) Shapely officers of the not-gentle-anymore genders who refuse to share and share alike? Ditto! Hound them without mercy in all the courts of the land.

Third, not so obviously, find an eloquent, English-speaking man-candy to handle the public communications. That Owino guy is good, but it doesn't help that he looks so obviously like an old-school karao. You need the cop equivalent of that Mutua guy (not the wedding videos Mutua; the other one with the navy blue suits and million watts smile).

Fourth, and rather crucial, revise history. Extensively. In detail. Finesse is preferred but not necessary. For example, look at how we view Daniel Toroitich arap Moi today as the benevolent father of the nation and a retired president running successful land-buying companies without bating an eyelid. Kenyans have short memories and in the Digital Age all the media tools are at your disposal in rewriting the history of policing n Kenya in which your shit don't smell. At all. Ever.

Finally, pull a Houdini. Give the people something to focus their anti-corruption, human rights animus on. al Shabaab will do in a pinch, but you are better off reminding the people that "civil society" rhymes rather neatly and niftily with "evil society." A catchy slogan is a beautiful way to focus the attention of a people with the attention span of a pigeon, which your target community is. Every time one of your guys foolishly shoots dead another Kenyan in broad daylight you can just trot out the "evil society" slogan as the bogeyman Kenyans ought to fear and, Hey presto! no more police-are-bad stories.

See? I can be helpful sometimes.

An occupying army

We see the police and we are automatically apprehensive. It matters not that many of us are blameless of any malevolent act or intent, if we see uniformed police we run quickly in our minds over all our acts upto that moment and mentally tally up the contents of our pockets, wallets and Mpesa accounts. None of us is immune, save for the men and women with the political, social and financial heft to command the obedience of the police. We have all been on the other end of the attentions of the police and those experiences are not the stuff of legend but the boring wallpaper of otherwise unremarkable lives.

No less than the Ghai Commission and the Committee of Experts agreed that something had to be done because both the Kenya Police Force and the Administration Police Force had become laws unto themselves, seemingly answerable only to their Commander-in-Chief and to no one else. For most of Kenya's history the police forces, including specialised units such as the General Service Unit, the Special Branch (the forerunner of the National Intelligence Service), the Anti-Stock Theft Unit, the Flying Squad, the Criminal Investigation Department (now renamed the Directorate of Criminal Investigations) and mysterious ones such as the Kwe Kwe Squad were the iron fist in the Commander-in-Chief's iron glove, used to smash all opposition to the Commander-in-Chief's remit, imagined and real, to smithereens. Often it is hard-suffering Kenyans with no interest in political power who were the victims of police abuse of power.

When the Committee of Experts attempted to tackle policing (and national security) in the harmonised draft constitution in 2009/2010, the securocracy, from the presidency on down, did everything in its considerable power to water down the proposals that had been endorsed by many Kenyans through years of agitation and discussion. Reading through Chapter Fourteen of the Constitution, it is clear to me that all public mention of "police reforms" is the height of hypocrisy; the Constitution does nothing to reform the police as it existed before August 2010 beyond the changing of names. It is only after you read carefully the functions and objects of the National Police Service in Article 244 of the Constitution that it becomes plain that reforms were never on the cards for the police forces of Kenya. The glaring absence of "public safety" from the mandate of the police forces should have been a very big clue.

Thus it should not have come as a surprise that policemen continue to murder Kenyans with impunity or that the entire securocracy is not interested in justice for the victims of the police; the police are not founded or trained with their principal mandate being the safety of the people or private property. Their mandate, as part of the national security infrastructure, is the "protection against internal and external threats to Kenya's territorial integrity and sovereignty;" the rest of the highfalutin words in Article 238 are neither psychologically nor philosophically inculcated in the securocracy. Kenya's territorial integrity and sovereignty, as much as it shocks to say it, is not what it means; it is the safety and perpetuation of the presidency against all risks. All. Even imaginary ones. The safety of the people or their property is an afterthought, if it is thought of at all.

Kenya is not Israel or the United States or Pakistan; save for the restful peoples of the former Northern Frontier and of the North Rift, many Kenyans and foreigners do not have an axe to grind with the Government of Kenya or the peoples of Kenya. For this reason Kenya does not need an armed national police army. It never has. An armed police army is not a tool of public safety but that of an occupying army. An armed police army is a very public praetorian guard for the protection of the presidency at all costs. This is at the heart of the unending cases of police abuse of power and use of excessive or deadly force against the civilian population. It is the only explanation for the senseless murder of the Mavoko Three and the foot-dragging in the investigation of the case. Unless we know the problem we will never solve it.

A better picture, please.

Kenya's property market is in a bubble. The bubble is still inflating, and if it doesn't get deflated gently, it will burst very painfully. Real estate prices are almost totally unmoored from their true values, and what's keeping them up there is hope, greed and fear (and a generous helping of dishonest money). Everyone's a property speculator and dealer. All power to them, but when the music stops, there'll be plenty of people left without chairs. When the tide goes out, you'll realise how many people were swimming commando. Take your pick of trite metaphor, but don't say you weren't warned.—Wallace Kantai

According to Hass Consult, a construction company, "15,000 units were released into the market in 2013" in Nairobi. According to Hass Consult, Nairobi alone needs 200,000 units per year to satisfy the demand for housing across all segments. Taken together with Mr Kantai's assertion of a housing bubble and the reasons for the housing bubble, a few questions come to mind.

First, are banks at risk if the bubble bursts? Among the findings of the analysis of Imperial Bank's books was that a great deal of the insider trading was for the purpose of real estate investment/speculation both in and outside Kenya. Though no proof has been advance, it is alleged that much that is driving county real estate development is not credit advanced by financial institutions but hundreds of millions looted from county coffers. If the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission and the Asset Recovery Agency are to be believed, a significant proportion of the missing NYS billions will be found in high end real estate. So, how much of the real estate bubble is financed by the banking sector?

Second, if the banks are not exposed, are they complicit in turning black money white as the driven snow? It is now a statutory requirement that all transactions in real estate (that includes housing, too) must take place through registered financial institutions. Most of it takes place through banks. The Dubai Bank debacle exposed a seamy side to bank supervision: it is almost non-existent. Say someone manages to "obtain" a hundred million from somewhere and wishes to clean it swiftly, a bank would be a natural agency. (I'm reasonably informed that on an "investment" of five million, a hundred million could be "obtained" relatively easily.) A bank could use its accounting system to obscure the source of the hundred million, take its agency fees and arrange the purchase of real estate and quietly close the client account with the CBK's bank supervisors being none the wiser (or richer by a couple of million).

Third, how much of the speculation in Kenya's, especially Nairobi's real estate, is by foreigners or non-resident Kenyans? Of those foreigners, what proportion are laundering black money and do they care if they take a fifty percent haircut on their real estate investments? Again, given the need for these transactions to flow through registered banks, is it possible that we are incapable of keeping track financial inflows/outflows or unable to enforce statutory (and basic) KYC protocols in our financial sector? Whatever the answers are, there is much of the financial infrastructure that seems insulated from regulatory oversight and that has become the preferred conduit feeding air into the real estate bubble.

Fourth, how much of the bubble has been derivativised? Again, the hundred million shilling real estate "investment." Once the real estate has been bought and registered, it becomes available as collateral for other advances of credit which can either be used to invest in other real properties or, as is becoming increasingly popular, assets with a decidedly impermanent character such as Range Rovers, Jaguars, Ferraris, Porsches or Bentleys. If for whatever reason the hundred million is recovered from whence it was obtained, the hundred million investment is unlikely to be liquidated for that amount; more likely it will be between 50 million and 25 million shillings less. And that is the optimistic assessment if the 2007/08 US housing crash is any guide.

Finally, what happens when the crash comes? Will serikali middle class types suddenly flock en masse to Kitisuru, Westlands, Kilimani, Milimani, Upper Hill or Runda? I don't think so. The pain will be felt all over and more so in the civil service where, for sure, a painful round of austerity will ensue (that is, allowances will be pared down to the bone without mercy for the rank and file). "Asset managers" will find themselves without clients; only well-invested funds and "old" money are likely to survive the collapse. RMA might yet go the way of CMC. Will Nairobi come to resemble Sydney or Las Vegas, with rows upon rows of unoccupied, high end real estate attracting vandals and squatters? I wish someone had a better picture.

An unsavoury truth

By now a horrifying thought must be going through your mind. If you are a little like me, even a little bit, you must surely know that Father Christmas is a mythical figure that children revel in even though deep down they must know he doesn't really exist. If your child still believes in Father Christmas at ten, I have to question your emotional and psychological maturity. In the same vein, if it hasn't occurred to you that the last of our national heroes are about to expose their feet of clay, then you really haven't been paying attention.

I hope it is clear to many of you that a great number of our Olympics and IAAF world-beating gold medalists are police and military officers. In light of the revelations about both institutions in recent years, it is almost impossible to continue to believe that the scourge of corruption has not infested either the police or the defence forces and that this corruption has not been manifested in the increasingly loud allegations of doping.

Kenya has an enviable record of world beating track and field athletic achievements. Legends have been created in the rarefied air of Iten's "high altitude" training grounds. When everything else was crashing and burning around our ears, we had our iconic athletes who were purer than the driven snow, more golden than the famed fleece. When they stood tall on top of those podiums and received their medals, wreaths and bouquets of victory, we stood with them. When our national anthem reminded the rest of the world that on the tracks Kenya was a world power, our hearts swelled with pride. No more.

Things have not been the same since the allegations of sexual harassment and abuse of female athletes were exposed and the male-dominated Athletics Kenya did the equivalent of a shoulder shrug. Scrutiny of the athletics system continues to expose graft on a scale hitherto unknown. With new accusations of doping being levelled against elite athletes and their trainers, we are now at a place where national heroes no longer exist. It really shouldn't come as a surprise; the police service is not known for its integrity after all and the defence forces are increasingly being tarred with the same brush the longer its operations in Somalia remain shrouded in mystery. The recent fiasco around the Anti-Doping Act, 2016, has not helped matters at all.

 

Our elite athletes have remained untainted by any association with their parent services for the longest time because we all believed that when they trained for the marathon or the 10,000 metres races, the Iten air is what gave them that extra "kick" in the final hundred metres of the race. It is this belief that has attracted even elite Ethiopian athletes to come to Iten to train. If it turns out that the extra kick came from dope, then there is no hope for us.

We are no longer children, you and I. We are mature enough to look the horrible truth in the eye. If it turns out that most of our national athletics silverware is the product of chemical-induced greatness, we must face this unsavoury truth with the stoicism we have faced the crumbling of all our other national institutions. One thing is for sure, if doping is the order of the day, first we shall blame the "foreign" trainers, the foreign environment in which our athletes sometimes compete in, the foreign this, that or the other. We will blame the rest of the world rather than admit that the corruption that we have allowed to metastasize in our public institutions has finally infected our last bastion of all that is good with the world. It is only a matter of time before this cancer consumes us all.

The Mavoko Three and Police Reforms

When we were children, growing up in the 1980s or coming of age in the 1990s, our parents taught us certain immutable truths: the Government was always listening; the police were to be feared; politicians were never to be trusted. Of course as we grew older and came into our own, we tempered these lessons with our own life experiences especially because many of us went to university or graduate school and got our first jobs long after it became apparent that, truly, "Yote yawezekana bila Moi." With the abduction, torture, murder and crude disposal of Willie Kimani, Josephat Mwenda and Joseph Muiruri, I am not so sure that we should have tempered the message of our parents rather than heeded its inimitable truth.

What we know—or think that we know—is that Josephat Mwenda was unlawfully shot by a policeman belonging to the Administration Police Force. He filed a criminal complaint against the policeman and the case was being heard at the Mavoko Law Courts. Willie Kimani, who worked for the International Justice Ministry, was his lawyer, advising Mr Mwenda of his rights. Mr Mwenda's criminal complaint resulted in a campaign of harassment and intimidation by officers of the Administration Police Force, including multiple traffic offence charges and criminal allegations of drug-dealing or drugs trafficking. On the fateful day, Mr Mwenda and Mr Kimani contacted Mr Muiruri, a taxi operator, to drive them to the Mavoko Law Courts, wait for them as they concluded their business in court and then drive them back to Nairobi.

We don't know what happened after Mr Mwenda and Mr Kimani left court that day and met up with Mr Muiruri. Mr Kimani's widow received a phonecall from a stranger informing her that three men who were being held at the Mavoko Administration Police Force Camp had scribbled a note on toilet paper and hurled it out of one of its cells asking her to be informed of their whereabouts and that they feared for their lives. That is the last known contact by the three men. A week later the remains, suspected to be of Mr Mwenda and Mr Kimani, were recovered in a river. They had been tortured, had their hands bound behind their backs and drowned in the river. The Law Society of Kenya and large swathes of the population strongly suspect that the men were tortured, murdered and their bodies disposed of by officers of the Administration Police Force. The Inspector-General of Police and the Cabinet Secretary for Interior and Co-ordination of National Government speculate without providing proof that the three may have been done in by hired hitmen.

For the past six years, Kenyans have waited for policing in Kenya to be reformed. It is time we admitted to ourselves that reforms are not forthcoming and, perhaps, they were never coming. We have watched, bemused, as senior police officials have contorted themselves in incredible ways to explain sources of wealth or academic credentials as they undergo "vetting" before the National Police Service Commission. We should not have been so sanguine about the incredible state of affairs in the National Police Service. With the murders of the three men and the circumstances that led to their murders, perhaps it is time to begin an honest national conversation of the kind of police we have and the kind that we deserve.

In the same week that the remains of the three men were discovered, there was yet another ambush of buses travelling from Mandera town. The bus was in a convoy of three and was being guarded by Kenya Police Reservists. Four passengers and a police reservist died. In the previous week, another bus, that time escorted by Kenya Police Force officers, was attacked. Four police died. The police refused to escort any more buses until they were provided with reinforcements and the right kind of transport. At the beginning of the month, as Kenya celebrated Madaraka Day, it is rumoured that the police who marched past the presidential dais in Nakuru were not paid their allowances by their seniors and went on "strike" until the allowances were settled. Early in the year, the sorry state of police patrolling the Boni Forest in Lamu, was broadcast on TV. The police who spoke to reporters were punished for insubordination, dereliction of duty and painting the National Police Service in a bad light.

What emerges is that rank and file policemen are brutalised by their superiors and they, in turn, brutalise the civilian population. The Mavoko Three are not the only victims of the police. There are countless others in the years since we promulgated the constitution, including those who have been "renditioned" outside Kenya on "terrorism" charges and those who have been executed extra-judicially for "terrorist" links or sympathies. These events echo the brutal tactics employed by the police and sanctioned by the late John Michuki when he was the Minister of Internal Security and Provincial Administration when scores of Mungiki adherents and sympathisers were executed extra-judicially. Paul Muite, Senior Counsel, estimates that there were 8,000 such executions.

The United Nations Special Rapportuer on Extra-judicial Killings noted that the police forces of Kenya were not designed, equipped or trained to ensure the safety or security of the civilian population but for the control of civilians. If there was safety or security to be had, it would be the safety and security of the State, the Presidency and the ruling elite. This is the internal security infrastructure that was established by the colonial government, perpetuated by the post-Independence governments of Presidents Kenyatta and Moi, and inherited by the post-multi-party elections' governments of Presidents Kibaki and Kenyatta the Younger. Reforms, as executed after the Ransley Reprt, haven't reordered the relationship of the State and police with the people; they have merely dressed it up in fancy clothes and titles. The police remains a violent tool for the control and subjugation of the civilian population. The Mavoko Three are unlikely to be the last victims of the police.

Despite the threat against the civilian population by terrorist organisations and armed brigands, a national, armed police service is abnormal. It is expensive to equip and difficult to regulate. If we are serious about reforming the National police Service, we must begin by disarming it in its entirety. Where armed response is required, a scaled down General Service Unit shall suffice. Secondly, the police force must be broken up and decentralised completely. Policing must be placed under the authority of governors. Except for the armed General Service Unit, police do not require a national command-and-control system. This will freak out the securocracy and its boosters but if we are to change the way in which we are policed and how the police operate among civilians, it is the only radical step that will convert it into a true police organisation and not a rogue army occupying our streets.

The re-election of UhuRuto

You treat Uhuru Kenyatta as an idiot at your peril; you treat William Ruto as wounded only if you wish to witness what happens to wounded lions. None of the analysts reading the 2017 tea leaves is wiling to put money down that come hell or high water, Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto will secure five more years to rule. The key to their victory lies in the early reconstitution of their campaign propaganda machinery and the deployment of influential voices to far-flung foreign capitals with significant populations of deep-pocketed Kenyans capable of being persuaded to dig onto their pockets for the cause.

The President and Deputy President are smart, smarter than you or I. If they weren't, the message we would be receiving today of their reign would be one of disappointment, lethargy, in-fighting and antipathy. This is a message that resonates among the partisan members of the Opposition coalition; it does not resonate with the millions of Kenyans who, for the first time, have access to Huduma services, tarmacked roads, electricity, piped water, computers, free maternity care and Chinese noodles. For sure large swathes of what was developed Kenya is decrepit; but the even larger swathes that were not developed have been pulled into the twenty-first century for the first time in the history of independent Kenya. The have nothing but praise for the Government and, by extension, the President and the Deputy President.

Careful curating of social media spaces and public broadcasting, equal parts cajoling and bullying of the print media and good old fashioned coercion and bribery have guaranteed that the Opposition is seen as a team of malcontents unwilling to do anything positive for the people instead engaging in acts that have ended in tragedy more often than not. What is amazing is how somehow neither the President nor the Deputy President has been tarred by the brush wielded by the likes of Moses Kuria or William Kabogo, while the doyen of the Opposition is very much linked to every hare-brained scheme and utterance of the vulgar Johnston Muthama and Jakoyo Midiwo.

For the sophisticated among us, the assumption is that how we understand the three years of media management and strategic communication by the Presidency is the same way that the rest of the nation does. It isn't. I am not implying that they are less intelligent or educated than the Nairobi set. No, they are our equals in innate intelligence and academic achievement. What they have is a realistic appreciation of the rules of political power. They do not live on promises, much as urban Kenya does; they reward concrete returns for political capital paid. I will put money down that every Kenyan for whom the Government has provided electricity, free health care, piped water, tarmacked roads, market access and cheaper access to information will vote for Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto even as they vote for the Opposition in the counties.

The mothballing of the Presidential Strategic Communications Unit is not a retreat from the political field of battle; it is the first volley by the Presidency in the War of 2017. The President has stolen a march on the opposition once more. The Opposition is busily making and putting out internal political fires. The Opposition might have made up for lost time when it comes to registration of voters, but it has concretely lost when it comes to the other areas of political warfare. The counties under its control remain backward, undeveloped, filthy, expensive, chaotic and violent. That is not a winning combination. Not by a long shot. This time round there is no need to control too tightly the electoral body or the Supreme Court (which is why Jubilee is fighting so hard to control them because if it wants it then, Godammit, CORD wants it too.). Once more, the Opposition has lost before the first shot was fired. Don't believe me? Follow #MakingNairobiGreat on Twitter and witness the re-election of Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto.

How business is done

One of the strangest things happened without much fanfare yesterday: the tribunal appointed to investigate the conduct of Philip Tunoi, retired judge of the Supreme Court, wound up its sittings arguing that with the retirement of the judge, it had become "functus officio", that is, the retirement of the judge no longer required the tribunal to continue to investigate his conduct because he was no longer a judge. The winding up of the sittings or the reasons for the winding up are not the strange part; the strange part is how the whole thing unfolded in the first place.

The basis for the appointment of the tribunal was an accusation by a journalist that he had been denied his due in a scheme to pervert the course of justice. The judge's accuser claimed that he had acted as an intermediary between the newly-elected governor of Nairobi City County and the judge in a scheme to bribe the judge to guarantee a favourable ruling for the governor in an election petition filed by the governor's principal rival in the 2013 general election. The bribe has never been proven.

The saga begins in a strange way. The accuser goes to a contact he knows at the Directorate of Criminal Investigations and asks for help to get his cut of the bribe from the judge. He informs the CID man that the judge has for months been dodging him, fobbing him off with twenty thousand shillings. The CID man, for some reason, sends the man to his superior who, rather than open a criminal investigation into the alleged bribe, asked the man to find a lawyer to help him swear out an affidavit laying out the sum and substance of his accusations. The lawyer he settled on happened to be the lawyer for the Judicial Service Commission, which had already asked the judge to retire.

The man gave the affidavit to the Chief Justice some time in 2014. Why he gave it to the Chief Justice remains a mystery. The Chief Justice on his part decided to "investigate" the allegations using the administrative machinery of the Judiciary. The man grew impatient as the judge didn't seem to be paying a price for allegedly cheating him out of his cut. So he went to the press with a copy of the affidavit, forcing the Chief Justice's hand who in turn announced the appointment of a team to investigate the affidavit and make recommendations. The team recommended the appointment of a tribunal to investigate the judge. The recommendations were forwarded to the president.

The president blew hot ad cold on the appointment of the tribunal, eventually being forced to do so by a sustained bad press over the whole affair. The rest, they say, is history, for while the tribunal sat, the Court of Appeal ruled that the judge should have retired at the age of seventy years and the Supreme Court, in a fit of madness, is unable to do anything about it because the Chief Justice has retired too, as has the Deputy Chief Justice, and two members of the Supreme Court have recused themselves from hearing the matter and, therefore, the Supreme Court has no quorum to hear the matter.

I find it strange, though, that the man who accused the judge of withholding his cut of the alleged two million dollar bribe was not charged by the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions with his part in the alleged crime. He has vanished from the newspaper pages, TV studios and blog posts. The whole saga has been about the judge and whether or not he received a bribe from a governor. The Chief Justice behaved strangely, too. Even with his notorious open door policy, how did he come t receive the affidavit and to whom did he share it? Was he so hell bent in forcing the judge out of office on account o his age that he would enter into a scheme to force him out on account of alleged bribe-taking? The judge himself created the circumstances that exposed him to this state of affairs by engaging with both the governor and his accuser in the months before the accusation.

With the winding up of the sittings of the tribunal, and the notorious secrecy instincts of the presidency, it is almost certain that we will never know the truth of what really happened between the three of them. That will be in keeping with the way Kenya does business, which is, really, how the whole world does business.

The one-hundred year rule

When Uhuru Kenyatta conceded defeat to Mwai Kibaki after the 2002 general elections, Kenya embarked on a short-lived political transition that it has never recovered from. The defeat of KANU should have coincided with the defeat of KANU-ism; instead, what President Moi prophesied as a hundred-year KANU rule seems to be coming true.

Many Kenyans point to the 2007 general election and the 2007/2008 crisis as the turning point in Kenya's politics; I believe it is the appointment of the likes of Kiraitu Murungi and Peter Anyang' Nyong'o to Mwai Kibaki's Cabinet that set Kenya back in terms of political maturity. The co-option of political malcontents into the maw that is the Cabinet has ended in disaster. Instead of steering the ship of state into calmer waters, we find ourselves foundering on jagged rocks.

The principal goal of any government is its continued stability. Since Mwai Kibaki's first Cabinet, stability has been seriously lacking. President Kibaki fired half  his first Cabinet after it defied him and actively campaigned against a draft constitution that the President favoured. The referendum was lost and President Kibaki canned his Ministers. His second Cabinet spent so much time raising money for the 2007 general elections, no one noticed when a few rogue members set out to make the peace as ungovernable as possible.

His third Cabinet was beset by the fallout from the Post-election Violence and never cohered while the nusu mkate Cabinet was a study in backbiting, backstabbing, infighting, intrigue and great corruption. Kenyans hated it. The legacy of Kibaki's governments has been visited in Uhuru Kenyatta's, where the principle objective is not stability but re-election. It is why the president and the deputy president have spent great treasure and time attempting to corral a parliamentary majority that has never cohered and has never seen the forest for the trees.

KANU-ism lives on in the political divide-and-conquer that empowered Mwai Kibaki and continues to empower Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto in their co-presidency. It is revealed in the patronage politics that has shared and re-shared the spoils of war, from high positions in the securocracy to vice-chancellorships in Kenyans burgeoning higher education sector. But the common thread that links the KANU-ism of the the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, the 2000s and today is the great corruption that robs the people of their innocence and faith in their nation and government.

Jomo Kenyatta had his Million Acres Programme. Daniel Moi had the well-orchestrated collapse of the Kenya National Assurance and Goldenberg. Mwai Kibaki had Anglo-Leasing and Triton. Uhuru Kenyatta has had a revolving-door policy regarding the anticorruption commission and the eyesore that are the Standard Gauge Railway and LAPSSET contracts. Corruption is the glue that binds the KANU-ist ancien regime to its modern day incarnation. Corruption fosters neither stability nor longevity. Corruption hollows out the institutions of legitimacy and authority. Corruption is a poison that slowly kills the body politic.

KANU's defeat in December 2002 was not a true defeat; it was a tactical retreat. Three months after the Uhuru Kenyatta concession speech, KANU-ism regrouped and KANU-ists tooks steps to reassert their political dominance. Kiraitu Murungi will always embody the worst of KANU-ism with his hyperbole that neither matched his actions nor the outcomes of his policies as justice minister. The next governments, regardless of who their heads will be, have their characters cast in stone. KANU, the party, might be dead but KANU, the ideology, is set to rule for a century, just as Baba Moi predicted.

Burning down the school

Rules are meant to be applied fairly. When we permit a few to play by a different, laxer set of rules, we encourage many to seek such accommodations, whether they are "entitled" to them or not. Rules are meant to guarantee a fair outcome for all, not privileges for a few at the expense of the majority. Kenyan public administration is a study in how unfairly rules are applied, how privileges are distributed and how conflict is managed when the outcome is less than optimal. In Kenya, the privileged few play by a set of rules that elevate them over their fellowman.

The results of the Kenyan way are evident. Conflicts are not easily resolved. Conflict has become hardwired among Kenyans and dispute resolution has become more difficult to manage. Whenever disputes arise today, the option readily to hand is violent confrontation sometimes with tragic consequences. The privileged elite ask why it is not possible for groups in conflict to peaceably negotiate to find solutions forgetting that they themselves don't negotiate for the privileges they enjoy. Young Kenyans are internalising this way of looking at things: if they don't get their way, they will burn down the house even if it means that they will sleep outside in the cold.

That is what happened last night. A boys' residential school's administration refused to allow the boys to watch a football match. If this boys' school is anything like my alma mater, it is likely that the manner in which the decision was communicated to the boys would be described as "high-handed," which is not how you address boys who have been cooped up in school for weeks on end. As evidenced by the rise of school-burnings in recent months, the outcome was predictable. The boys protested the decision without succour from their teachers. The protest escalated and ten dormitories were set ablaze. It could have been worse if the mob had somehow managed to "invade" a nearby residential girls' school. When the blood of a mob of boys is up, there is no telling what the boys are capable of.

What these boys did was what they think they have seen on TV and read about on the internet, that if their demands are not met, they have the right to "strike" and in striking, anything goes. After all, that is what their teachers have done on numerous occasions, using some of the most incendiary and unlettered language possible. It is what doctors, the epitome of academic excellence, have done on numerous occasions. It is what their political leaders have done since time immemorial without paying a price for it. Most importantly, it is what their parent do every day, sometimes to survive and sometimes to obtain an unfair advantage. The social compact that we are supposed to have made with each other - to live by the rule of law and to respect the equality of everyone - has been abandoned at the altar of individual need and greed at the expense of the greater common good.

With the ;spread of modern communications technology and media, young Kenyans are shown the benefits of bad behaviour by everyone. When inebriated pastors run down and kill other road users, they lie about it and use their positions of leadership and authority to escape from the consequences of their actions. Then they justify it at the pulpit on every subsequent Sunday. When politicians suborn murder and violence, they are not arraigned in court; instead they are celebrated as "liberators" and "champions" of the people. When civil servants extort from the poor and the vulnerable, their bosses do not demand, at the very least, their resignations; they ask for forbearance because the civil servants' service is too hard. Bad deeds, young Kenyans know, need not have bad outcomes. It is almost certain that unless we change how we relate with each other - how we respect the law and uphold our equality - more school dormitories are going to be set ablaze.

Less than owed

Who are your heroes and role-models? Mine happen to be the only two people I have ever truly disappointed: my parents. They are famous - within their circles. If you google their names, by the time you get to page 10, you'll be exhausted. I want to focus on my mother, though, because I think her experiences are what made me appreciate the key phrase "legislative and other measures" in relation to "past discrimination" (by the State) against the women of Kenya.

One of the funniest things - at the time I was five or so and didn't know better - my mother ever told me was that until 1985 or so, women didn't really need national ID cards. After all, they were either a man's daughter or a man's wife. There was no third classification. A woman's father or her husband was sufficient for the purposes of identifying a woman in Kenya. You can imagine the scenario - that for a woman to register as a voter - the principle of universal suffrage was accepted in theory - she had to be accompanied either by her father or her husband. So if she wanted to stand for elective office, whether as a councillor or a member of Parliament, ditto! husband or father required.

This paternalistic view of women, even rebellious ones like Wangari Maathai, was the hallmark of the State and it prevails even today, though many of the ridiculous shackles have been loosened. When she won a scholarship to finish her PhD in the UK, she had not just to receive permission to leave the country from her university, the Ministry of Education and the Office of the President, but she also needed my father's written "consent" to obtain a passport and travel overseas. She smiles when she says this, but you can tell she found it ridiculous and frustrating in equal measure back then.

Today, you would think that the women of Kenya have overcome the entrenched patriarchy that has cause so much grief in Kenya. You would think so and you would be wrong. While women are free to obtain documents of identity without relying on their fathers or husbands anymore, and while they can travel to any destination whether or not their husbands or fathers think they should, in key areas, women continue to suffer disadvantages that hinder the full realisation of their full potential. 

 

I remember this line from a song with a wildly different context, "The oppressor says that turning to politics is the only way" and it seems strangely apposite when it comes to the question of how we can erode the entrenched patriarchy that holds half of the Kenyan population back. It is why we have internalised the false narrative that the only way to break with a perfidious patriarchal past is to elect or nominate ever more women to Parliament and county assemblies and appoint ever more of them in public service positions. (Or, if it is non-political women, hand over sacks of cash as part of "women entrepreneurship development" and hope for the best.)

The "legislative" part of our constitutional contract with women (and other marginalised groups) seems more or less settled; all that remains is for the political deal-making and horse-trading to take place, and, come the 12th Parliament, elected and nominated women representatives will form a substantial core of the elected classes. When it comes to "other" measures, other than "enterprise funds", women have received less than they are owed.

Take a recent discussion I had with a blogger I respect. She had been invited to moderate a panel that had just one other woman among three other men, yet the online advertising would lead you to believe that it was a panel of men alone. You would have had to click on the link to the event in order to know that it was a sausage fest. In subtle and insidious ways, we erase the presence of women in our lives, whether professionally, socially or personally. We mansplain them away without shame. It is why, try as hard as you can, few of you remember that there have been more influential women in Kenya than just politicians. (Google "Orie Rogo Manduli Safari Rally" and thank me later.)

My mother is an accomplished women despite the patriarchy she survived on her way to greatness. I am lucky that my father and my grandfather were contumacious that my mother and aunts were not treated any differently from my father and uncles. That cultural rebellion has given us a family that is well-rounded and well-represented in all the professions. Our family needs no government handouts or quotas in order to make a mark; we make a mark simply by being us. I am inordinately proud to be her son, even though I have done absolutely nothing to deserve her and one day, if the winds of fate blow in the right direction, my precious R will live up to my mother's expectations - the ones that I didn't live up to.

Nairobi politics: sharp elbows needed

City politics is not for the faint of heart or for the meek of the Earth. City politics is for the brawlers and for those with egos the size of small planets. Less is definitely not more in city politics. Balls of brass, whether one is of the male species or not, are a requirement. Because when you go in, to stay in you will need fortitude of the testicular kind. Johnson Arthur Sakaja is slowly coming to realise that a suave approach to the siasa za Nairobi will not give him the edge to edge out the incumbent, the hapless Evans Kidero.

A stupid tweet - it was rather daft - by Mr Sakaja suggests that Nairobi traffic will improve if only most (or all) Nairobians drove city cars and didn't obsessively go for 4x4s. The deluge of scorn that followed was impressive, especially for a Sunday morning when most Nairobians are supposed to be praying in church, nursing massive hangovers or nursing massive hangovers in church. It exposed Mr Sakaja as the neophyte who couldn't get nominated or elected in the party that he is chairman of. Now he wants to unseat Mr Kidero. Like I said: big brass balls.

Evans Kidero was elected because Nairobians were tired of the City Hall Way. We didn't want anything to do with Ferdinand Waititu or Mike Sonko. Jimnah Mbaru was too keen by half and too short to make it past our ideals of a mwanasiasa. Evans Kidero ticked off all the superficial right boxes: well-read, well-spoken, tall, stellar (supposedly) business background, boatloads of cash and the right political party. It's been almost three and a half years since Mr Kidero took over a City Hall and his reign has been a disaster.

He has a few accomplishments to his name: the e-platform, security lights in the CBD and the efforts at Pumwani Maternity Hospital. By and large, however, Mr Kidero has failed and failed spectacularly. The mounds of garbage that simply refuse go away, the matatu madness that seems to grow worse every week and the collapsing residential buildings that seem to grow in scale - these are all on Mr Kidero's watch. No one trusts him any more to get to it right. So now Mr Sakaja joins the acerbic-tongued Miguna Miguna and the colourful Mike Sonko in the Kidero Must Go bandwagon. He will need sharper elbows than he has demonstrated so far.

If the allegations are true, it was a $2 million bribe that kept Ferdinand Waititu from City Hall. But Mr Waititu himself is no shrinking violet. The way he stomped on Mr Mbaru's ass during the TNA nominations was a thing of wonder. Sonko is no stranger to playing hardball as Ms Shebesh (and her husband) can painfully attest to. He may have attempted to rebrand himself, but Sonko is no gentleman when playing in the rough and tumble of siasa za Nairobi. Mr Miguna has yet to prove himself in an election; the last time he tried his hand at it was somewhere in Luo Nyanza where, depending on where you sit, the Odinga hypnosis was unbreakable or he was just too arrogant for the electorate who are pretty arrogant themselves. This colourful group is against whom that Mr Sakaja intends to run.

It remains unclear whether Mr Sakaja has the money, the muscle, the cunning, the ruthlessness and the asshole factor to prevail in Nairobi. He is smooth and he seems to have some money to his name, but whether he can finance the kind of rabid support that Sonko does or organised chaos that Waititu seems to favour or the ad-buys that Kidero definitely can remains a mystery. Can he spend more than a minute in the heart of Korogocho without turning up his nose? I don't know. Can he join The People as they wade across Nairobi's many rivers of shit on their way to work? Who knows? Does he have the stones to call a rival candidate a thief or a drug baron? Only time will tell. What is certain, though, is that he will need very sharp elbows and a way of throwing them that won't get him called out for it.