Criminals and outlaws

Under ordinary circumstances, bending the rules or breaking the law is the exception and not the rule. If you're driving down a one-way street, it is not normal to make a three-point turn into oncoming traffic. If certain steps must be completed before a public tender is awarded, it is not normal for the giver of the tender to skip any or all the steps before awarding the tender. If one is disposing of rubbish, it is not normal to dispose of the rubbish outside the bin or into a water body. In Kenya, these are not ordinary circumstance; bending the rules and breaking the law are not exceptional acts but habitual ones.

The best depiction of the normalisation of the abnormal in Kenya is by the matatu industry. Public transport is rarely the most profitable venture in Kenya. It directly and indirectly employs hundreds of thousands of Kenyans — crews, touts, mechanics, petrol station service providers, spare parts suppliers, bankers, lawyers, insurers and accountants. Matatus account for billions of shillings in investment, credit creation and value creation. These billions have turned the industry into an ecosystem. (In an ecosystem, there are predators, prey and scavengers.)

Once upon a time, the City Council of Nairobi operated the Kenya Bus Service, KBS. It is the KBS that had a monopoly of certain parts of the Nairobi Business District, especially the Central Bus Station off of Tom Mboya Street, the Ambassadeur Bus Stage along Moi Avenue and the KENCOM Bus Stage along City Hall Way. It operated other termini at Pumwani, Kangemi, Kawangware, Umoja and Dandora. It didn't enjoy a monopoly on public transport, but it had the best real estate in order to operate effectively.

Matatus, on the other hand, were confined to that zone known as "Commercial", bordered by Tom Mboya Street, Ronald Ngala Street, Ring Road, Kirinyaga Road and Murang'a Road. While the KBS operated a large fleet of scheduled, standard-sized buses that followed numbered routes, matatu owners tended to own one or two minibuses of varying designs and sizes that followed no schedule (and sometimes no set routes). "Commercial" was where you boarded your matatu if you cared little for the stodginess of the KBS, wanted to alight at non-designated places, enjoyed sub-woofer amplified dancehall, and didn't care if the matatu was overloaded or speeding. 

The Government of Kenya mirrored the public transport sector; some civil servants were the stodgy, play-by-the-rules KBS while others were the flashy and flamboyant matatu scofflaws, and this was starkly reflected in public institutions as well. And just as with the demise of the KBS and the takeover of the transport sector by the matatus, so too have the scofflaws captured the institutions of government, academia, the business sector and the civil society (including faith communities). The matatu culture pervades every part of our civic lives. It is almost expected of one to bend the rules or break the law because it is almost expected that little will be done about it. The offenders we punish the harshest are the ones least likely to affect the legitimacy of the Government we have; the offenders likely to receive the protection of the State and the adulation of the people are the ones who have turned our Government into a mirror of the matatu industry.

Chicken thieves, purse snatchers, burglars, armed robbers and murderers are quite often criminals. The corrupt in the highest echelons of the Government are almost always outlaws. You need to know the difference between criminals and outlaws if you are to understand the matatu-ness at the heart of our Government.

Just enforce the law

Three years ago, I advised you that to win the war on graft was simple in theory but hairy in practice. I advised you to simply enforce the laws we have on the books. I warned you that if you made Uhuru Kenyatta, President and Commander-in-Chief of the Defence Forces of Kenya, the anti-corruption warrior-in-chief, then the war against graft would be lost before the first shot was fired. I almost thought that I was wrong in the wake of the President's anti-corruption list of shame which he presented at the 2015 State of the Nation Address to a Joint Sitting of Parliament. As the State House Summit on Governance winds to a close, I offer my advice afresh: simply enforce the law that you have on the books.

Anti-corruption, in theory, can be tackled through the Anti-corruption and Economic Crimes Act, the Public Audit Act, the Public Procurement and Asset Disposal Act, the Leadership and Integrity Act, the Ethics and Anti-corruption Act, the Public Service Commission Act, the Commission on Administrative Justice Act and the Penal Code, the National Police Service Act and the Independent Policing Oversight Authority Act as well as the Banking Act, the Capital Markets Authority Act, the Income Tax Act and the Tax Procedures Act. The anti-corruption challenges we face have little to do with the legislative or institutional framework and everything to do with the enforcement or administration of the laws we have on our books — and the men and women we have entrusted with the authority to administer or enforce the law.

Corruption remains one of the principal reasons why the legitimacy of the government is in doubt. Whenever agents of the Executive are caught up in corrupt acts, grand and small, the exhortations of the Head of Government are taken as the "wink, wink" of an insider covering his butt by saying what the people want to hear. When judicial officers preside over the "disappearance" of files, which reappear at the production of a facilitation fee, the Chief Justice's declaration that Kenya is a bandit economy ring just a little bit hollow. When parliamentarians establish private companies in order to "win tenders" overseen by members of the Executive whom the parliamentarians are supposed to hold to account, the enquiries televised from parliamentary committees' chambers expose the lie that the people's representatives have the people's fiscal interests at heart.

A State House summit on governance will not address the legitimacy deficit. It has been three-and-a-half years since we elected the President and he formed his government. In three years one of the most profound revelations, for which little comment has been made, is that of multi-millionaire policemen for whom even the rudiments of legitimate paper trails escape them. We have witnessed the conflicts of interest among members of the Cabinet caught up in billion-shillings tenders-gone-awry. Judges have been accused of shamelessly soliciting bribes for favourable decisions. No arm of government has been spared and the higher the ranks one goes, the more putrid the stench from all the "eating" going on.

State House can address the deficit in its legitimacy by protecting those entrusted to administer or enforce the law from political interference — which has proven to be quite resilient. If a person wins their public office partly because the appointment is a calculated political or ethnic reward, the merits of the appointee's qualifications will not matter and their acts of omission and commission will almost always betray motivations other than the law. The law enforcement apparatus of this nation is riddled with cases of high appointments whose main justifications were political and ethnic balancing. These are not appointees who have the will to do their duty without fear or favour. These are appointees who are politically protected — not because of their good work but because of the political fallout if they are not. Unless that calculus changes, summits and parliamentary addresses are all that the President will have to show for his fight against corruption. No more.

The JSC continues to disappoint

Is the right to life the most important political, social or economic question likely to be faced by the Supreme Court of Kenya, let alone the Judiciary of Kenya, in the next five years? If your answer is "Yes" and your answer is informed to a large part with the "rights of the unborn child," then there is little rational discussion that you and I may hold on this subject. But if your answer, broadly speaking, is about the Bill of Rights and the lengths the judiciary should go to protect it as the executive attempts to restrict its application, then you have a better-than-average understanding of the proper relationship between the people, their government and their constitution.

It has been three weeks or so since the Judicial Service Commission undertook to interview and select for the president jurists whom they believe should be nominated or appointed to the Supreme Court, including in the position of Chief Justice and Deputy Chief Justice. Except for a selected few, some with deeply vested interests and other because they are committed to demystifying the Government of Kenya, the discussion of the interviews has neither been well-informed nor well-reported. What little we have been able to glean of what the Commission has been looking for has done little to persuade me that we have a truly paradigmatic understanding of our government or our constitution. The Commission, sadly, continues to disappoint.

One of the questions that has been raised by the Commission over and over has been that of abortion and whether interviewees would or would not "permit abortion." This has to be the stupidest and laziest enquiry that has been mounted by the Commission and it is a shame that it has not been extended to its logical conclusion. I say is stupid and lazy because it is no more than a parroting of what passes for debate in the United States in its never ending culture wars.

In Kenya, the question is easily settled. Abortion is not permitted unless, in the opinion of a trained medical profession, there is need for emergency treatment, or the life or health of the mother is in danger, or if permitted by any other written law. That is the sum and substance of Article 26(4) of the Constitution. Whether or not judges will permit abortion is neither here nor there; the Constitution permits it in four specific circumstances. Until Parliament rouses itself to address the final circumstance ("...or if permitted by any other written law"), theoretical disquisitions by judges being interviewed by the Commission are useless. It is sad that the law professors in the Commission did not grasp this simple truism.

On the Bill of Rights, however, a missed opportunity revealed more than met the eye. Under Dr Willy Mutunga's tenure as the Chief Justice, the judiciary was overwhelmed by political disputes that seemed urgent at the time but were quite intellectually pedestrian when examined in the light of foresight. If David Maraga is confirmed as Dr Mutunga's successor, perhaps his judiciary will have the opportunity to tackle truly important questions, especially on the limits of executive powers in the context of the Bill of Rights. 

 

The executive has been prodding, over the past five years, whether or not Kenyans are prepared to push back against the insidious abrogation of the Bill of Rights. The most obvious is the national Police Service and the escalating extra-judicial killings of criminal suspects. But it is in the expansion of the mandates of state agencies, such as the Kenya Film Classification Board, that the judiciary shall eventually be called on to adjudicate and determine whether such expansions are constitutional or not. If the Commission had pursued an examination of the judges' ideologies regarding the proper power of the executive in the context of the Bill of Rights, Kenyans might have had a better picture of whether or not the judiciary, as seen through the mindsets of the interviewees, was a friend of the people or a friend of the State. That would have been a more useful discourse.

Do you need psychiatric help?

Any person who, owing allegiance to the Republic, in Kenya or elsewhere—

(a) compasses, imagines, invents, devises or intends—

(i) the death, maiming or wounding, or the imprisonment or restraint, of the President; or
(ii) the deposing by unlawful means of the President from his position as President or from the style, honour and name of Head of State and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Kenya; or
(iii) the overthrow by unlawful means of the Government; and

(b) expresses, utters or declares any such compassings, imaginations, inventions, devices or intentions by publishing any printing or writing or by any overt act or deed,

is guilty of the offence of treason. - Section 40, the Penal Code (Cap. 63, laws of Kenya)

A charge of treason has two elements, if it is to be sustained at prosecution: a person must (a) compass, imagine, invent, device or intend a treasonous act, and (b) express, utter or declare the compassing, imagining, inventing, devising or intending of the treasonous act. 

I have highlighted one of the treasonous acts; the deposing by unlawful means of the President. It is described in the alternative: it is either deposing the President from (a) his position as President or (b) the style, honour and name of Head of State and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Kenya.

The Senator of Nairobi has been accused of treason (or a treasonous act) by certain members of the Bar and the Director of Public Prosecutions has directed the Inspector-General of Police to investigate the conduct and utterances of the Senator because it has come to the attention of the DPP that the Senator has engaged in disruptive conduct and uttered words to the effect that he is the acting President of the Republic of Kenya. The DPP, however, does not accuse the Senator of treason; he merely thinks that the Senator's conduct is disruptive; he has no opinion on the utterances of the Senator. The highlighted words are the ones most likely to be applied against the Senator if the Inspector-General investigates him for, or the DPP charges him with, treason. But are they apposite?

Did Mike Sonko, eponymous and colourful, depose Uhuru Kenyatta by unlawful means from (a) his position as President or (b) the style, honour and name of Head of State and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Kenya? Were Mike Sonko's words treasonous as some lawyers have suggested and was his behaviour disruptive as the DPP has implied? The most common definition of treason is  

"the crime of betraying one's country, especially by attempting to kill the [sovereign] or overthrow the government" 

and that of disruptive is  

"causing or tending to cause disruption" 

and includes behavior that may be characterised as "troublesome, unruly, rowdy, disorderly or wild." These are not characterisations that can be applied against Mr Sonko if what the video shows is the whole picture.

The reactions to Mr Sonko's utterances betray the lack of proportion in our politics, especially when one takes into account the depths of sycophancy inherent in a system that is built on a considerable degree of patronage. It explains why the loudest brown-nosers are the ones who have taken the greatest umbrage at the utterances of the colourful senator. The presidency did not lose face simply because Mr Sonko uttered a provably false statement; that ship sailed a few decades ago when a sitting president wondered aloud

If you go to Fred Kubai’s home, he has a big house and nice shamba. What have you done for yourself? We were together with Kungu Karumba in prison and now he runs his own business…Kaggia! What have you done for yourself?

The presidency will survive Mr Sonko's utterances. The Republic will not fall because the Senator has an unruly tongue. Perhaps it is time we asked whether treason need be defined as it is in the Penal Code today. Perhaps it is time we examined what it means to elect the most colourful and most politic among us. Perhaps it is time we challenged the rule that says no one can say mean things out the president without things getting out of hand. If you think that Mr Sonko's utterances should be punished by his being hanged by the neck until dead, you have serious issues. You need psychiatric help.

The US was never great

Donald J Trump wants to Make America Great Again (#MAGA) and, in his and his supporters' minds, America was great when Blacks were subjected to the most humiliating rules designed to subjugate their bodies, minds and spirits. In Mr Trump, racists and racialists, sexists and misogynists, have a hero they can be proud of. In Mr Trump, I am shocked to say, some Blacks have a "conservative" hero they can be proud of. You would be shocked too to discover that Kenya also has Blacks who think that Donald J Trump is a man to emulate.

There is a section of Kenyan Blacks who see themselves as greater than their sisters and brothers, superior in the mould of the British settler and colonialist. Some are wealthy, their wealth having been earned Quisling-like in the sixty odd years that the Union Jack flew over the Kenya Colony and the Kenya Protectorate along the Ten-Mile Coastal Strip. Some became wealthy from their proximity to the government, whether the colonial one or the post-colonial ones. Some have become wealthy from corrupt dealings with and facilitated by officers of the Government. Their wealth has persuaded them that they are superior breeds, and their superiority, in their minds, equates them to the odious Donald J Trump.

White Kenyans have always believed that they were a superior breed. The ones whose ancestors settled this country and who continue to own property in this country believe that without them or the sacrifices of their forebears, Kenyans would still be living in bushes, eating god-knows-what, uncivilised, unlettered, backward, barbaric. The are irredeemable. But Black Kenyans who espouse the same philosophy, the same ethos, should shock us. Yet it doesn't. Because some of us aspire to the same attitudes that great Kenyan wealth seems to imbue the wealthy.

It is time to remind them that the Unites States of America, so long as it subjugated its Blacks and the Native Americans, so long as it continued to unleash death and destruction in the name of anti-communism, freedom and democracy, so long as it poisoned its waters and air with chemical and radiological weapons, and so long as it continued to treat women and women's bodies as playgrounds for the moral majority, was never great. It was small. Small-minded and petty. It might have been incredibly wealth, but as 2007/2008 demonstrated when the global economy seized up, banks failed, and US homes got repossessed by mortgage companies, US wealth is built on an incredible lie, that one can postpone the settlement of his debts in perpetuity.

In the spawning of the desecrable Donald J Trump, the scales have fallen off the world's eyes and the truth has been revealed: the United States is not great and it never was. The United States is a racist, racialist, misogynist, sexist, war-mongering, war-profiteering, conman. Any Black Kenyan who wants to be Donald J Trump is a racist, racialist, misogynist, sexist, war-mongering, war-profiteering, conman who hates himself as much as he hates his fellow Blacks.

Donald J Trump is not a buffoon as many of us wish he was. He is a warning. If we don't heed it, Kenya is doomed.

The mirror of Uhuru

On Saturday, 26th August 2016, the Second Republic celebrated its sixth year but you wouldn't know it because not even the 26 invited heads of state who were trying to ink deals with Tokyo were told of it. If you looked at the Lancaster House constitution that Kenya built its independence governments under and the one Kenyans promulgated on 27th August, 2010, you would think that we were in two different worlds. And you would be wrong.

From a constitutional and statutory perspective, the differences between 1963/64 and 2016 are profound. On paper, at least, Kenya has term-limited presidents, no one-party Stalinist cults of personality, a decentralised (devolved) government, a bicameral parliament, an independent judiciary, an honest and effective public service, free primary education or primary healthcare, and a booming economy, which it did not have in 1964. That paper is, however, worthless in the light of the realities of the day.

They might not be overtly Stalinist, but whether one is affiliated with the ruling party or the opposition, cults of personality are back with a vengeance, if they ever left at all. In recent days, the doyen of the opposition has raised serious doubts about what is known as the Grand Collector Tunnel. An acolyte of the ruling party declared, tongue-in-cheek, that if Raila Odinga praised his house, he would burn it to the ground because he couldn't trust that what Mr Odinga said was said in good faith.

Government may have been devolved but instead of bringing out the best among the Governors and elected representatives serving in county assemblies, what we have witnessed is the localisation of great corruption. Bungoma county purchased wheelbarrows at $1,000 apiece. Murang'a county paid a consultant $20,000 to open social media accounts for members of the county executive. The speaker of Embu county was kidnapped for being suspected in the attempted impeachment of the Governor of Kiambu.

The civil service is no longer trusted to be honest; the national police remains one of the most mistrusted civil service organisations in the Government while the Ministries of Energy, Land, and Transport continue to be roiled by their own corruption firestorms. The recent vetting of candidates for the offices of Chief Justice, Deputy Chief Justice and Judge of the Supreme Court were as a result of interconnected claims of graft against the judiciary, especially against a retired judge of the Supreme Court.

Primary healthcare continues to be humiliated by the procession of international celebrities, putting money into our begging bowl, highlighting that maternal and child mortality at birth continue to stalk the land like colossi. Free education, you say? It is only free when someone ;else is paying for it and the shenanigans surrounding the laptops-for-tots continue to cast a long dark shadow over the sector.

The only difference between 2016 and 1963 is in the players and the veneer of technological advancement. In the respects that matter, little has changed. It should give us pause that more than fifty years after Uhuru, we are yet to stare into the mirror and acknowledge that we fail ourselves everyday thieves, pederasts, murderers and the corrupt walk free.

The Worst Airline in the World

I remember the first time I boarded a Qantas 747. It was my one and only journey to the Antipodes. I was excited as hell. I hated the OR Tambo transit lounge. It was comfy, don't get me wrong, but South Africans take passive aggression to ridiculous heights. I don't think I want to ttravel through OR Tambo ever again; twice seems to have been enough for me. The Qantas experience, however, was awesome.

A little background is in order, though. It was the middle of a cold July and my annual debilitating flu was back with a vengeance. My upper lip was covered in the ghastliest cold sores this side of that little horror from the Lord of the Rings movies. I was coughing up a phlegmy storm and my nose was permanently runny. Sydney was a week or so away from the end of winter so I wasn't going to have a nicer time of it over there as over here.

Those who know me know that sartorial elegance is something I read about in GQ magazine and practice more in the breach. To manage my flu, I had managed to resurrect a hideous leather jacket from my Law School days, a truly ratty pair of jeans, my trusted sweater and a make-shift scarf that I thank my mother for every day the chill gets out of hand. Oh, and a truly nauseating balaclava for my scalp. I looked like an Eritrean undocumented immigrant hiding out in Kilimani or something. It was not a pretty sight.

On the KQ down south, you could feel the disdain with which the KQ cabin crew held me in. When the purser did a double take as  I boarded and gave me that second, hard stare, I didn't think much of it. But when it became almost impossible to get the water refills I needed to stave off medical disaster, I knew it was my shambolic look that had put them off service to me. I put it down to my generally leper-like look. Who wants to be infected by the typhus virus fro one of their passengers, right? I have, by the by, hated KQ ever since.

Qantas cabin crews, on the other hand, were awesome. I was sequestered in the last seat in the massive 747. I had leg room and that was all that mattered after the cramped interior of the KQ B737. But every time I beeped them for water, the Qantas crew were on hand. When they noticed the cold sores, they didn't recoil in horror but were solicitous about the copious amounts of tea that they plied me with in the course of that night flight. They didn't necessarily make me feel special but they didn't make me feel like the Typhoid Mary of East Africa either. I have loved Qantas ever since.

My experience with KQ has never been a good one. Delayed flights. Soggy meals. Cramped cabins. Unfriendly crews. Horrid, horrid, horrid. When the gods finally allow me to win that Mombasa County uji tender, I will try with all my might to fly with any airline but KQ. When it is finally liquidated to pay off its debts, I will dance a jig on the ashes of the Worst Airline in the World.

A very revealing interview

Q. Is Kenya winning or losing the war against al Shabaab, in your view?

A. We're winning the war in Kenya. We're winning the war in Kenya because we've deployed a lot of resources, we've done a lot of capacity-building, we have trained personnel in the security sector, we have bought a lot of equipment including surveillance equipment. We're better co-ordinated. So we're better at preventing attacks than we ever were. — Al Jazeera, UpFront

Mehdi Hassan is not a cuddly interviewer; he reminds me a bit of Tim Sebastian when he hosted BBC Hardtalk. He is relentless and when one of his interviewees is unable to respond with finesse, he can be quite snarky. The above exchange is between Mr Hassan and Kenya's Cabinet Secretary for Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Amina Mohamed. It was a train wreck for the Cabinet Secretary, who has been nominated by the government she serves to be the next president of the African Union Commission.

It isn't a simple question but the answer is revealing. Rather than highlight how Kenyans are safer because of Kenya's antiterrorism efforts, the Cabinet Secretary focussed on what the Government had done to improve its antiterror capability, completely ignoring the fact (highlighted by Mr Hassan) that in the five years since Operation: Linda Nchi, Kenya had suffered nine times more terrorist attacks than before.

This isn't as surprising as it sounds. The nabobs of Kenya have always led a charmed life, protected by the best elements of the Kenyan securocracy. In the late 1980s, as violent crime and burglary became commonplace, Kenyans also fell prey to the predation of the securocracy, a predation that had been nurtured by almost two decades of Special Branch midnight knocks. Nowadays, the pretense that the securocracy exists for the safety of the people and the security of the nation has been jettisoned and it is now almost openly acknowledged that the securocracy exists for the sole purpose of keeping our modern-day maharajahs in power.

Al Shabaab and, before it, al Qaeda are not really interested in deposing the government of the day or even fomenting fullscale insurrection among disaffected Kenyans; they are only interested in punishing the government for interfering in their plans and by supporting the United States in its Global War on Terror. The United States government is interested in the surveillance of terror networks; it has already come to the sad conclusion that it cannot stop the likes of al Qaeda, al Shabaab or the Islamic State. So it has enlisted frontline states, like Kenya, in its scheme to place under surveillance the whole world, and our nabobs, keen to get their grubby hands on US greenbacks, have gone along like the tame pets they have always proven to be.

So it comes as no surprise that the Cabinet Secretary for Foreign Affairs will not think of success from the perspective of the safety of the people or the security of the nation, but from things that revolve, intimately so, around security tenders. Even if Mr Hassan had treated Ms Mohammed with kid gloves, it is almost certain that the interview would still have revealed the utter heartlessness that drives the Kenya security establishment.

Matatus are not the (only) problem

A few years ago, when the gods of the public service were feeling super-philanthropic, I stayed in two Australian cities, Sydney and Perth, and had the good fortune of being showered with taxicab vouchers by my hosts because they thought I was a good egg. Or something. Funny thing, though: I took a taxicab only once and only because I was on my way to the airport and couldn't figure out where to catch the bus from where I was staying at the time.

 

Perth

What struck me about the public transport infrastructure in both New South Wales and Western Australia was how un-fussy it was. Both cities had commuter trains, buses and taxicabs. But it went further than that too. The road design integrated all road users, including private motorists, motorcyclists, commercial transporters, bicyclists and, crucially, pedestrians. The infrastructure was organised in such a way that it was accessible, predictable and safe.

 

Sydney

I have had the privilege of living in Nairobi most of my life and of having stayed in Mombasa, Malindi, Kisumu, Machakos and Nakuru. What is certain is that the public infrastructure in these five towns is not accessible, predictable or safe. The recent fatal crash on the Magadi Road from the Bomas of Kenya to the Republic of Rongai illustrate this fact starkly. The problem is not that matatus are a law unto themselves; the problem is that the system is not designed to operate as efficiently, effectively or safely as possible. It is designed to make a fast shilling in the shortest possible time, safety be damned.

Sydney

Public transport in the cities of Perth and Sydney are publicly-funded transport systems. They lose money, for sure, but both New South Wales and Perth are wealthy enough to subsidise the public transport system. Because they're publicly-funded, they are much easier to regulate. In both cities buses are of a standard design, operate at a standard speed (40kph), have dedicated lanes along some routes and are safe and predictable.

If we are to "restore sanity in the transport sector" as some have suggested, a few hard questions must be asked. Do the county governments of Nairobi City, Mombasa, Kisumu, Machakos, Kilifi or Nakuru have the capital to not only nationalise the public transport sector but also to subsidise it once the cities and towns are in charge? Second, do the county governments have the capital to redesign the public transport infrastructure to incorporate all users effectively and safely? Finally, what will the county governments do with the ensuing joblessness in the public transport sector once they nationalise public transport?

The challenges we face in public transport in Kenya are complex mix of the liberal politics of the early 1990s in which many public sectors were liberalised or privatised, including public transport, economic austerity that drastically reduced the total amount of public investment in such areas as public transport, the explosion of the car-owning classes without a commensurate expansion in the facilities available to them and a toxic mix of bribe-givers and bribe-takers, especially when it came to the enforcement of "petty" laws such as the Traffic Act.

Contrary to popular myth, John Michuki didn't improve the safety or reputation of the public transport sector; he used a bandaid to stanch the haemorrhage. His draconian measures only concerned one aspect of public transport: matatus and their crews. But because it was not an integrated solution covering all the aspects of public transport, it was bound to fail. The Magadi Road fatalities and the riots that they generated are Mr Michuki's true legacy. Until we confront all the challenges the sector faces, not even the most draconian penalties will make the system better. So far, Evans Kidero, Ali Hassan Joho, Alfred Mutua, Jack Ranguma, Amason Kingi and Kinuthia Mbugua, and their enablers in the national government, James Macharia and Joseph Nkaissery, have yet to grasp the enormity of the challenges or to do anything about them.

Is your mind already lost?

Children should not watch pornography. They shouldn't witness beheadings, torture (both physical and emotional), murder, rape, assaults of all kinds, the glorification of wealth, the celebration of aberrant sexual fantasies, (cigarette, pipe, cigar) smoking, alcohol consumption...the list of things that children should be protected from is long and the younger a child is the greater the protection should be. 

The Constitution places the principal responsibility for the protection of children on their parents, but, for sure, the Government has interest in the protection of children as do their other relatives and other social institutions such as their schools and places of worship. Anyone who wants to harm children must be stopped. Anyone who harms children must be punished.

This seems plain enough. Yet, if the campaign by the chief executive officer of the Kenya Film Classification Board, Kenya's onetime film censorship board, is anything to go by, the protection of children seems to have taken a quite a turn into the unknown.

Kenya's constitutional order attempts a delicate balancing act between individual rights and the needs of the many. Those charged with the protection of our fundamental rights and freedoms have more often than not erred in favour of the needs of the many — as determined by the all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful State. The eponymous CEO of the KFCB is but just one manifestation of the all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful State, a throwback to the days when Kenya was a single-party "democracy", what you read, watched, listened to, said, published or filmed was severely circumscribed and where any threat against the all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful State always — ALWAYS — ended up in the State's favour.

The KFCB, through its CEO, will brook no challenges in its campaign to protect our children and if it means that it will stretch its understanding of its mandate to the limits of intellectual and statutory elasticity, step on toes big and small, push the constitutional envelop way beyond the edge of reason or reasonableness, then that is what the KFCB's eponymous CEO will do and he will wear it as a badge of honour every time the atheists and pornographers and lesbians and homosexuals rail and cavil against his crusade. After all, he is doing it for the sake of the children, isn't he? It hasn't occurred to him yet that his attitude towards us treats us all like children. And that is the foundation of our problems with him.

The adults who exercised their suffrage to endorse a constitution in August 2010 did so knowing and believing that they were making a complete break with the past, a past in which the rights of the individual had been utterly at the mercy of the State — there were no collective rights. The State was mighty and it was always right; the individual was only fit for labour, taxation and in certain extreme situations, torture and execution. Individuals didn't have the right to read what they wanted, to educate their children as they saw fit, to access information at their own will or to propagate both information and knowledge to all those willing to listen. If the State and its system of eavesdroppers and censors deemed it "unsafe" there was little n individual could do but bend their knee and slink away in shame or invite the Nyati House boys with their electrodes and water hoses. The adults who voted in 2010 wanted to be free.

The KFCB and its boosters live in a world in which benevolent dictatorships always do what is in the best interest of the individual, including raising and educating the individual's children. The individual is a fool, easily swayed by different ideas, easily captured by malign proposals, easily tempted by the aberrant. The individual, in the name of the children, must be shielded from harm. Always. Forever. The individual must be protected from himself. If you believe — nay, know — that the KFCB and its CEO have your interests at heat, then your mind is already lost.