How much money does your church make?

How much money does your church make? How much of that money goes to sustaining the church leadership to the style they are increasingly becoming used to? Have you blessed your church leadership with a holiday in Barbados of late? Shopping trips to Dubai, then? You did, at least, make sure that the church leadership does not schlep in PSV hell, didn't you?

I like the example that the Christ lived. Only the best was good enough for the Son of Man. Only untold luxuries were required for the Prince of Peace. If the Son of God ate, He had to eat the best dates, figs and lamb that could be found in Galilee. Had he been born in the twenty-first century, the pony he rode into Jerusalem for his trials and tribulations would have been a Rolls-Royce Phantom and the modern-day Pontius Pilate would have been seven self-important, self-aggrandizing, black-robed Judges of the Supreme Court. (He would be acquitted of all charges, of course, throwing the case into the hands of Pokot bandits, or some such shit.)

You know as well as I do that God doesn't listen to the unwashed, unkempt, unlettered, poor masses; God has His ears only for the man with the fattest wallet and the woman who consorts with him as his, uhmmmm, helpmeet...or something. That's why when Jesus issued the Great Commission it had a secret protocol: in addition to making disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you, please amass great wealth by any means necessary because no one goes to the Father unless they have a big-assed trunk of gold and shit.

If your church doesn't make enough money to acquire land and hospitals and bus companies and shares and stocks and houses and Rolls-Royces and Gulfstream 550s, you are certainly going to hell. Don't squander your money in gambling dens and houses of ill-repute like the pastor; give it all to the church. Every last penny is a seed that God shall multiply for your pastor - and for you, when the time is right and so long as you keep the faith. Yes, dear child, the fifty thousand that you hand over to apostle pastor doctor bishop will one day manifest itself in your life as a Rolls-Royce parked next your Range Rover outside your Kitisuru mansion with the hidden hangar in which nestles your Bell Jetranger helicopter.

Yeah, so how much does your church make?

On the Laikipian "invasions" (again)

This deadly convulsion is an escalation of what has been an untreated low-grade fever with the proliferation of arms among pastoralists, an almost certainty for the outbreak of deadly violence. (Daily Nation, Underlying factors in Laikipia crisis)

This sentence distresses me. It was written by the President of the Law Society. It is written with the confidence of the lawyer opining on a matter beyond his ken. It is written with little thought as to its inherent bias against the pastoralist. It is written to reinforce the unspoken rule: Pastoralists are backward and don't deserve official recognition as legitimate members of our society.

"...with the proliferation of arms among pastoralists" is treated as the spark that lights the tinder of the "low-grade fever". This "fever", kind people, are "[H]istorical grievances linked to access to animal grazing and water rights and land ownership and use..." No, sir. The proliferation of small arms is not the reason why violence was all but guaranteed. Indeed, the proliferation of small arms is snot the reason why there has been an escalation. The proliferation of small arms was inevitable in the Laikipian plains but it wasn't the reason that the force of arms have come to bear on the Laikipian plains during this drought.

No, sir. They are not "historical grievances". They are historical injustices. No matter how you paint the picture, the Laikipian plains tell the story of peoples that were dispossessed of their land and the dispossession enforced by, yes, the force of arms wielded by legitimate and illegitimate governments for more than a century. Take away their "small arms" and watch them fashion "crude" weapons and carry on the fight.

The "outbreak of the deadly violence" is simply not because every Moran and his uncle has an AK-47. It is because though the Moran is not the only one who was dispossessed, he is one of the very few who's culture was never respected, whose history was buried in English archives and forgotten, whose culture was appropriated by strangers for monetary profit, and whose land is now occupied by tourists, filthy towns and strangers' heads of cattle. The Moran is a stranger in his own land. Arms or no arms, violence was inevitable.

Our identity as a free people is a farce if a people were dispossessed of their land and vilified by their very own government and public institutions as "invaders" and "bandits".

Mr Mwangi is no lawyer

Rhetoric and hyperbole form the main oratorical tools of politicians seeking public office. The grander their verbal theatrics, the theory goes, the better they connect with their constituencies and the likelier they are to get elected (or appointed) to high office. In Nairobi's Starehe Constituency, Boniface Mwangi is seeking to be elected as its representative in the national Assembly in the 2017 general election. As part of his against-the-establishment persona that he has cultivated with impressive vigour since 2012, Mr Mwangi makes the following allegation,

The Kenya constitution forbids Cabinet secretaries from political party activities.The people supposed to uphold the laws are breaking them. @bonifacemwangi

He had earlier declared with authority that,

A cabinet secretary taking part in a political rally is illegal.President @UKenyatta the cabinet officers at your rally are breaking the law. @bonifacemwangi 

The law is not clear-cut. The provisions of Chapter Six of the Constitution on leadership and integrity and Articles 152 and 153 of the Constitution are silent on whether or not Cabinet Secretaries (and their counterparts in the county government, Members of County Executive Committees) are forbidden from taking part "political party activities" or in "political rallies". The Leadership and Integrity Act (No. 19 of 2012) provides at section  23 for the political neutrality of State officers and public officers. It states that

(1) An appointed State officer, other than a Cabinet Secretary or a member of a County executive committee shall not, in the performance of their duties—

(a) act as an agent for, or further the interests of a political party or candidate in an election; or

(b) manifest support for or opposition to any political party or candidate in an election.

(2) An appointed State officer or public officer shall not engage in any political activity that may compromise or be seen to compromise the political neutrality of the office subject to any laws relating to elections.

(3) Without prejudice to the generality of subsection (2) a public officer shall not—

(a) engage in the activities of any political party or candidate or act as an agent of a political party or a candidate in an election;

(b) publicly indicate support for or opposition against any political party or candidate participating in an election.

This section of the law has not been subjected to the interpretation of the High Court which is the only institution charged with the responsibility of interpreting the Constitution. For example, does sub-section (1) mean that CSs and MCECs can "act as an agent for, or further the interests of a political party or candidate in an election" or are they prohibited as "public officers", in terms of sub-section (3), from "engag[ing] in the activities of any political party or candidate or act[ing] as an agent of a political party or a candidate in an election"?

Mr Mwangi has many virtues. Being a lawyer is not one of them. Being a constitutional lawyer is definitely not one of them. He should stop pretending that he possesses definitive authority on knotty politico-legal questions that are yet to be definitively determined.

#CreativeKE and #Cap222Review

Dear #CreativeKE,

I write to you on the question of the review of the Films and Stage Plays Act, chapter 222 of the laws of Kenya. I have followed some of the debate on the matter and I fear that the Kenya Film Classification Board and its chief executive officer are driving the discourse in an unhealthy direction.

When the KFCB was established, it was established as a censorship board, not a classification board, and its mandate, principally, was to control the exhibition of films that the political leadership could have found sensitive. It performed its mandate not by banning films but by requesting "excisions" of the "cinematographs" that would protect the sensibilities of the political leadership. As part of its mandate, it was also responsible for the licensing of cinemas and the authorisation of film posters, another way in which it could control (on behalf of the political leadership) who could see a film and whether or not any person could find out about a film through its posters.

After 2003, censorship was out and classification was in. But even in that guise, it was becoming apparent that KFCB was long past its "sell by" date; online content and online streaming were near-impossible to regulate and television was and still is the exclusive preserve of the Communications Authority (and its predecessor, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting). KFCB has no mandate to regulate broadcasters; even in the regulation of the "watershed period", KFCB's role is limited to the classification of films that are intended to be broadcast on television and no more.

The Ministry of Culture, through its Department of Film Services, is responsible for licensing and accrediting foreign and local filmmakers shooting films in Kenya, not the KFCB. It is important to remember that the Department of Film Services does not license or accredit where films may be shot in Kenya. When it comes to the question of where to shoot films, it were local authorities that regulated this activity and, post-2013, county governments, not the KFCB. As an added wrinkle, post-2010, the Fourth Schedule to the Constitution (Part 2, paragraph 4(d)), county governments have powers over cinemas too, which might supersede the KFCB's powers to regulate cinemas under cap. 222.

These are some of the issues that you must consider before engaging with the KFCB as a maker of policy.

The KFCB is caught in a time warp. When it was established and when its mandate was revised between 1997 and 2002, technology underwent a revolution. The advent of the Digital Revolution meant that the producers and dissemination of film no longer had to rely on cinemas or television nor did they need to produce content in Kenya in order for that content to be viewed in Kenya. Many of the tools at their disposal are communications technologies for which the Communications Authority is still trying to regulate effectively. It's jurisdiction over broadcasters and communications companies means that it can regulate where and how these companies operate but it might find it impossible to control what they disseminate.

The current system where the KFCB must review a film before it is shown in cinemas or broadcast on television affects a very small segment of the content available to Kenyans. The majority of content is now produced for dissemination through the internet and other digital tools over which the technology is far ahead of the capacity of regulators to regulate. It is why, for example, that the Constitution provides that the control of pornography is a function of county governments and not the national government, because the county government has a better chance of regulating who can sell content, to whom and where.

An area that should be explored regarding the protection of consumers, including vulnerable consumers such as children, from harmful content is the role of consumer rights organisations (who form part of civil society). A healthy relationship between them and associations of content producers can identify areas of common ground, such as how to identify content that might be harmful and agreeing on guidelines to be used to prevent that content from either being produced or disseminated to the vulnerable. The model used by the United States incorporates ratings by the Motion Picture Association of America and the application of the TV Parental Guidelines. Co-operation between content producers, federal and state regulators, consumer watchdogs and parents' associations has, in the light of US constitutional protections, evolved to provide relevant information to consumers of content to enable them to make informed decisions about what content to expose their children to.

Finally, regarding the question of encouraging investment in content production, again, this is not a role that the KFCB as a film-certification body can effectively perform. Financiers and content-producers look to a return on their investment by reducing overall costs of production and increasing profit margins by lowering or eliminating taxes (or claiming tax rebates). These are policy decisions best made by the National Treasury, the revenue authorities and county governments, with financiers, content producers, exhibitors, broadcasters, distributors and performers as key stakeholders. The Kenya Film Commission, whose mandate includes facilitating investment in film projects is better placed to perform this role than the KFCB.

I believe that a review of cap. 222 is long overdue. The ideal revision would be a separation of film and theatre to begin with; both rely on vastly different technologies and facilities. Second, a simplified regulatory environment would improve regulatory activity; the fewer the regulators, the higher the chance for regulatory compliance. In this case, given the split mandate between national and county governments, focus should be on standards that can be effectively implemented at county level. Third, incentivising investment will mean the reduction of licenses and permit by the elimination of many. A one-stop shop for certification, broadcasting, exhibition and production should be the long-term plan for the sector. Finally, regulatory enforcement should take into account not just the needs of investors but consumers as well and thus the involvement of consumer watchdogs should be incorporated, especially in the area of content rating, classification, broadcast, exhibition and distribution.

I hope these thoughts offer insight.

Land hunger and historical injustice (Cont'd)

This is what I have said,

If you keep looking at Laikipia as a "tourism and [wildlife] conservation" investment destination, then you will continue to miss the most important question of the century: how will you solve Kenyans' land hunger if you don't resolve historical land injustice? ~ Land hunger and historical injustice

I think I should carry on in this vein.

The Laikipian "invasions" are by well-armed herders with thousands of head of cattle looking for water and pasture. The most important of the victims of the Laikipian "invasions" are "investors" who occupy tens of thousands of acres of land and engage in raising livestock, conservation and tourism-related enterprises, such as safari lodges. The "invaders" have left their homes in the care of wives, mothers, sisters, children and old men. They have also left behind large herds of sheep and goats, ignored the gerontocracy that eschews violence, and travelled to the Laikipian plains in the full knowledge that what they are engaged in is unlawful and that is why they are armed to the teeth with assault rifles. That is the short of it.

Let us look at how an injustice of historical proportions is reducible to a sweeping generalisation about the benevolence of non-native investor-rancher-conservationists and the black-hearted malignant intents of invaders engaged in "[g]risly [ ] rituals of warrior status involving big game, long since extirpated in their own land".

The legacy of the "native reserves" has never been addressed; inadequate solutions like "settlement schemes" in the 1970s and 1980s only served to exacerbate the situations; communities that had been driven off ancestral lands were never permitted to return. One of the most tragic institutions in the 1970s and the early 1980s was the wildlife department in the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources that became the rubber-stamp for post-colonial evictions of entire communities from ancestral and community land in the name of environmental or wildlife conservation, such as the removal of the Endorois from the land surrounding Lake Bogoria in the mid-1970s and the eviction and transportation of the Ngulia from what became Tsavo West Nation Park, not once, not twice, not thrice but four times. In both instances, tourist lodges catering for the appetites of foreign tourists were established, too expensive for either the Endorois or the Ngulia to patronise but benevolent enough to give their children menial jobs in the kitchen or in the field as gardeners, car-washers, "entertainers" and bush guides.

The land, for the Endorois or the Ngulia, wasn't simply for the production of food or for use s capital in commercial enterprises; the land held a special spiritual place in their hearts and their culture (cultures that have been attacked by many of those who see land in strictly economic or commercial terms as barbaric, outdated and evil).

"Native reserves" and the colonial policies that sustained them have survived three post-colonial administrations. It is why the third post-colonial administration fought tooth and nail to deny that the first and second administrations had not, for all intents and purposes, attempted the socio-cultural genocide of the Endorois. Land is useful only as a means of production. The end! It has no intrinsic, religious or cultural value. It must be protected from even its true owners.

One of the more pernicious uses of the "native reserves" was to keep its inmates (yes, they were treated as prisoners) ignorant, uninformed and uneducated. The "education" the inmates received was just enough for them to hire out their labour as shamba boys and kitchen totos (look it up). Today, this "education" is sufficient for the vast majority of them to hire out their labour as shamba boys, herdsmen, "cultural dancers", watchmen and members of armed militia sponsored by political actors with axes to grind with Kenya's post-colonial landed gentry. An entire civil service (as well as a military service) exist solely to ensure that the "natives" don't exceed their boundaries: look at the shambolic state of the public education and healthcare system and tell me this isn't true. (And the likes of Bridge Academies are no panacea to widespread miseducation, and critical lack of critic thinking skills.)

I wasn't wrong. Laikipia has been in the making since 1896. If we refuse to learn the proper lessons from our history, the blood-red symbolism in our national flag will take on a whole new significance.

Land hunger and historical injustice

Europeans arrived and built a railway in Kenya in roughly 1900.

The Laikipia treaty in 1904 moved a few thousand Maasai to southern Kenya...If Laikipia is one million acres, there is approximately 500,000 in private hands in ranches and conservancies that encourage wildlife.

The Star, Voice from the Grave: Tristan Voorspuy puts Laikipia invasions into perspective

If you can read these sentences without your sense of history being assailed, then you are a lost soul.

Between the establishment of the Imperial British East Africa Company and the lowering of the Union Jack sixty-seven years later, the territory that came to be known as the Kenya Colony was invaded by citizens of Great Britain, many of whom were granted immunity of prosecution whilst allowing them the right to raise taxes, impose custom duties, administer justice and make treaties.

Many of the peoples of the Kenya Colony were herded, like livestock, onto "native reserves" where their "native rights" could be "recognised" by both the Imperial British East Africa Company and its successor the Colonial Government.

The peoples of the Kenya Colony had no choice in these matters; the "charter" granted to the Imperial British East Africa Company and the royal ordnance that established the Kenya Colony made no reference to the existing political arrangements except, perhaps, to determine them to be of an inferior quality, ripe for extermination and, in the words of the late Mr Voorspuy, extirpation.

The seeds of the Laikipia "invasions" were planted over a century ago, nurtured by a trading company, a colonial government, and successive post-colonial administrations that refused to grasp the stinging nettle that were "historical land injustices" but instead entrenching colonial-era systems that dispossessed entire ethnic communities, rewarded political loyalists and protected unfair arrangements between colonial era land barons and the landless.

Mr Voorspuy's death is tragic and so are the deaths of the unnamed Kenyans falling victim to gunfire from bandits in Laikipia's lawless areas. We can blame the "political bigwigs" fomenting trouble in Laikipia in this election year and deploy Kenya Police "reserves" and paramilitary police to "restore law and order". But so long as we refuse to deal with the legacy of 67 years of British occupation of Kenyan lands, we are simply putting band-aids on gangrenous wounds. Mr Voorspuy will not be the last victim of these circumstances. Neither will the scores of innocent Kenyans who have fallen due to the machinations of politicians and "investors". 

If you keep looking at Laikipia as a "tourism and [wildlife] conservation" investment destination, then you will continue to miss the most important question of the century: how will you solve Kenyans' land hunger if you don't resolve historical land injustices?

The anti-Raila canon

Opposition to a Raila Odinga presidency has been elevated to a religious precept by every cat and its uncle in the ruling alliance. It doesn't really matter that the contradictions of an Odinga presidency are plain to see, the Jubilation is living in a permanent state of crisis, fearing that Mr Odinga is the schoolyard bully out to take their lunch money and send them home screaming for their nannies.

If there has been one organising principle of all the streams that brought Messrs Kenyatta and Ruto together is that the Government of Kenya must never fall into the hands of Mr Odinga and his acolytes. The canon of the anti-Odinga religion has it that Mr Odinga is a communist, the son of communist, with communist contacts and, after the successful socialisation of the Kenya Chemical and Food Corporation (better known as the Kisumu Molasses Plant), socialistic intentions for the hundreds of thousands of acres of land that Messrs Kenyatta, Ruto and the members of their faith owned. One of the pillars of this strange religion is that it doesn't matter how bad things get between its co-religionists, none of them will become an apostate and sing Mr Odinga's praises, even when he deserves the praise, as when he offered to testify on behalf of the accused at the Hague in the strange affair over the post-election violence, PEV.

There is a liturgy to this religion and a gospel that is spread by the religions clerics, some of whom have the gift of oratory that can paint Mr Odinga as the monster they fervently wish their vote-banks to see him as. It always comes as shock to the penitent in this religion when they finally meet Mr Odinga in the flesh and it turns out that he has the same desires that they do: peace, prosperity and national pride. The coup-plotting traitor who wants to drive the Kikuyu and Kalenjin into the Indian Ocean turns out to be a man who believes strongly in a national character and identity that binds all Kenyans, believes that private property must be protected from a rapine state, believes that the rule of law applies to one and all without fear or favour, believes in fairness regardless of ethnic or lingusitc background, and has suffered at the hands of both the first and second presidents and has been betrayed and demonised by the third and fourth.

When the scales fall from their eyes, they realise that while Mr Odinga s not the ogre that their false prophets have declared him to be, that he is too old and too set in his ways to rescue Kenya from the dire political and economic straits it finds itself. Mr Odinga is St John the Baptist to Kenya's true political liberator: he has led the way to a more equitable and prosperous nation but he is likely never to the one to bring Kenya to its true potential. In their deepest hearts, they know this to be true. But as in all religions, none wants to be excommunicated and labelled an apostate; their faith sustains their irrational paranoia regardless of the terrible consequences on their mental, social , economic and political well-being.

Please don't torture us any more

Dear Evans and Jonathan,

I think it is time we held a come-to-Jesus meeting so that we can explain to you in terms that even you can understand why we think you are the biggest pair of white elephants since the Siam became Thailand and why, if that #FagiaWote hashtag isn't some sort of cruel joke, these are your final few months of making our lives a misery.

You two had wonderful ideas and the photo-ops you, Evans, engaged in when window-shopping for BRTs was impressive. That was then. Today, there is an entire swathe of the business district that resembles Fallujah: massive craters that some people generously, and erroneously, call potholes; massive mountains of garbage; narrow pedestrian walkways; noise, dust and diesel fumes; and massive crowds tripping over themselves because of the men and women you hope to turn into a vote bank: hawkers.

I understand that the principal job of an elected official is to get re-elected and you are not as different from the other men and women seeking high office. It's what your species does. What I don't understand is why the two of you have such a jaundiced eye of the walking masses. Why do you hate pedestrians and low-income labourers so much? Why do you want to exterminate them? What do you have against the men and women whose labour subsidises your lives to an almost insane degree?

Before you start issuing denials, get out of your suit and walk, incognito, down Haile Selassie Avenue, between the Jesus Is Alive Ministries HQ and the Landhies Road entrance to the Muthurwa Market-cum-bus-station. If you, after keenly looking at the environment that you have allowed to develop, are till convinced that you id all you could since you became the political and administrative leaders of Nairobi City County, then I fear that it will be further proof that you really don't know anything about managing a complex institution such as a county government. 

The pedestrian walkway is more or less a permanent make-shift market. It remains paved in parts; the rest of it is dust which, during the rainy season, turns to mud. The walkways are also too narrow for the huge numbers of people coming from the bus station, Kamukunji, Gikomba, OTC or Central Bus Station. Then there is the garbage that is generated by your makeshift market; the quantities defy logic and might also include mountains that are dumped out of Wakulima Market and Retail Market at the roundabout connecting Haile Selassie Avenue, Ring Road and Landhie Road.

On that ground alone, you do not deserve a second term. You do not deserve to hold any public office. It is proof that you are totally unconcerned with the welfare of the most vulnerable residents of this city. And it is an indictment of your failures at every turn. You should be ashamed of yourselves.

Please don't stand in the 2017 election. We've suffered enough.

Why isn't satisfaction enough?

There's nothing wrong with being employed. There's nothing wrong with being employed all your life. Not all of us are cut out to be entrepreneurs, and many of us will never be good at it. Think, even when you start your fancy startup, you will need employees, won't you? This nonsense that a salary is an addiction, or that you can never get wealthy from a salary is that - nonsensical. The key is to find something you're good at, be the best at it (in the world if possible), and find someone to pay you for it.—Wallace Kantai, What You Need to Remember when the Deal is Too Good, Unquiet African

Entrepreneurship is not an impossible activity to engage in. Being an entrepreneur is not something that cannot be learned. Success or failure as an entrepreneur is down to many factors: preparation, intelligence, popularity, dedication, attention to detail, luck. But as Mr Kantai says, it is not for everyone and it is not the only ingredient to success in life, wealth or comfort.

Many of us love what we do. Many of us enjoy working for the bosses we work for. Many of us can't be bothered to deal with the details of what it takes to run a business enterprise: licenses and permits, taxes and tax returns (is there anyone who loves doing the paperwork, online or not, for the revenue authorities?), hospital insurance and social security, public health and occupational safety and health, workmen injury benefits, and the like. We love the idea of a more or less steady pay-cheque at the end of the month, the predictability of a workday, the comfort of picking and choosing simple things like vacation days or investment strategies (such as may be allowed by a salary).

Many people, especially many men who have lied and cheated their way to financial success, believe that entrepreneurship is a panacea to widespread youth unemployment and other social ills. They extol the virtues of "bootstrapping" and "perseverance", hard work and dedication, attention to detail and the magic of a blockbuster surefire "idea" that no one else has.

But even when we have an idea, few of us usually want to make the commercialisation of that idea the centre of our working lives. It's why you'll find that even in the US, many of those who file patent applications tend to do so with the intention of selling the patent to a billion-dollar corporation for dollops of dollars. If I had an innovation that could make my chosen field more efficient and effective and if I could obtain a patent for it, perhaps I would also be tempted to sell it for billions as opposed to borrowing and spending millions to bring it to market.

Of course, there are entrepreneurs we admire or envy. But our admiration isn't always enough to push us out of our comfort zones to engage in the kind of mania that leads sane men to make wild bets with incredible payoffs. We admire their technical and professional skills, emulate some of their personal habits and listen with interest to their pearls of wisdom. But we also know that we are not them. We have our own uniqueness even as we part of the drones in employment. And so long as we are satisfied with what we have, happy to have the creature comforts we enjoy, life offers us more than we can deal with and we wouldn't want to change things. We're not just built to be Gordon Gekko's killers.

On libertarianism

As long as one does not hurt another individual, you can run your life as you choose.—Ron Paul

That, at its most fundamental, is the libertarian philosophy. If you have social and economic freedom, you should be left to your own devices. Political organisation, therefore, begins at the individual level, for the protection of individual freedoms or rights, before it extends to the family unit, the local community, the county and the nation. However...

In the late 1990s, a researcher and his colleagues in the United Kingdom published a fraudulent paper in the Lancet, a medical journal, showing a link between autism and the mumps, measles and rubella vaccine. What they did was wrong and harmful. What they sparked now threatens to endanger children's health in many communities because many parents believed the findings of the paper even after they were discredited by other researchers. In exercise of their individual rights and freedoms, arguing that the healthcare system endangered their children's lives, many parents have opted out of any vaccinations for their children.

Libertarian philosophy would have that these parents have every right to control what medication their children will receive and that in all instances the needs of their children must supersede the needs of everyone else. Vaccines, however, have two profound effects: first, they protect the one receiving the vaccine from contracting the disease against which she is being vaccinated and second, teh larger the number of children that are vaccinated, the greater the collective immunity of the community against the disease or its spread, known as "herd immunity". In this case, libertarianism threatens the health of children in an area where the vaccination rate against a particular disease is low.

Libertarians argue for few regulations and when one reads the reams of documents that one must comply when trading with or in the European Union, you can't help but sympathise with their philosophy. More often than not, regulation imposes additional costs on individuals to comply with the regulations. Even non-libertarians will agree that excessive regulation is a threat to social and economic liberty. The solution, though, is not total deregulation as some extremist libertarians suggest, but well-thought out regulations that are imposed with the full knowledge and consent of the people.

Immunisation campaigns offer insights as well. Intelligent libertarians will accept a wide-spread immunisation campaign against childhood diseases if it is not carried out in secret or by hiding key information. Few parents are so dogmatic (save for religious fanatics) that they would endanger their children's lives simply to win a political argument. In Kenya, for example, when the Ministry of Health proposed to reduced tetanus in pregnant mothers by conducting a wide-spread immunisation campaign in 2014, the Catholic church objected strongly because it feared that the vaccine being used could also sterilise otherwise healthy women of child-bearing age.

If I were a libertarian, I would have been concerned if the allegations were true, whether or not I were a Roman Catholic. The reaction of the Principal Secretary in the ministry was ham-fisted, to say the least. First, he argued that only the Government had the capacity to definitively state that a vaccine was good or not. Second, he argued that only the Government had the capacity to test whether the vaccine has been contaminated (in this case, with the HCG virus) and third, only the Government had the capacity to interpret the data from any laboratory tests conducted on random batches of the vaccine. On the basis of the Ministry's reaction alone, and if I were a woman, I would have refused to undergo the vaccination.

Looking over the libertarian philosophy, I wonder why, in addition to what appear to be sensible foundations, it seems so hard-hearted. To listen to them, libertarians are absolutely against any governmental charity of any kind no matter how tragic the outcomes might be. Taxes must only be spent to protect the liberties of the individual; when they are employed in welfare programmes, temporary or otherwise, they encourage laziness, mendacity and entitleness and discourage entrepreneurship or hard work. In many instances, this might be true, but it is not rue in all instances.

Even where healthcare is a local function, that is, exclusively managed by county governments with the county residents as the primary recipients of health services and the principal determinants of health policy and investment in health services, a substantial portion of public healthcare must still be funded from taxes. With this in mind, there are many individuals in communities who, through acts beyond their control, cannot afford to pay their "fair" share for access to health services. If we insist that they cannot receive subsidised care until they can afford to pay for it, their health problems might become our problems, especially if we are dealing with contagious infections.

Sometimes you get the feeling that libertarians wish for a utopian fantasy where the taxes they pay provide for the criminal justice system, an army to defend the homeland and the rest of the judiciary exists solely to determine commercial disputes. The regulations they allow their government to make are designed to encourage competition and investment, retain as much of the profits for the benefit of the entrepreneur and protect the right of the individual to choose where, when and how to invest. In this utopia, each individual and his family are in charge of directing and paying for their education and the education of their children. Ditto for healthcare. Those who cannot do so are to blame because they are lazy bums out to milch the taxpayer for very drop of welfare benefits. 

Libertarians are seen as extremist Darwinians. Empathy is not their thing. It's probably why even people who agree with them don't like them very much and more often than not vote against their candidates and their proposals when offered an alternative.

On the "campaign period"

electioneer v. gerund or present participle

(of a politician or political campaigner) take part actively and energetically in the activities of an election campaign.

The Elections Act (No. 11 of 2011), at section 2, defines "campaign period" as,

the period specified as such in the notice issued by the Commission in relation to an election

The notice referred to in section 2 is a notice published by the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission under sections 14, 16, 17 and 19 of the Act, which have to do with the presidential election (s. 14), a parliamentary election (s. 16), a county governor election (s. 17) or a county assembly election (s. 19).

So far as I can tell, the Commission has not published a notice specifying the "campaign period" in relation to any election. What we are witnessing now are what would be called political campaigns and not election campaigns as defined by the Elections Act, 2011. A political campaigns is,

an organized effort which seeks to influence the decision making process within a specific group.

The two are often taken to one and the same thing because a political campaign in a democracy is

an organized effort which seeks to influence the decision making process within a specific group. In democracies, political campaigns often refers to electoral campaigns, by which representatives are chosen or referendums are decided.

But, in tribute to the British Westminster system that governed so much of our electoral history, "campaign period" has a specific legal meaning and until the Commission publishes its notice, the campaign period in Kenya has not officially commenced even though political campaigns never truly ended after the previous general elections.

Mr Matiang'i must resign

We are working with the school board, faith-based organisations, Old Boys Association and the Teachers’ Service Commission to ensure that matter is resolved internally.

If it is true that the Cabinet Secretary for Education, Science and Technology uttered those words, then it is possible that so long as a top-performing national school doesn't murder your child, it can get away with anything in the name of retaining a school's prestige. I continue to be amazed at the attitude we have adopted when it comes to the care, safety and wellbeing of our children.

What we have learnt about the Alliance High School is that the principal and senior members of his staff were aware that school prefects routinely and viciously assaulted fellow-students, that many of these assaults led to bodily harm, that when students required medical attention, they were denied access to their parents, and that these assaults have become a part of the traditions of the school. We have also learnt that the country's top policy-makers don't care to pursue real reforms in the basic education sector if the basis for critising the sector is founded on proven and provable allegations against top-performing national schools such as Alliance.

Many of the things that parents put their children through are no longer acceptable in light of the new knowledge that we have on child development and psychology. We now know that children socialised using violence as the principle tool almost always internalise that violence, consider it normal and deploy it to resolve life challenges. Our Constitution specifically provides for the rights of children under Article 53. One of its most specific provisions states that every child has the right to be protected from abuse, neglect, harmful cultural practices, all forms of violence, inhuman treatment and punishment, and hazardous or exploitative labour.

The Constitution also declares that one of the purposes of (the state) recognising and protecting human rights is to preserve the dignity of individuals, and this surely includes children. The violence meted on children by school prefects in Alliance include forcing them to lie on graves, physical assault occasioning grievous bodily injury, denying victims of violence the comfort and counsel of their parents, and elevating the violence to the status of a harmful cultural practice of the school. Among the principles of the basic Education Act are promoting the protection of the right of the child to protection, participation, development and survival and elimination of gender discrimination, corporal punishment or any form of cruel and inhuman treatment or torture.

The former principal of Alliance High School and the Cabinet Secretary for Education, Science and Technology have violated the principles of the Basic Education Act and, in doing so, violated the rights of all children as protected under the Constitution. But despite this, I am almost certain that there are those who will argue that Mr Matiang'i is well-meaning and that he will eventually find an acceptable solution to the crimes committed by the former principal and his underlings. No one, not parents' associations, not teachers' unions, not even the parents of the child victims in Alliance High School, or politicians with axes to grind will ask, nay demand, Mr Matiangi's resignation or the criminal prosecution of the former principal. We will accept the insane logic that a little violence is necessary for our children to "grow up", and we will leave it at that and move on.

Mr Matiang'i must be reminded that it is no longer an "internal matter" when children are brutalised in violation of the Constitution and the law; it is a criminal matter. The Director of Public Prosecutions must order the Inspector-General of Police to investigate. The victims of the violence must be offered counselling and treatment. The pubic must be told the truth. And Mr Matiang'i must resign. Bloodletting of children in the name of "initiation" and "tradition" is not a good enough excuse for the status quo to prevail or for our desire to return to status quo ante.

Keep your children safe, dammit!

School buses or vans, and PSVs, shouldn't exceed forty kilometres per hour. Vehicles use for transporting schoolchildren should abide by this rule at all times. Their designs should be standardised and those operating them should meet stricter criteria. I can undertstand, I think, the instincts of liberatarian adults to declare with finality that the right to endanger their lives is their own and that the State has no business telling them whether or not they can board a cramped fourteen-seat "Nissan" with bald wheels for a ninety-kilometres-per-hour das to Kikopey or some such place. 

 

But I cannot understand how or why parents, and the Government they purport to live under, can endanger the lives of their children, whom they claim to be the future of the nation, by allowing them to be crammed into "buses" operated by men, and quite a few women, with the driving skills of the Kayole-bound Forward Travellers deathtraps who are more interested in shortening their shifts by attempting to recreate the more exciting parts of a banzai run round the Nürburgring.

 

School transport is not safe. It almost doesn't matter that the school is a million-shillings-per-year private resort or a bare-bones "academy" somewhere in Umoja Innercore: school transport is more often than not repurposed former PSVs crewed by the non-bhang-smoking cousins of matatu crews. The ones I encounter at 5:30am as I hustle to get to work almost always have children packed in them as if they were matches full-to-bursting in matchboxes. Most of the children look miserable and most of the bus-van crews look miserable - and half asleep. The most distressing sign is that the parents are probably safe in their cut-rate ex-Dubai reconditioned Japanese shitboxes with Pioneer amps, Kenwood subwoofers and Grogan Road mufflers that drive Njoki Chege up the wall as she claims.

When disaster strikes, as it frequently does on Kenya's superhighways of death, disconsolate parents beg the Government to "do something". I have a solution: stop loading up your children n death traps. Insist that the schools to which you fork over tens of thousands of shillings every year to buy vehicles designed to ferry schoolchildren. I don't care that they will be late for shoo, insist that the maximum speed that these vehicles can attain is forty kilometres per hour, a speed that science tells me is not too fast that disasters cannot be averted by even semi-competent drivers. Insist, on the point of threatening grievous bodily injury, that the crews of school transport should meet the highest standards of competence, mental health and experience. Finally, these vehicles should only be allowed on the roads between the hours of 6:30 am and 6:30pm, when there is enough natural light.

Keep your children safe, dammit!

Terrorism? I don't think so

For long, Pokot people have wrecked (sic) havoc & terror on all its neighours. Entire Pokot Community must be labeled & treated as terrorists. — @DonaldBKipkorir

Section 2 of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (No. 30 of 2012), defines, in part, a "terrorist act" as,

[ ] an act or threat of action (a) which (i) involves the use of violence against a person; (ii) endangers the life of a person, other than the person committing the action;(iii) creates a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section of the public; (iv) results in serious damage to property;(v) involves the use of firearms or explosives; ... (ix) prejudices national security or public safety; and (b) which is carried out with the aim of (i) intimidating or causing fear amongst members of the public or a section of the public..

The Penal Code defines "robbery" as, 

Any person who steals anything, and, at or immediately before or immediately after the time of stealing it, uses or threatens to use actual violence to any person or property in order to obtain or retain the thing stolen or to prevent or overcome resistance to its being stolen or retained, is guilty of the felony termed robbery. (Section 295)

It describes the penalty for robbery as follows,

(1) Any person who assaults any person with intent to steal anything, and, at or immediately before or immediately after the time of the assault, uses or threatens to use actual violence to any person or property in order to obtain the thing intended to be stolen, or to prevent or overcome resistance to its being stolen, is guilty of a felony and is liable to imprisonment for seven years.

(2)  If the offender is armed with any dangerous or offensive weapon or instrument, or is in company with one or more other person or persons, or if, at or immediately before or immediately after the time of the assault, he wounds, beats, strikes or uses any other personal violence to any person, he shall be sentenced to death.

Finally, in relation to stealing, the Penal Code provides that,

A person who fraudulently and without claim of right takes anything capable of being stolen, or fraudulently converts to the use of any person, other than the general or special owner thereof, any property, is said to steal that thing or property. (Section 268(1))

And,

If the thing stolen is any of the following things, that is to say, a horse, mare, gelding, ass, mule, camel, ostrich, bull, cow, ox, ram, ewe, wether, goat or pig, or the young thereof the offender is liable to imprisonment for a period not exceeding fourteen years. (Section 278)

Are cattle rustlers terrorists or thieves? By most account in the news, the troubles in the North Rift are in the form of stock theft. Armed bands, probably of Pokot men, have been violently robbing the members of other communities residing in the North Rift of their cattle. The robberies have been extremely violent, during which firearms have been used and many people have been seriously or fatally injured. In my estimation, what is happening in parts of Baringo county is not terrorism but robbery.

What is happening in Baringo county meets some of the criteria set out in section 2 of the Prevention of Terrorism Act, 2012, but not all of them. However, it meets all the criteria for theft, robbery and stock theft set out in sections 268, 278 ad 295 of the Penal Code, for which the penalties are clearly set out: death. Moreover, one of the formations of the National Police Service, known as the Anti Stock Theft Unit, based in Gilgil, has the mandate to conduct anti-stock theft operations and stock–theft investigations.

What Mr Kipkorir is attempting to do is to demonise an entire community for the sins of some of its sons; the Pokot are not terrorists. Some Pokot men are armed robbers who have gotten away with their robberies because the National Police Service and the mandarins that command them in Nairobi have allowed armed banditry to flourish without being checked.

This is a year fraught with perils because of the political grandstanding that an election year entails. Mr Kipkorir's sympathies are well known and his political utterances have elicited mirth in some quarters. He has come out strongly in favour of the ruling alliance, now renamed the Jubilee Party and has declared his political fealty to the Deputy President, a man who is not a Pokot man. Mr Kipkorir's utterances, in another light, would be considered hate speech, and they would invite the scrutiny of the Ole Kaparo-led National Cohesion and Integration Commission.

However, I have a different take. Mr Kipkorir has fallen victim to the hubris that inevitably engulfs those who are close to and associated with political power. This hubris, overweening in its nature, tends to blind them to reason or logic and encourages ever grander declarations that reiterate their political loyalties. If Mr Kipkorir truly believes that all the Pokot are indeed terrorists, then there is little that reasoned debate will do to persuade him as to the inherent inhumanness of his statements. But if he is doing it in order to not only demonstrate his political leanings but also to generate some bit of negative press for the Pokot, then his demands can be dismissed with the prejudice they deserve.

In his utterances against the Pokot, Mr Kipkorir also reveals one other pernicious aspect of the situation in Kenya's remote areas: the remit of the National Police Service is limited and inadequate. Since its formation, the Anti Stock Theft unit was feared for its anti-stock theft operations. Whenever it was deployed, cattle rustlers always lost. Yet it remains a mystery why a unit of the National Police that was established specifically to combat the banditry that members of the Pokot engage in has not been deployed to that banditry-prone place. What good is having the ASTU sitting pretty in Gilgil when lives are being lost the tit-for-tat cattle-rustling-and-murder taking place in Baringo, Wes Pokot, Turkana and Baringo?

Mr Kipkorir refuses to address this question. Perhaps his political fidelity prevents him frm asking the logical question: why is the Deputy President, whom he declares to be a powerful man, incapable of prevailing in the ruling alliance to ensure that the Inspector-General of Police, who also hails from Mr Kipkorir's preferred community, deploys the ASTU to conduct operations to identify and bring to justice the men who have caused so much death and destruction? Could it be that despite Mr Kipkorir's hagiography of these men, more so the Deputy President, they do not really care that citizens living in the North Rift are being murdered in the name of heads of cattle?

Enough with the hyperbole

If he wasn't the son of the late Mzee Jomo Kenyatta and if he wasn't the heir to a half-a-billion dollar fortune, I would sympathise with Uhuru Kenyatta because of all the sweeping, unprovable accusations made against him, like the one that he is made in the same mould as Donald Trump and therefore, he wants to "destroy the press". Uhuru Kenyatta, President and Commander-in-Chief of the Kenya Defence Forces, isn't interested in destroying the media or turning the media into his lackey: the media already is a lackey and anyone that says otherwise is blind. Or stupid. Or both.

There is a very big difference between the all-but-forgotten Dennis Galava and the true owners of the Daily Nation, the Saturday Nation and the Nation on Sunday. Mr Galava is no doubt a talented journalist, capable of distilling the essence of moment in our history, identifying the key issues that Kenyans must focus on and set it down on paper in a way that will make most readers pay attention. But Mr Galava is not the media nor is he a representative of the media nor the media house that once employed him. He is a journalist. He has his ethics. The Nation Media Group, no matter how much personhood the law grants it, is not a journalist and neither are the other companies that make up "the media" in Kenya. 

Mr Galava could be jailed for reporting the news; it would be unconstitutional, but it could be done on one pretext or the other. Or, to prevent his news stories from being read, he could be fired from his job. He could self-publish on the internet or try and find financing for his own newspaper, but, come on, who would bother to read any newspaper that isn't the Daily Nation, the Saturday Nation, the Nation on Sunday, the Standard, the Standard on Sunday, the East African, the Star, the People or the Business Daily? What is important to remember is that neither of these companies can be jailed; they can be disbanded, their registration withdrawn by the Registrar of Companies, but they can't be jailed because though they may be "the media", they are not journalists.

Journalists will always report the news and how they report the news depends entirely on whether or not their employers, the "media houses" believe that there is money to be made by reporting news that, for example, Uhuru Kenyatta would want to suppress. Journalists and "media" companies, unless they are employed or wholly owned by the government, don't have a right to government revenue in the name "ad buys". They can sell their advertising services to the rest of the private sector; but they cannot claim that their existence relies solely on the government's need to buy ad space to inform the people of available jobs in the Ministry of Mining or that the National Assembly has invited the public to comment on the Moveable Property Security Rights Bill, 2016. (Okay, that latter one is really important.)

But, surely, it is not the business of the taxpayer to subsidise the media companies who will in turn charge the same taxpayer an exorbitant fee for their newspapers, is it? I have no problem with my taxes being spent on more important things, like the facilities that doctors are demanding from the government before they can return to work. The same journalists who were all for the reduction of the public wage bill because even clerks are paid too high in the public service, should be all for the reduction in all unnecessary expenses by the government, such as extortionate ad buys. When journalists are jailed for being journalists, like it happens in Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Iran, Saudi Arabia or Zimbabwe, yes, the media (formerly known as the free press) is under threat. When government wastes less and less money on ad buys, not so much.

Good health or good healthcare?

How much does it cost to ensure that every Kenyan is in good health? Who should bear this cost? There is a school of thought that argues that your health is your own affair and that the government should expend the minimum amount of national revenue to address your healthcare concerns. There is another school of thought that argues that it is the responsibility of the government to ensure that every Kenyan is in the best possible health.

We should begin by defining what "good health" means. Article 43 states that we are entitled to the highest attainable standard of health, including healthcare and reproductive healthcare services. But that is not the definition of "good health", is it? Good health is an outcome of very many factors, from environmental factors such as clean water and clean air to dietary ones such as how much food one consumes, the quality of that food, and the dietary value of that food. It includes where we live, where we sleep, the physical and mental stresses we undergo, the stability of our immediate and extended families, the availability of recreational facilities including playing grounds, parks, bars, libraries, cinemas, restaurants, discotheques, swimming pools and bicycle lanes.

The healthcare "system" is an important factor in our continued good health but it is not the only important factor. Some healthcare models emphasise prevention of ill-health over treatment of illnesses or diseases. Public policy in these instances is geared towards encouraging healthier lifestyle choices. For example, the campaign to reduce cigarette smoking attempts to modify human behaviour regarding this addictive habit. High taxes, a ban on advertising and restrictions on packaging design are all tools that governments have employed to reduce the total number of new cigarette smokers, make it difficult for habitual smokers to persist in the habit, and reduce the overall number of new patients suffering from health problems associated with cigarette smoking such as lung cancer, mouth cancer, emphysema, asthma, diabetes and low sex drive.

The healthcare system of hospitals, doctors, nurses, dentists, pharmacists and other specialist medical practitioners such as radiologists, urologists, podiatrists, ophthalmologists, psychiatrists, orthopaedists, oncologists and cardiologists is frequently called in to deal with the outcomes of poor health. It is set up to treat patients in poor or failing health. It isn't set up to encourage healthier living. And if it were, it would have to do so hand in hand with a cleaner environment and restricted access to substances that harm health such as cigarettes, alcoholic drinks, saturated fats, carbonated beverages, untreated drinking water, uninspected meat or meat products, processed sugars and vehicle exhaust emissions.

Good health is not simple to attain; it requires the concerted efforts of both the government and the individual, public institutions, private sector organisations and consumers, a balance between civil liberties and public laws. Reducing good health to simply what doctors can and cannot do is dangerously deluded. And the same goes for a healthcare system. Sooner or later, as the conflict between doctors and the government continues, we must ask whether or not our efforts have led to good health, and if they have not, whether or not our efforts have led to a good healthcare system, and if they have not, whether or not the outcome of the negotiations between doctors and the government will lead to both good health and a good healthcare system.

Monkey + AK-47. What could go wrong?

Who among you remember that day when the agents of a company that had a contract with the Government of Nairobi City County dumped a tipper-load of stinking-to-high-heaven garbage in front of the main gate to the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation on Harry Thuku Road, because the parastatal had failed to settle its dues with the county government? I do. 

The incident came to mind when the managing director of an energy-sector company that distributes the fuel products of a global oil company went, in person, to the repossession of the physical facilities at a petrol station which was at the heart of a commercial (and, some say, political) dispute between the company and the operator of the petrol station.

The reason I see parallels between the two events is that in Kenya, business activities are sometimes an extension of political activities. The KBC is a parastatal, a state-owned broadcaster, which enjoys a certain measure of protection from the application of some rules, especially because it is located in the Capital City, a county that is under the political administration of the Minority Party. The governor of Nairobi has singularly confirmed that what academic and professional credentials are provided on a piece of paper are irrelevant to the management of a county government if the candidate is a shameless self-promoter with the common touch of a leper, but also that when it comes to the management of political conflicts between him, his party and the Majority Party, he lacks any kind of touch.

Rather than find a political solution that gave both his government and the information ministry, which is nominally responsible for the KBC, a win/win solutioon, the Governor went went to DefCon 4 and dumped stinking rubbish in front of KBC's premises. How an act of vandalism was meant to compel either the KBC or the ministry to pay what it owed the county government  remains a mystery only the pin-heads in the executive suite at City Hall can explain.

The same is true of the business-cum-political dispute between the oil company MD and his tenant, a senator representing the county. The senator had demonstrated a certain political independent streak that rubbed his business partner the wrong way and regardless of the terms of the contract between the two men, the MD was determined to make an example of the "disloyal" senator. When an opportunity presented itself to turf out the senator from the petrol station, the MD took it and ran.

Both sides to the dispute hired gangsters to protect their interests. Both gangs confronted each other at the petrol station ending up in a classic Mexican Standoff, except the other-bodied senator was in a chair wielding a pistol while the MD was on his feet rallying his troops. The incensed senator was not letting the contract voided without a fight; when the MD casually and dismissively turned his back on the senator, the senator fired off a round past the MD's ear, sending bystanders and gangsters fleeing in all directions. It remains a mystery why both the MD and the senator were both on site. The mystery is cleared up when one remembers that the MD's failed political ambitions are on a lifeline held by the leader of the majority Party, leaders who are unhappy with the mule-headed independence of the senator and who are unwilling to separate business from loyalty.

A win-win scenario was possible between the MD and the senator. If the senator kept it quiet that he was the MD's senator, his independence wouldn't have caused the MD to have to prove his loyalty to the Majority Party by throwing off his petrol station. Neither party comes out of this smelling of roses: the senator comes off as a trigger-happy madman; the MD comes off as the king of brown-nosers willing to put his life in danger to keep himself in the good graces of the party leadership.

Politics is a zero-sum game in Kenya. There are never any win-win scenarios. As a result, close shaves such as vandalism and shots-across-bows (literally), tend to escalate into blood feuds that rope in entire families, communities and ethnicities. The line between mass bloodshed and political live-and-let-live is wafer-thin. More often we are on the wrong side of that line. Governors, senators, parastatals and business tycoons are proof that we are monkeys-with-AK-47s when it comes to politics.

Can money and power buy good health or resurrections?

Nderitu Gachagua has died. He was undergoing specialised treatment in the United Kingdom. He had, in 2016, spent months undergoing specilised care in India, another Kenyan doing so in India because of the state of healthcare in Kenya. He had undergone specialised treatment in the UK earlier in 2015 too when he spent two months in hospital. Mr Gachagua should have resigned. There is simply no way he could have successfully led his county government from hospital beds all over the world.

It is for this reason that the National Super Alliance should rethink its lineup. So long as it has Mr Odinga in the top tier, NASA is as wedded to the idea of One True Leader as Nyeri's politicians were in their loyalty to a man whose pancreatic cancer eventually killed. In the late Mr Gachagua's case, the office of governor was literally a matter of life or death.

Michael Kijana Wamalwa died in office as Vice-President. He would not or could not step down even when it became clear that he would not be walking away from his London hospital bed. Mwai Kibaki refused to step down even when it was clear that the lucid-minded former Makerere University lecturer, former London School o Economics-trained economist, former leader of the official opposition, former finance minister and former vice-president was not the same man who was, as rumour had, sustained by the incredible medical alchemy of doctors and pharmacists. His fateful decision not to step down contributed to the bloodshed of 2007/2008.

In Kenya, public officers, whether elected or appointed, never step down, especially if they are serving at the highest levels of the government. No matter what the reason, be it ill-health, accusations of corruption, incompetence or the mistakes of their underlings, they never step down. They would rather be carried out of office, feet first. Sometimes, as in the case of Mr Wamalwa and Mr Gachagua, the feet-first route is the only one left and it begs the question, do they really believe that money and power can buy good health or secure resurrections?

Faking it till we make it

Elections matter. They don't matter more than the rule of law or the integrity of the executive, but they matter. Anyone who argues that elections are an expensive boondoggle for choosing political leaders and determining national priorities fails to take into account the problems of restricting political activity to the narrowest elite slice of the population of a nation. Elections matter because they are proof of the resilience or weaknesses of a political culture. In Kenya, both are in stark display in 2017.

The Coalition for Reforms and Democracy (CORD), the Minority coalition in Parliament, has entered into an agreement with the Amani National Congress (ANC) to form a "superalliance" called the National Super Alliance (NASA) to take on the spawn of the Jubilee Alliance now finally known as the Jubilee Party (JP). I don't think it really matters what the manifestos of the NASA or the JP really are; no political party, alliance or coalition has ever even tried to live up to the lofty promises in an election manifesto.

I don't think that the alliances, superalliances, coalitions and agreements are seen by many as the ethnic vote-bank politics that have come to define election contests in Kenya as a bad thing. After all, even children and politicians with mixed ethnicities and mixed heritages are forced to choose the one they consider the "dominant" one, usually the one their father belongs to. Ethnicity, both positive and vile, infuses every aspect of politics and is enshrined in the Constitution in the anodyne phrase "the regional and ethnic diversity of the people of Kenya" which tells all you need to know about the place of ethnicity (code for "tribe") in Kenya.

What matters is that Kenyans are at least paying lip-service to the ideals of the constitution on multipartyism, pluralism, tolerance and the peaceful transfer of political power between one political regime and the next. In the United States they have a saying: fake it till you make it. Perhaps if Kenyans fake political liberalism long enough and hard enough, Kenyans might actually build a nation and political culture that espouses all the values and principles that make our ridiculously long-winded and dull constitution the most progressive and liberal in the world.

My case for disarming the police

For as long as I have been alive, the police have always been armed. They ordinarily bear the Heckler & Koch G3 battle rifle, the Kalshnikov Concern AK-47 assault rifle or the Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun. Few of them carry side-arms, sniper rifles, general purpose machine guns or light machine guns, except when dealing with large-scale unrest. It is inevitable, thus, that if you encounter policemen on patrol, they will inevitably be armed with assault or battle rifles.

I believe this lies at the heart of the problems with policing in Kenya. When it is founded on an armed, national police force, renaming it as a police service, will not resolve the inherent contradictions. A police service should be established for the safety of the people first, and then the safety of their property. Things like the security of the state and the stability of the government are dealt with by the security services and the defence forces.

A police service that is called upon to perform both public safety and national security functions will develop a schizophrenia from all the pressure bearing upon its usually meagre resources, particular its human resource. The National Police Service is called upon to perform both functions, even when the Kenyan intelligence community can be tasked with a great deal of the national security work. The pressures that have come to bear on the National Police have, I believe, contributed to increasing cases of insubordination, indiscipline and violence among professional colleagues.

In recent weeks policemen have turned their firearms on each other, turned their guns on their intimate partners, committed suicide or threatened or attacked their commanding officers. This too during an expansion in their material capabilities, from the purchase of more guns to the purchase of more military and paramilitary materiel.

The need to protect the country from terror attacks has been used to justify the continued presence of armed police on our streets and in our neighbourhoods. However, from the response to the attacks at the Westgate Mall, Mpeketoni in Lamu and Garissa University College, it is clear that the existence of armed police did not prevent the attacks. It however, revealed the intelligence failures at the continued menace of terrorist groups.

A reorientation in policing towards its demilitarisation and a focus on public safety might also improve the national police's disciplinary challenges. The fewer policemen that are armed, the fewer policemen that are tempted to use their firearms to settle personal or professional scores with each other or with civilians. This might also reorient the relationship of the national police service with the communities that it is charged to keep safe; fewer encounters between the police and civilians will be likely to escalate into violent confrontations if the civilian population doesn't feel like it is living under siege.

Better co-ordination by the national police and the intelligence community might identify communities that will require armed police patrols; however, this should be the exception and not the rule. A generally disarmed police service has the opportunity to forge better community relations which will help identify threats to the safety of the people or private property before they escalate into crimes that warrant a police response. Of course, each police district will still need a small contingent of armed police to respond to situations where the force of arms are necessary but, again, this should be the exception and not the rule.

One other outcome might be the redirection of scarce resources towards the improvement in the quality of life of rank and file police officers and, perhaps, a reduction in corrupt acts among them. If less money is spent buying more guns and ammunition, the savings can be directed at police housing and other social amenities for police officers and their families, reducing the psychological pressures they're under, improving discipline within the ranks and reducing the chances of police officers turning their firearms against each other, intimate partners, other civilians or their commanding officers.

Sex and Murder

Serena Williams. She, I can recognise from a hundred paces. Maybe even two hundred paces. She is, without a scintilla of a shadow of a doubt, the most important athlete. Ever. More important than Lewis Hamilton. More important than "Iron" Mike Tyson. More important than the walking refrigerators known as American football players. She has dominated a sport that was for the longest time the preserve of doped-up ex-SovBloc athletes and she dominated it when even today, many of her challengers are still doped up. If there are athletes to be conferred with sainthood for their complete domination of the sport, Serena Williams would be one of them. Together with Mohammad Ali.

Ms Williams reminds me of the very pregnant Beyoncé Knowles-Carter. No, Ms Williams doesn't remind be of Queen Bey because Ms Williams has put on a bit of weight or anything like that; she reminds me of Beysus because Mrs Knowles-Carter is the most dominant musician I have heard of for the past decade. From what I have seen, the Beyhive is a cross between a world-dominating religion, a cult and a gang: only its members truly understand what it is to live in a world in which a magical creature as Beyoncé lives.

Speaking of entertainment, billions of English-speaking women (and the men who simply can't resist) are glued to idiot boxes because of Shonda Rhimes, a place my beloved and her cohort know as ShondaLand. In ShondaLand two TV shows occupy pride of place: Grey's Anatomy and Scandal. In Grey's Anatomy, doctors spend almost a whole hour every week sleeping with each other, planning to sleep with other, regretting that they slept or didn't sleep with each other...and dying in creatively violent ways. In Scandal, political operatives, congressmen, first ladies and presidents spend almost a whole hour every week sleeping with each other, planning to sleep with other, regretting that they slept or didn't sleep with each other...and dying in creatively violent ways.

What these women have in common is that they bear the same skin colour as some of my favourite athletes and entertainers: Maria de Lurdes Mutola, Blessing Okagbare, Congestina Achieng, Leleti Khumalo, Mbilia Bel, Nayanka Bel and Mary Atieno. One day, a Kenyan won't have to pine after ShondaLand to get their fix of sex and murder. If a Kenyan is very, very lucky, of course.

Can you?

Can you afford food, shelter, healthcare, transport, electricity, and water services? (Okay, okay, when it comes to water services, can you afford to pay for a water bowser of "clean" water in the middle of this drought?) In addition, can you afford to save for your retirement, entertainment and a holiday somewhere nice that is not shags? Finally, if you are employed, can you afford to go a year without a job or if you are self-employed and "in business", can you afford to live off the proceeds of your hustle for a year?

These questions keep me up because on almost every metric, "barely" seems to be the only word that comes to mind. I wonder how many Kenyans listen to the "booming economy" PR with agreement. I wonder how many believe the PR gurus when they hashtag you with #TukoPamoja.

Mr Owino is right; they're priority payments

I have written about the Consolidated Fund and Consolidated Fund Services. I argued,

Consolidated Fund Services...is an accounting term relied on by the National Treasury to make the payments required to be made as charges on the Consolidated Fund...Consolidated Fund Services encompasses all the payments that are a charge on the Consolidated Fund, that must be paid and are ordinarily not subject to the appropriations processes of the National Assembly.

Subsequently, Kwame Owino and I had a twitter argument on whether these charges on the Consolidated Fund are priority payments or protected payments. Mr Owino argues that they are priority payments, while I argue that they are protected.

This is what the Constitution provides in Article 221(6) and (7):

(6) When the estimates of national government expenditure, and the estimates of expenditure for the Judiciary and Parliament have been approved by the National Assembly, they shall be included in an Appropriation Bill, which shall be introduced into the National Assembly to authorise, and for the appropriation of that money for the purposes mentioned in the Bill.

(7) The Appropriation Bill mentioned in clause (6) shall not include expenditures that are charged on the Consolidated Fund by this Constitution or an Act of Parliament.

The purpose of an Appropriations Act is to authorise the withdrawal from the Consolidated Fund of the money needed for [the] expenditure but because charges on the Consolidated Fund are not subject to the approval of the National Assembly, they are not included in the Appropriations Bill. However, because they are part of the estimates of national government expenditure, they must be must be approved by the National Assembly.

I admit I am more confused now than when Mr Owino and I argued yesterday, and I think that in the absence of a clear interpretation of Article 221, Mr Owino is probably right about the prioitisation of payments that are charges on the Consolidated Fund. I say so because there are two stages in the appropriations process: approval of the estimates by the National Assembly and the introduction of an Appropriations Bill in the National Assembly. The approval of these charges fit into the first part; their payment is not subject to the Appropriations Bill.

Non-discretionary payments, the term Mr Owino and I agree describes these charges, because they are not subject to the passage of an Appropriations Bill by the National Assembly, may be paid as soon as the National Assembly approves their estimates. It isn't an explicit rule but it is a logical one. The National Treasury has made it a convention to pay them out first, thereby prioritising them.

Mr Owino, I will no longer quibble over whether the protected charges are also priority charges. You were right and I was not.

The Consolidated Fund

The following sentence caught my eye:

However, the Constitution prescribes a minimum level of payments that must be made through Consolidated Fund Services (CFS). (Kwame Owino, Why the State Can't Afford to Give Every Kenyan Money)

To be blunt, the Constitution doesn't prescribe any such thing. The following are the payments which are a charge on the Consolidated Fund established under Article 206 of the Constitution: the remuneration and benefits of the President and Deputy President (Art. 151), the remuneration and benefits payable to or in respect of judges (Art. 160), the expenditure of the judiciary (Art. 173), the public debt (Art. 214), and the remuneration and benefits payable to a commissioner or holder of an independent office (Art. 250).

In respect of any minimum payments to be made in accordance with the Constitution, presumably as a charge on the Consolidated Fund, though the Constitution is silent on this, this would be the "at least fifteen per cent" allocated to county governments out of all the revenue collected by the national government under Article 203(2) and the half a per cent paid into the Equalisation Fund established by Article 204(1).

Consolidated Fund Services, CFS, does not exist, either in the Constitution or in the Public Finance Management Act (No. 18 of 2012), the principal statute on the management of the Consolidated Fund. It is an accounting term relied on by the National Treasury to make payments the payments required to be made as charges on the Consolidated Fund. In other words, it is a line item in the National Treasury's books of account. Consolidated Fund Services encompasses all the payments that are a charge on the Consolidated Fund, that must be paid and are ordinarily not subject to the appropriations processes of the National Assembly.

In short, the Constitution does not prescribe a minimum level of payments that must be made through Consolidated Fund Services. It simply prescribes what are charges on the Consolidated Fund.

The Big Switch-Off (Redux)

Article 31 of the Constitution states, "Every person has the right to privacy, which includes the right not to have (a) their person, home or property searched; (b) their possessions seized; (c) information relating to their family or private affairs unnecessarily required or revealed; or (d) the privacy of their communications infringed."

But Article 24(1) also states, "A right or fundamental freedom in the Bill of Rights shall not be limited except by law, and then only to the extent that the limitation is reasonable and justifiable in an open and democratic society based on human dignity, equality and freedom, taking into account all relevant factors, including (a) the nature of the right or fundamental freedom; (b) the importance of the purpose of the limitation; (c) the nature and extent of the limitation; (d) the need to ensure that the enjoyment of rights and fundamental freedoms by any individual does not prejudice the rights and fundamental freedoms of others; and (e) the relation between the limitation and its purpose and whether there are less restrictive means to achieve the purpose.

The proposal by the Communications Authority––a proposal that seems to have been made to all telecommunications' services providers in Kenya since at least September 2016––that telecommunications' services providers shall allow a private contractor of the Communications Authority to install a "link at the data-centre or the mobile switching room" that shall "terminate close to the core network elements that shall integrate to the DMS solution", according to the Daily Nation, to "track countefeit phones" has met with suspicion that the purpose of the "link" is to spy on phone users by accessing their phone calls, text messages and other data without having to obtain a warrant from a court of law, an invasion of privacy that many will challenge.

Assuming that the alleged nefarious scheme by the Communications' Authority is true, can it actually do so? Article 31 can be limited if the limitation meets all the criteria set out in Article 24. Therefore, yes, the Communications Authority can, for lack of a better word, spy on you through your mobile phone.

Mr Wangusi, the chief executive officer of the Communications Authority, says that this "link" will be used to track counterfeit mobile phones. Few believe him. But if that were true, Mr Wangusi has not made any attempt to demonstrate that other less intrusive measures have failed. In 2012, the Communications' Authority's predecessor, the Communications Commission of Kenya, proposed to "switch off" millions of "fake" mobile phones that were in use in Kenya. Little, if anything, is known about the 2012 exercise, including whether or not it was successful and what the Communications Authority had done since then to prevent counterfeit mobile phones from being activated in Kenya.

In 2012, the big switch off revolved around the International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) number, a fifteen-digit code that identifies each mobile device that has been activated on any mobile network in the world. These IMEI numbers are entered into a global Equipment Identity Register (EIR) principally to help manufacturers track counterfeiters and sue them for intellectual property theft. The Communications Authority, hand in hand with telecommunications services providers, can still use IMEIs and the EIR to identify and track counterfeit phones. Why they need an advanced system with the potential of being used as a tool for violating Kenya's right to privacy remains unexplained.

The Communications Authority can limit Kenyans' right to privacy but before it does so, any Kenyan can challenge the Communications Authority's actions in the High Court. I don't believe Mr Wangusi and his other officers will be able to persuade a High Court judge that this "link" is "reasonable and justifiable in an open and democratic society based on human dignity, equality and freedom" or that there isn't a "less restrictive means to achieve the purpose". I wonder if he ever will.