Pull the other one. It has bells on.

It is important for Kenyans to take a moment and reflect on the self-delusions of their elected representatives. These characters believe themselves to be our saviours, out to right the wrongs of history. In the here and now, many portray themselves as the saviours of devolution against all other enemies. Therefore, the Senate claims to be the safe-keeper against the Governors; the Governors claim the same against the Senators. Meanwhile the National Assembly members are torn between kicking the Senators while they are down or kicking devolved government because it is more prestigious than their piddly little constituencies.

But every time the esteemed members of the Senate, the National Assembly or the Governors' council stand in front of crowds to speak, they ooze the milk of human kindness. When they are comfortably ensconced in front of TV cameras on high-brow TV shows (or what passes for high-brow in Kenya), they sound as if they have read and re-read the Constitution of Kenya from cover to cover. The reality, sadly, is that each and every one of them is peddling snake oil with the charm of a Louisiana second-hand car dealer.

Someone needs to whack us really hard on the head to remind us that elected representatives have been the bane of this nation since the much-loathed Legislative Council was inaugurated. The mzungu taught us all sorts of legislative tricks when it came to disenfranchisement, land-grabbing, "development" and "representation." we took our lessons to heart and perfected the art of governing by misgoverning. We are past-masters of sophistry and cant, and we deploy these vices on a national scale when we seek elective office and are actually elected. Kenyan elected representatives have the capacity to stand in front of cameras and deny scientific fact. (There was that Rift Valley worthy who declared it as fact that "trees do not bring rain!") They are capable of causing bloodshed and mayhem and do not have the capacity to admit that they were wrong.

When we see them on TV or hear them on radio or read of them in the newspapers speaking with authority regarding their determination "to make devolution work", we need to remember that when they were required to ensure its success, they were more concerned with fattening their wallets. They did this at the expense of the transition process. They did at the expense of dialogue to prepare the nation for the changes devolution would wring. They did it at the expense of advising their president that the uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.

The fires that are burning because of the devolution challenges were foreseen but nothing was done. Anyone who claims to be devolution's defender is flat out lying. It is time we called them out on it. And laughed in their faces.

Opium of the masses.

Ideals, it seems, are more important than human life. If one goes by the arguments advanced in favour or against abortion or homosexual love in Africa in the past decade, one will be hardpressed to identify anything that sympathises with the plight of the living. Abortion is a hot potato that gets revisited every now and then, but with increasingly diminishing returns as more and more African women ignore their men and their faiths and instead, take matters into their hands. It is not surprising that a diminishing number of regimes even bother to enforce the portions of their repressive penal laws that criminalise abortions.

In recent months, though, the war of the morals seems to have shifted inexorably towards the men and women who wish to express more publicly their homosexual inclinations. Uganda and Nigeria have reacted with determination and zeal. The anti-homosexual bandwagon seems to be gathering passengers too; Kenya's Parliament has a growing population of cultural and sexual purists who are demanding stringent action against the forces of Sodom and Gomorrah. Some of the Kenyan worthies are demanding an audience with the Attorney-General, the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Inspector-General of Police over what, the worthies hysterically claim, is a lackadaisical approach to the heinous homosexual agenda.

But a more nuanced view of the thing is warranted. Uganda and Nigeria, and indeed Kenya, have become very familiar with violence on a scale not witnessed in Africa since the dark days of military coups and civil wars. It is only recently that Africa's longest running civil war in the Sudan came to an end. But Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army and Nigeria's Boko Haram remind African governments that just because a government has made strides in one area or another that it will not face resistance for some of the things it has not made strides on. Museveni, Uganda's president, seems determined to rule until the day he keels over in office. Goodluck Jonathan seems to be presiding over a petro-fuelled kleptocracy that simply won't stop.Both presidents and their governments have singularly failed to establish institutions that enjoy the legitimacy of broad public support; instead, they are faced with open rebellion because their peoples have absolutely no faith that things will get better.

This, in part, explains why Uganda's and Nigeria's governments find it easy to identify an enemy everyone can rally behind: homosexuals. In Africa, where the scars of colonialism are still fresh in many minds, cultural colonialism has become the new frontier of pseudo-nationalism. Anyone that suggests that Africa is ripe for open homosexuality has not been paying attention to the facts on the ground. Ironically, the anti-homosexual agenda is manipulated from the same cultural enemies of the African peoples. The gay/anti-gay war is the an extension of the United States' Culture Wars. Where one lot won or lost in the US, they are determined to prevail in Africa. In Uganda they have found the perfect partner in Yoweri Museveni who uses "culture" and "tradition", "right" and "wrong" to cement his grip on power.

This blogger holds no brief for the gay lobby; far from it. But this blogger also realises that Kenya is unique, perhaps more so than the "exceptional" USA. In the decade of Mwai Kibaki's government, Kenyans demonstrated that "real" issues animated them: life, death, safety, security, famine, drought, unemployment, healthcare, education and the like. Until the proxy culture warriors brought up the subjects, Kenyans did not give two shits about homosexuals or abortion. Now, when hunger stalks northern Kenya, and corruption cartels threaten to derail Uhuru Kenyatta's agenda, while thousands of Kenyans are killed or maimed annually on our roads, and millions of man hours are lost annually in Nairobi's traffic jams, three Members of Parliament think that Kenya's senior-most public servants should spend their days worrying about how to roll back the homosexual agenda.

Life or death issues are no longer the concern of the rulers, it seems. Their principle worry is how to con the people out of ever larger sums and how to keep their ill-gotten loot  without attracting the wrath of the people. That is why they find it convenient to  distract the people with "wars" against gays and battles for the unborn, than in solving the problems of poverty, unemployment. rampant graft or run-away crime. In Kenya, corruption, and not religion, is the opium of the masses.

We'll screw it up our way.

The battle between the National Government in the odious guise of Parliament and the devolved government in the unsophisticated form of several governors is much more than about "transparency" or "accountability." Senators have fired the first salvo by taking an overly muscular interest in the management of finances by the devolved level of government, laying the blame squarely at the  feet of governors, many of whom are inept and hapless before the rapid-fire hotshot interrogators of the Senate such as Bonny Khalwale and Kipchumba Murkomen.

Kenyans have lived through the fifty-year experiment of centralised government; to a man, they revile it to its core. The presence of the hated provincial administration in our midst in the twenty-first century is proof that the old way of governing is still being clung to by those who should know better. The presence of a mheshimiwa in Nairobi telling us how our money will be spent is a hangover from the days when the central government was baba na mama. The televised gargoyle-like spectre of Kithure Kindiki, another voluble senator, that Parliament would work towards the erosion of the powers of the devolved government is proof that even the most eruditely intelligent who have tasted a bit of power tend to lose their marbles in the marbled corridors of Parliament Building in Nairobi.

This blogger comes from the semi-arid badlands of Makueni. To our eternal shame, famine is a constant companion, stalking our county like a colossus and laying waste to families and livelihoods. By the grace of God alone, our county is spared the banditry and violent mayhem that seems to define parts of Northern Kenya, the Capital and the chang'aa-drenched highlands of central Kenya. What has ensured that famine destroys this blogger's county has always been the heavy-handed way that the central serikali mishandled everything. The co-operative farming movement was snuffed out at its infancy. Agricultural extension services were notable by their glaring absence. Then Mzee jomo and Baba Moi decided to impose kingmakers amongst our people who could barely read or write, but whose loyalty to the central government bordered on the idolatrous.

As a consequence, roads were not built, schools remained mere dreams, hospitals were rumoured to exists in Wote or Masaku , and hunger stalked our people like the Angel of Death. In 2010, while our national leaders bickered unseemingly as they had been trained over the previous 47 years by the central government, we determined for ourselves that devolution was our saviour. In Ukambani we chose madaktari: Julius Malombe in Kitui, Kivutha Kibwana in Makueni and Alfred Mutua in Masaku. Whether they are honest or not, they are our choices. It is not for the loudmouths in Nairobi to tell us whether they are doing their jobs well or not. It is not up to the old-fashioned central government to tell us that Mutua wa Masaku is a thief; like my taxi driver says, Hata kama ameiba, kazi ametufanyia ambayo serikali haikufanya!

How the senate can dare to question Malombe wa Kitui about mashilingi we do not understand? Is it because they want to remind him that just like Wambora of Embu, they will snap their fingers and all his bold initiatives for the benefit of the peoples of Kitui from the coal, limestone and coal will go Poof! When we elected the three, and the county assemblies, we did so consciously. We knew that deep down the central government would never let us go, but we are determined to shake of the unremittingly dead hand of the central government and do things our way. It is our turn to determine what we think is best for us. Bonny Khalwale, Kithure Kindiki and Kipchumba Murkomen better go peddle their book theories elsewhere. They should take Johnstone Muthama with them too. We want to screw things up our way.

Mavuno Church got it right.

Your father, unless he has less conservative inclinations, will not talk about it. Mothers might, but only with their daughters, and only if they suspect the village Lothario is sniffing around the girl. For sure, your pastor will stay as far away from the subject as possible. Your teacher won't even bother to take a whack at it. Your peers will snigger knowingly, though they'll probably all be blind as bats on the subject. Your elder siblings will acquire an aloof, thousand-yard stare when you bring up the subject, or you stumble upon it...but they will be of little help. Magazines,. books, films and music of dubious provenance will provide much of your initial information on the subject, though with careful editing to ensure that the picture being luridly painted in your mind is totally unwholesome. As you reach the stage of taking bold steps on one path or another, certain encounters with certain third parties may either end well...or with years of shame to contend with.

The subject is sex and sexuality among the under-eighteens, especially the teenagers. This is the other sex-mad Kenya that seems to dominate the airwaves every time some idiot provokes the ire of the moral majority. In this case the idiot happens to be one of Nairobi's flashiest "it" churches, Mavuno, and its provocation was an online invitation to their Teenz Konnect service that has elicited reactions that are as panicky as they are hypocritical. 

In a poor country with an oppressively domineering sense of Christianity, any perceived assault on the morals of the people will be met with resistance, whether the resistance is rational or completely unhinged. Mavuno Church does not describe itself as a progressive church, but one that addresses the issues of its congregation without sophistry or cant. If it intended to provoke the interest of its congregation alone, it bit off more than it could chew. (Though it seems to be doing just fine.) But the reactions, online and off, by the leaders of Nairobi's other evangelical sects have been overwrought, principally this blogger believes, because they don't have the "it" glamour anymore. They have been wracked by so many scandals over the past month that they are unhappy that Mavuno has shone the spotlight on them in their period of infamy.

Yet this blogger believes that Mavuno did no wrong, that what it did focused the minds of the people, their church and their government on a problem that is bound to loom ever larger in the coming decade. Whether the subject of sex and sexuality is tackled clinically by medical professionals, academically by teachers, or spiritually by pastors, it must be tackled and tackled today. Cultural imperialism by non-Kenyans, especially the United States, Latin America and Western Europe have distorted our young people's minds regarding the subject. Many have been raised on television and radio that glorifies sex and sexuality without explaining the sociological, emotional, psychological or spiritual context.

Many youth have a distorted view of sex and sexuality, and are immature, incapable of dealing with the complex influences on their lives. The burden of dealing with the aftereffects of the poor education of the youth on this subject falls disproportionately on parents and the extended family, whether it is in the form of long-term health conditions without cures or unplanned additions to families.

Our reaction as a nation and as a society is to ignore the problem, to focus on the sensational, to react with faux outrage every time our sensibilities are assailed, and to wail louder than the bereaved. This blogger is glad that Mavuno has taken the lead to guide the youthful members of its congregation in their years of confusion and hormonal impulses. This blogger would recommend similar programmes for all congregations in Kenya, with the full backing of the State. It is time we yanked our heads out of the sand and admitted to ourselves that this is not the Kenya of the 1960 our parents speak of with such unpersuasive fondness.

The Senator v the Grand Mullah

This blogger frequently disagrees with Ahmednasir Abdullahi, the sharp-tongued publisher of the Nairobi Law Monthly and the author of Straight Talk in the Sunday Nation. In his weekly column, Mr Abdullahi has crossed pens with many who hold themselves out to be the conscience of  this nation including Makau Mutua, who pens a column for the rival Sunday Standard. The relationship between Mr Abdullahi and Mr Mutua in recent weeks, especially when viewed from their exchanges via Twitter, have been anything but gentlemanly.

This past Sunday, Mr Abdullahi let rip with The trouble with Kenya's 'test-tube' politicians (Sunday Nation, 23/02/14). The column was written in his usual no-nonsense style, skirting the limits of the laws of libel and slander. In it Mr Abdullahi argued that the former Prime Minister and the Deputy President, Raila Odinga and William Ruto, were consummate creators of "greenhorn politicians...[who] become[s] [an] expert[s] on all things from devolution to mineral exploration. [He] fights all enemies of the regime, real and imaginary, honestly thinking that [his] master wants him to do so. [He] then unilaterally but secretly declares [himself] defender and sycophant number one of the regime. [He] goes full circle. [He] becomes a national nuisance."

The article elicited a rather surprising response from Kipchumba Murkomen, a Senator from the Rift Valley, a region that Mr Abdullahi claims has its fair share of Deputy-President-created test-tube politicians. In what became an escalating war of words on Twitter between Mr Abdullahi and Mr Murkomen, the latter claimed that the former was targeting him using the allusion to "a broad category of politicians," as Martha Karua observed.

This blogger will not wade into whether Mr Murkomen was the target of the Grand Mullah's (as Mr Abdullahi is fondly known in some quarters) pen; but we must wonder whether his diagnosis of the current quality of politicians is due to a flaw in their selection and subsequent election. Patronage politics has defined Kenya since even before Independence. What has remained a shameful secret is that those who eventually made it into the colonial Legislative Council were frequently men considered loyal to the colonial administration. The same became the case after Independence; only the party loyalists would be selected to contest party and general elections. Eventually, Mzee Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel Toroitich arap Moi ensured that only those who were loyal to the president would contest the party elections and the general election.

With the return of multi-party politics, and the splintering of the Forum for the Restoration of Democracy in 1991, the political party was no longer just a vehicle to presidential power; it was a vehicle to the untold wealth held by the national government. All it took for one to become fabulously wealthy, especially after 1997, was to be elected a Member of Parliament. And the keys to the kingdom were held by the Party Leader. Loyalty to the Party Leader guaranteed one a chance to battle it out with other candidates loyal to their party leaders at the general election. Whoever prevailed would get rich, but only if they did exactly as they were told by the Party Leader. The disloyal or the malcontent soon found the avenues for self-aggrandizement closing and their plaintive calls in the wilderness of political adventurism being ignored.

Mr Abdullahi is right. It is the party leaders who mould politicians in their parties. The party leaders' demands for absolute fealty, and for acts of obeisance, must have led the Grand Mullah to call them "test-tube politicians." Their acts of obeisance have compelled some of the them to engage in acts of political contortion that would break lesser men. Some have become masters of sophistry; in their mouths, black is white and night is day. Mr Murkomen should have taken the opportunity to read between the lines of Mr Abdullahi's commentary; then he should have determined that if indeed he fit the description of a test-tube politician, the wisest course of action was to pen a counter-commentary, setting out as lucidly as possible why being what he is is not a bad thing. He still has a chance to respond. Whether he will will do so in a sober manner is something this blogger awaits anxiously.

Conservative-lite.

The loudest opinions on sex and sexuality seem to belong to men, especially when they claim to protect our morals or our culture or our essential Africanness.Uganda and Nigeria are "conservative" countries going by the commentary by respected pundits, and the enactment of laws to ban homosexuality and mini-skirts. Kenya has its own share of "conservatives" who have announced a plan to roll back the trend by famous Kenyans to come out of closets best set on fire with them in it.

What the hell does being "conservative" mean? Does it mean that Jesus is the driver of the bus you happen to be traveling in as you run over the gays, lesbian, bisexuals, transexuals, mini-skirt-clad cleavage-bearing temptresses out to destroy marriages and the occasional teen looking to terminate an unplanned pregnancy without her father's consent? Does it mean that you understand the "proper roles" for men and women, that they complement each other, that the woman is the helpmeet of the man? Does it mean that the Law of God supersedes the man-made Constitution that has taken us two decades to promulgate?

Listening to the "conservative" voices in Kenya, in Uganda and in Nigeria, it is difficult to separate them from the crazy ones that have pervaded the extreme fringes of the right-wing of the United States political scene. The African conservatives seem to draw inspiration from utter nutters who fill the US morning air with diatribes that are quite unhinged. It is a wonder that the US right's obsession with keeping and bearing arms doesn't seem to have made the crossing across the Atlantic yet, unless it is also on the cards.

The conservative ideal is one that calls for limited government, strong families, low taxes and trade-oriented policies. Indeed, it is the First Amendment of the United States Constitution that is or should be the foundation of the conservative movement. It protects the state from the passionate embrace of any one religion; it encourages the people to engage in a robust debate about things that matter; and thanks to the United States' Supreme Court, it protects a person's privacy against the unwarranted intrusion of the state.

That is not what the Kenyan conservative-lite movement seems to be advocating. First it seems to demand a very strong place for Christianity in the affairs of the state. Every time they claim that Kenya is a Christian nation and its laws should inculcate Christian values, they betray their complete lack of a sense of history, or foresight. Second, they would wish the state to have a hand in the private affairs of man; hence their obsession with identifying and punishing homosexuals for being homosexuals, for engaging in homosexual conduct, for promoting homosexuality. Third, they see no irony in demanding that the public wage bill be cut to a manageable number and simultaneously demanding state intervention in every single matter, especially job-creation and infrastructure development. Finally, it never crosses their minds that their obsession with gays and lesbians in a nation that does not openly speak about sex and sexuality is unusual, kooky.

Kenya faces challenges that have bedeviled it since Independence, and before. Governors Alfred Mutua and Isaac Ruto may seem a bit unhinged when it comes to public spending, but we should not underestimate the effect all the ambulances they have acquired will have on the health of the peoples of Machakos and Bomet. This is especially so when the Government of Kenya has had forty-five years to fuck things up to such an extent that patients to government-run hospitals would routinely be expected to pay in cash for syringes and gloves, and send out for blood (where transfusion was required) and share beds (if hospitalisation was ordered). The National Government will spend billions of shillings on laptops for children but still cannot find money to build water-proof classrooms for the hundreds of thousands of pupils who undergo their learning under trees, if they are lucky, or the harsh noon-time sun (usually before they have to skip school in order to herd their fathers' cattle).

The conservative movement in Kenya is a joke, and a cruel one at that. It will not see the pain and suffering of the person described in the newspapers as the ordinary Kenyan. It will instead obsess over the problems of Kenya's burgeoning middle-class that seems to offer a home for drug addicts and sexual perverts. While millions of Kenyans starve to death, Kenya's conservatives will ensure that gays and lesbians do not spread their disease to other upright Kenyans. It is not immoral to watch a child starve to death; it is immoral to watch a man kiss another man on the lips. That, at least, seems to be the message of the Kenyan conservative. They have learnt their lessons well from their United States fathers.

A sex mad country!

It is a measure of our obsession with earth that the victims of sexual violence during the aftermath of the 2007 general elections have been completely forgotten. Every Kenyan and his dog wants a piece of earth to call his own. It is who we are, or so we have all come to believe. Even when it is impractical to hold on to the point-something of an acre in our names, we will kill to keep it (or to get it). But sexual violence, whether it is against women (who are the majority of victims in Kenya) or men, is simply elided by everyone, whether they are in the government or the flourishing civil society industry.

Sexual violence in Kenya has a long history. Sexual violence as an anti-insurgency tactic was extensively used by the colonial administration during the years of the Emergency. The men and women who fought with, supported or were associated with the Mau Mau came to understand the bitter pain and shame that rape and other forms of sexual violence brought. Sexual violence was extensively documented in the aftermath of the 2007 general election. Many of those who documented the stories of the victims heard that rape, especially, was meant to humiliate "outsiders" and to push them out of areas where they didn't belong. Ironically, sexual violence was employed during the Land and Freedom Struggle as it was employed in the 2007/08 crisis as a means of ensuring that earth belonged to the chosen community, and none other.

Therefore, it comes as a bit of surprise that certain members of the Jubilee bandwagon have chosen to focus their attention on the rising numbers of men and women who are declaring for all the world to hear that they are either gay or lesbians or somewhere looking for their sexuality's answers. The announcement of the the legislators that they will summon the Attorney-General and the Director of Public Prosecutions and determine why the two personages have not hauled the men and women coming out of the closet to court will be greeted, by the cultural and religious warriors among us, with relief. For the thousands of victims of sexual violence, it will be one more chapter in a charade that has been running for years. What Jubilee, and Parliament, are reinforcing is that they care more for the safety of our moral (and sexual) health and don't give two shits about the men, women, boys and girls who were violated in such a beastly manner in the weeks after 27th December 2007.

It is a narrative that repeats itself in all manner of things, our misplaced priorities and the things that will get Members of Parliament all hot and bothered. While two-thirds of Kenya's rural backwaters are without running water or electricity, governors have entourages to rival that of the President of the United States. While Kenya's Forgotten Frontier's residents are besieged by armed marauders from over the border, our security establishment is minting millionaires and billionaires at a rate that ought to make the publishers of Forbes magazine proud. While thousands of Kenyans are either killed or maimed on Mwai Kibaki's Chinese-funded shiny highways, carpetbaggers and charlatans of all stripes are busy cornering the market for all eternity on rail transit. Our focus is always on the shiny new toy. Gays and lesbians are it today, thanks to one or two high-profile revelations in the past few months. But the old raggedy doll that is victims of sexual violence during Kenya's descent into madness remain an official afterthought, well and truly ignored even by the chanting yokels of the civil society industry and their donor partners.

What many refuse to accept is that this nonchalance is having a pernicious effect on the youth and children. Especially because of our embarrassment when discussing sexuality between generations, many children and youth grow up knowing little about the opposite sex and how to navigate the roiling hormonal waters of sex and sexuality. Hence the panicky reaction to pregnant girls in primary or secondary schools and the bat-shit-crazy reaction to gayism and lesbianism in our legions of single-sex boarding schools. Many men, and quite a few women, are now sexual predators because they know that we will not talk about it, we will do nothing about it and the State will focus more on homosexuals and abortions and the things that animate the far-right USA conservatives.

The authors of our doom.

Arundhati Roy, the award-winning author of The God of Small Things, once wrote that one of the ways to end the insurgency in Indian North East was to provide cheap TV sets to the insurgents and their families. When they witnessed the opulent lives of the characters on Indian soap operas, there would be a subtle shift in their ambitions; they would give up the gun for a Bajaj scooter and a BPL Kelvinator. It seems that the same logic prevails in the unbridled avarice of the average Kenyan today.

There is a generation of Kenyans that came of age during the age of the liberalisation of the airwaves. Before the advent of the Kenya Television Network, Kenyans were shackled to the timetable provided by the state-owned-and-run Voice of Kenya, which became the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation. But with the going live of KTN, youthful Kenyans were introduced to MTV, Neighbours and Spanish-language telenovelas. What the new TV fare had in common with each other were the lives of opulence the characters in those shows enjoyed...and many Kenyans wanted a piece of that pie.

It is around the same time that it became increasingly clear that if one wanted to live the live of their favourite TV character, they needed access to large amounts of unaccounted for cash. How they determined that Parliament was the place to be remains a bit of a mystery. It is why every man and his uncle will burn down his town for the chance to become a mheshimiwa. In the evolution of the Kenyan politician, and Kenyan politics, away from service to the people and towards self-aggrandisement, the values and mores that held communities together have frayed to breaking point. The young witness, daily, the lengths to which their parents will go to make a fast shilling and they draw vital lessons. This coupled with the images of opulence bombarding their impressionable minds have had pernicious effects on their sense of value.

The young have learnt the lesson of selfishness well. Where children used to play with each others' toys, parents are now confronted even with inter-sibling selfishness that baffles them no end. The individualisation of children guarantees that as they become teens and grow into adulthood, all they will take into consideration are their own interests, their own feelings. They have no motivation to think of the outcomes of their choices beyond the simple question of whether their bank accounts are fatter or not.

Our pursuit of money or its nearest equivalent, a US Green Card, has come at a very high cost. It is the defining feature of our national psyche. It is no longer pride in what we do or ho we do it; all that matters is money, wealth and power. All that matters is the Green Eyed Monster festering in our peers' chests at the sight of our "success." Our children are internalising this psychosis at ever earlier ages. Many of them will not enjoy their childhoods; they will be pursuing "success" at the expense of learning or maturity. They are the leaders of tomorrow. God help us all.

Comfy, convivial...Nice.

This blogger enjoys his tipple, but he is not a connoisseur of fine liqueurs, wines or brandies. this blogger is partial to Heineken, Corona Extra, Pilsner and the almighty Absolut. Crucially, however, this blogger is very partial to a convivial atmosphere while imbibing, an atmosphere that has become rarer than civility on Nairobi's murderous roads. It is an atmosphere that can be found in very few establishments in Nairobi's increasingly Very Loud CBD: The Porterhouse in the KCS Building along Mama Ngina Street.

The patrons of this fine drinking-and-dining establishment are a cross-section of Nairobi's professional classes with a generous spread of age-groups, intellectual rigourousness and socio-economic standing, with the occasional unwelcome Loud Drunk. The fare is fairly priced. This blogger is happy to report that when you order a cold one, it is properly cold and manages to remain cold for longer than seems possible given the laws of thermodynamics. The staff (sorry, Kioko...my Thesaurus is currently being mauled by a colleague across the table) is personable, helpful and, rather surprisingly, constantly displaying a measure of probity that will put some of their patrons to shame; feel free to leave your laptop, smartphone, tablet, whatever on the counter as your teeter decorously towards the facilities, which are clean and well-served with water and tissue of so-so quality.

This blogger does not have the buccaneering and pioneering spirit of many of his peers; he wanders far shorter distances from his regular haunts and The Porterhouse has proven a convenient stop between this blogger's offices and the taxi rank. (Mututho has made life difficult for the drink-and-drive cohort.) But more than that is the generally welcoming and generous (up to a point) character of the patrons of The Porterhouse. Conversations are easily joined, hotly debated and intellectually dissected. It is the poor conversationalist who leaves The Porterhouse without having learned something new or having experienced an opinion other than, Yes Sir! The Porterhouse is a part of Nairobi history and this blogger is happy, quite happy, that the proprietor has not succumbed to the Fast Buck Bandwagon that seems to have turned every decent pub in the CBD into a den of iniquity for the corruption of the morals of the youth.

This blogger's colleagues have taken a poll and decided that this coming Valentine's Day they must redouble their efforts to ensure that there is a wedding in his future. Towards that end, they are determined (women lawyers are a sight to see when they set their mind to something) to ensure that this blogger's Friday ritual is interrupted by Cupid or Eros or whoever they Shanghai in this ill-fated, doomed project. For this blogger intends to wend his way to his favourite corner (in the extremely agreeable Smoking Section) and park his ample hindparts on one of The Porterhouse's tremendously comfy stools. And bar the success of one or two women lawyers of fierce reputations, that is indeed what shall come to pass.

Sasa, nini hii?

There was a time when a presidential threat was thing to be feared, because it was so rare and always indirect and oblique. There is a generation of Kenyans who remain pitifully unaware of the Kenyatta I regime. More are familiar with the Moi regime, where cut-outs, marionettes and mouth-pieces were the vanguard of a system in which the President's word was holy writ and it took expert dissemblers and tea-leaf readers to discern the will, and the threats, of the President.

President Kenyatta, the Younger, has gotten into a habit of threatening people. No, no; I do not mean he is singling out individuals and telling them he'll whup their asses. No! Instead, he seems to make sweeping threats against unknown persons who have committed unspecified sins against the people and the government. In his brief, but excitable presidency, he's trained his guns on terrorists, carpetbaggers, corrupt civil servants, incompetent governors, rogue policemen, rogue judicial staff...the list is long. Indeed, this is the flip side to the President who is constantly promising to do something about one thing or the other without actually spelling out how it will be done, who will do it, when it will be done and how long it will take.

The presidency, never mind the high-minded promises of the civil society industry, is, and must be, strong. It must be seen to be strong. It should exercise its strength with determination and focus. It cannot be wasted on nonentities and humdrum matters. When a statement issues forth from the presidency, it must remain unquestioned by the riff-raff and the uninformed. It must call forth a counter-reaction from the forces out to ensure its brief spell in the State House. It must be precise when needed, and vague when necessary. If the presidency wishes to wipe out terrorists, it cannot do so tentatively or incompetently. When the presidency targets you, there must be no doubt that your days of liberty are numbered.

Since the Penal Code became part of the Law of Kenya, corruption has always been the target of officialdom. Decisions made by Kenyatta, the Elder, Daniel Toroitich arap Moi and Mwai Kibaki ensured that come hell or high water, the agents of corruption had bastions at the heart of the highest decision-making organs of the State. Since the Republic of Kenya was born, there have been corruption scandals that have exposed the Janus-faced approach to fighting corruption by officialdom. Iconic scandals dot the Republic's history; it seems the past is set to be repeated over and over. A sign that Kenyans no longer believe the anti-corruption rhetoric is the indifference with which they receive presidential t6hreats of action. Mwai Kibaki was the Great Big Hope. Under his watch, Anglo-Leasing and Triton will forever mar his words. Uhuru Kenyatta has promised action over and over again; the Nairobi Law Monthly and Alfred Keter claim that the Single Gauge Railway will be his Anglo-Leasing.

It is easier to speak of corruption in the abstract: "corruption will fight back;" "corruption networks;" and the like form now part of the anti-corruption lexicon. Formal anti-corruption campaigns were launched with the appointment of the John Harun Mwau-led Kenya Anti-Corruption Authority, followed by the Aaron Ringera-led Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission which was inherited by the eloquent PLO Lumumba. Now we have the late-to-the-party Mumo Matemu-led Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission. The records of the authorities and commissions are there for all to judge. The voice of the voiceless, according to the civil society industry, is an indictment of the anti-corruption efforts of the State.

It is not enough for the Government of Kenya to appoint new Commissions and Commissioners, enact new laws and regulations, or for the Head of Government to threaten unknown people with unknown consequences for unknown offences in the name of fighting corruption. Until the people, in whose name the fight is being fought, have an absolute buy-in in the fight, the efforts of the government will be meaningless. In the here and now, with the people despondent and desperate for economic survival, and the Government of Kenya lurching from one crisis to another, that buy-in has as much chance of being manifested as chicken will manifest teeth.

I have mixed feelings.

It is fallaciously presumed that only one emotion can reside in one person at any time in reference to a person, a place or a thing. The Freudians and Jungians alike will confirm that it is possible to have mixed feelings about multiple subjects. It is the same with the Jubilee government. We both love and loath it to varying degrees at the same time. There are those who, in addition, hold it in utter contempt, persuaded that it is made up of a bunch of carpetbaggers out to make a fast shilling at the expense of the whole damn country. There are those who are so fiercely loyal to the Jubilee stalwarts, they are in danger of being accused of idolatry by the fundamentalists of the Christian persuasion.

This blogger, too, has mixed feelings about the Jubilee administration. This blogger would like to see the government achieve all its objectives, fulfill its manifesto and wipe away the tears of the past decade. But this blogger is a pragmatist; he does not expect that the Jubilee government is all-angels or all-demons. It just is.

For a decade-and-a-half, Kenyans have been fed the lie that the government is their Number One problem-solver, if only the right people were in charge. This lie has become so large that its perpetrators have began to believe it too. Thus you have the spectacle of grown men and women unhinged at the thought that the "wrong" man is in charge or that the "right" man is over the hill. It largely explains, too, why even intelligent men and women are incapable of thinking about their government without the subtlest intimations that serikali ni baba na mama!

It is this welfare-state mentality that guarantees that Blue Ribbon policies like Kenya Vision 2030 will remain works in progress long after their target dates have been passed. If you see this as a bit harsh, remember that the Government of Kenya has promised water for all since at least 1972 with the target date of achieving the aim being pushed and never attained. Same too the promise of universal maternal care. In contrast, the always-in-crisis United States of America may have some of its citizens whingeing piteously about the winner-takes-all attitude of the Republican Party, but no one seriously proposes that the Federal Government nanny everyone all the time the way Kenyans expect to be nannied by their serikali.

Therefore, while I may admire the youthful facade of Team Jubilee, it is increasingly apparent that it is stuck to a serikali-ni-baba-na-mama mindset that has guaranteed poverty, illiteracy and disease on a colossal scale for nigh on thirty five years. And that makes me as angry as a rhino that has been disturbed from peaceful slumber. Why they insist on riding the same square-tyred bicycle that the Kenyatta I and Moi regimes rode to destruction remains a mystery. And to camouflage their complete paucity of fresh ideas, they cover their flaws with Big Ticket projects riddled with pork and five-fingered discount specialists: Single Gauge Railway, Laptops-for-tots, LAPSSET...the list is familiar and depressing.

It begs the question why stellar private sector titans like Adan Mohammed and Sicily Kariuki are still doing in the government. When their contracts come to an end, and they peddle their CVs at international institutions, they will face the same harsh scrutiny their Cabinet Secretaries will face because they will have completely fucked up the machinery of the State because they were unwilling to move beyond the tried and tested serikali-ni-baba-na-mama mindset.

I have mixed feelings about Team Jubilee. And that is as it should be.

I agree with Luis Franceschi, for once.

Luis Franceschi has an interesting take on the place of law in politics, and politics in law, in today's online edition of the Daily Nation (Can courts prevent county assemblies from voting on impeachment? 31/01/14). In the same paper, the Chief Justice calls for better wildlife conservation/protection laws. This blogger thinks that it is the Luis Franceschi view that should prevail, namely that not everything can be legislated. This blogger would go so far as to argue that not everything the state or the elites declare to be a crime should be made a crime punishable at law.

Kenya is a biodiversity-rich ecological wonder because of its unique terrain, soil, geographical location and its enlightened public. But its diversity is threatened with destruction from poor management and outright sabotage even by the well-meaning. Kenya is also unique in having a truly diverse economy that seems to be thriving but with terribly high levels of inequity between the haves and the have-nots. The poor seem to remain poor for longer than should be the case if the economy is growing at the rate the experts say that it is.

It is for this reason that the law should take into account the realities on the ground. In the 1940s and'50s, when the colonial government took on the challenge of conserving Kenya's flora and fauna, very little was known about Kenya's diverse ecological riches, but a lot was known about the state of impoverishment because of the colonial land policies and economic policies. The villagisation of Central Kenya has had a pernicious effect on the management of the environment since the colonial era. The same mistakes that were committed then are being committed today: the demonisation of the weak and the poor for the sake of dollars from tourism.

Mr Franceschi was writing in the context of the Embu governor's impeachment, but his argument can be extended to the manner in which environmental conservation has been managed, especially since the late 1970s. For the most part, it has been a donor-driven effort, with many researchers from overseas, especially the United States and Western Europe, exploiting out flora and fauna for their benefit. Meanwhile, the residents of Kenya have not been so lucky. The few that have had opportunities to conduct research in the nation's parks and game reserves, have found their research restricted to mundane subjects that had very little commercial viability, unless of course they were attached to a larger Western research project. Kenyans who live around these protected areas have had their livelihoods disrupted for very little or no compensation. (The Endorois would have very strong views on this.)

Therefore, when the effect of the enforcement of the wildlife protection laws is the persecution of the poor, there must come a time when we ask whether or not it is worth it to protect lions and elephants when millions of Kenyans are at risk of starvation. The short-sighted decision by the Kenya Wildlife Service against renegotiating the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) will rank as the hallmark of the wildlife conservation lobby against the interests of the poor. If all the nations of the world were allowed to trade in their stockpiles of wildlife trophies, Kenya could set aside this amount to helping communities around parks and reserves adapt to alternative livelihoods. This is a simplistic argument, but the fact that Kenya did not have a chance to debate the matter is instructive.

For a lawyer, every problem can be solved by more laws, or so it seems from the Chief Justice's remarks. He should know better. Laws are simply not enough; they must enjoy broad legitimacy amongst key stakeholders, f not the whole nation. Wildlife laws are broadly legitimate, but not among the communities who live next to reserves and parks. When young poor men form the bulk of offenders, their families pay the price when these young men are incarcerated or fined. Until the youth of Kenya, especially the youth living near game parks and reserves, get better economic opportunities that better education and other public facilities bring, they will form the bulk of anti-wildlife offenders and Kenyan elites will keep calling for stiffer penalties or, in the words of the Chief Justice, improved wildlife laws.

Try Kodiaga first before you recommend extended stays.

It is only someone who has yet to set foot in Kenya's eye-wateringly soul-shattering police jails or "GK" prisons who would call for an offender to be held or incarcerated in one of these places. When he was an honourable mheshimiwa, Shem Ochuodho would not have hesitated to recommended the stiffest prison sentence for any offender. The few months he spent at the Kodiaga GK Prison re-educated him about the inhumanity of it all.

In recent months there has been a concentrated effort to "enhance" the penalties meted by the courts under the law for offences against wildlife in Kenya. While Kenyans are acutely aware of the place of the nation's wildlife in bringing home the dollars, they are also equally acutely aware of the hypocrisy that goes with wildlife conservation (and protection).

The popular narrative, supported even by well-meaning but clueless eco-evangelists in far-flung areas of the globe, is that "poachers" are usually armed with "crude weapons" which might include boys, arrows, machetes, spears, simple snares or traps and home-made poison. It is why the prosecution of hunters simply looking for their families' next meals is so draconian. But this popular narrative has been discounted by hundreds of testimonies from victims of poachers, and this blogger does not mean the elephant or the rhino.

One of the un-noticed elements of the 2012/ 2013 Tana River clashes was the presence of sophisticated helicopter-borne poaching operations in the Tana River District and the southern bits of the Maasai Mara, Amboseli and Tsavo East. Not only were the illegal hunters flying about in helicopters, but they deployed sophisticated ground radar, seismic monitors, night-vision goggles and long-range sniper rifles. Their brutal efficiency ensured that the population of elephants and rhinos plunged alarmingly in that period. And when their operations were discovered by the residents of the Tana River, the hunters turned their sophisticated arsenal against the people. These hunters contributed a great deal to the sore-wounds between the Pokomo and the Orma that might never heal.

What is curious is that the men and women who smuggle wildlife trophies are caught, as are the small-time hunters. But the sophisticates with their hi-tech weapons seem to vanish into thin air, even though no one can land a helicopter in Kenya without attracting the curiosity of even the most sophisticated suit-clad graduate: we all want a peek at the idiot flying about in a helicopter. How is it then that shuka-clad hunters are being blamed for the destruction of Kenya's heritage while these hunting helicopters are refueled in the nation's ""air-strips" without anyone batting an eyelid?

Therefore, how can we demand with a clean conscience life imprisonment for people we know are not a threat to our cultural or environmental heritage? If there was even a hint that the pilots and crews of these hunting airships would face the same harsh judicial verdict, then we would by no means support life imprisonment for hunters of our endangered rhinos or elephants. But that is not the case. It is the poor who pay the high price demanded by our laws, while the rich laugh all the way to their Asian buyers. By all means try and find innovative ways to stop the carnage in our national parks and game reserves, but keep in mind that so long as we do nothing to prevent the financiers of industrial-scale poaching from purveying their craft in Kenya, it is the poor and our wildlife who will pay the price.

The Man in the Mirror

Despite the billionaires amongst us (dollar billionaires, not the run-of-the-mill shilingi billionaire, let us be clear) we are a poor country. Nor resource poor as those benighted sheikhdoms with oil only; but poor in the sense that over half the country shits in the bushes or down a very deep hole. Poor in the sense that even pretty wealthy men and women see nothing off about their five-fingered-discounts habits, especially when it comes to monies placed in their care. It is for this reason that this blogger is surprised that it took this long for a Governor (and his female deputy) to get their asses in the firing line of their county assembly on accusations of having trousered several ten million shillings meant for "development," that catchall word that means many things to many people.

Ironically, the news broke on the same day that the President and Commander-in-Chief was lining up his Cabinet in front of State House (with many of us hoping for a firing squad scenario) and the beaming broadcasts of the media and declaring in his Big Boy Voice that the Standard Gauge Railway will be built, come hell or high water, or words to that effect. He warned (what is it with this President and his warnings?) those who thought they could reverse decisions that initiated in the long-forgotten administration of Mwai Kibaki to...this blogger is still not sure what he wants them to do. What is notable, however, is the fact that the Government of Kenya, which cannot seem to supply clean drinking water, or buy computers, or pay doctors or nurses or teachers, has gotten it into its head that it is a good idea to secure a Very Large Overdraft from the Chinese (whose people have been taking a keen commercial interest in our wildlife, among other natural resources) to pay for a railway for reasons yet to be explained. We have a railway. Yes, it is old. But why do we need a new one? Why can't we simply make the one we have more efficient? Why exactly do we need an SGR today?

Meanwhile, Kenyans are realising that perhaps, the Deputy President, before he was a Deputy President, was right about the wee matter of implementing the constitution. It is still not clear whether the brainiacs that conceived devolution could have known that the hyenas that had pitched camp in the Capital would relocate their centres of greed from the nation's political centre to its forgotten fringes. It should not come as a surprise that this is exactly what happened; after all, how many of the idealists who served on the Committee of Experts failed to parlay their "experience" into wallet-fattening government jobs later on? If these one could not resist keeping their fat fingers out of the National Treasury cookie jar, it would take an Act of God to keep the Governors, deputy Governors, "Chief Officers and sundry county hefties and worthies out of the county treasuries, would it not?

But the catch is that while the machinery of government is creating billionaires and making millionaires on a weekly basis, a majority of Kenyans don't have two shillings to rub together. They are the ones at whom we snigger on morning FM radio because their homes have been flooded the night before and they cannot trace their loved ones or their meagre belongings. They are the ones we condescendingly organise nation-wide campaigns to supply them with sanitary pads and tampons, because their mothers and fathers have not the wherewithal. They are the ones we slap hefty prison terms on for doing what their betters do with briefcases and lawyers.

Compromises have defined the fifty years of self-rule. When it became clear that the much-hated settler community had great clout in the great halls of Whitehall, we swallowed our pride and allowed them to call Kenya home. When it became clear that KANU was a dictatorship, we swallowed our anger and went along so that we could get along. When it became clear that our Treasury was being pilfered, we swallowed our pride and gave our bit in the name of cost-sharing. It is only a matter of time that we stare at the face in the mirror and admit that we do not give tow shits about the poor, the weak and the downtrodden and that our nation, our government has taught us to look out for number one: the man in the mirror.

Rais, bend it to your will.

Rais, you are not on the campaign trail anymore and it is no longer your business to promise us action on this, that or the other. That is what we need to remind our President, ten months after he assumed power in State House and received the Instruments of Power with such colourful pomp and circumstance at teh Moi International Sports Complex at Kasarani.

This is not to say that the Presidency of Uhuru Kenyatta is a never-ending string of promises-yet-to-be-fulfilled; it is far from that. The Galana irrigation project, estimated to provide over 2 million jobs when fully implemented, is not a promise but action on the ground. However, if it is implemented in the same fashion as the free maternity healthcare promise, where babies are born while their mothers are standing, then it is not something he should tom-tom at the moment.

However, this blogger is not here to praise nor to hurl brickbats at the Commander-in-Chief; this blogger has noticed a worrying tendency by the Head of State to make promises: we will do this, we should do this, we are going to do this, we want to do this...it is becoming part of his charming mantra every time a new idea or a new programme catches his fancy. But that is not what heads of government do; they do not promise things. They simply crack the whip and it is done.

If President Kenyatta wants the Ministry of Transport, the National Police Service, the National Transport Safety Authority, the Kenya National Highways Authority and the key stakeholders in the transport-and-roads sector to reduce the deaths and injuries on the nation's highways, he will not promise to take action; he will demand it with the full authority of his office. he will hold accountable the men and women in charge. He will fire the stumbling blocks. He will prosecute to the fullest extent of the law the saboteurs. And he will publicly celebrate the achievement of the men and women who translated his Presidential Decree into Policy and finally into Results.

My President does not need to promise that the war against corruption will be fought and won; all my President needs to do is to demand it. He is the head of the government. He has the right to demand such an outcome. If Mumo Matemu and his fellow commissioners cannot meet the President's demands, they should be sent packing. My President does not need to promise that the Single Gauge Railway will be built; all he has to do is demand that it be built. It is the business of the Ministry, the Cabinet Secretary, the railways corporation and the Attorney-General to see to it that this presidential demand is met. When they embarrass him by playing the same old procurement hide-and-seek games, he has absolutely no reason to retain them in the service of his government. he is well within his powers to ask for their resignations. If they resist him, he must ensure that they go and that they never set foot in the public service ever again.

The time for making promises is over. This is the time to keep the promises that were made during the campaign, not to make new ones. It is not time to seize on every new idea out there. It is only required that the President should direct the machinery of his government to achieving all the ends of his promises. In this, the President need only point his finger for the public service to get to it. The sand in the gears of the machinery of government must be dealt with ruthlessly. They must be purged. In this, the President has the law on his side. If the sand is composed of the corrupt, the perfidious, the lazy, the incompetent, the saboteurs, and the like, he must set the forces of law and order on them. He must have the book thrown at them. He must make them an example and a lesson. In other words, it is his government. It is time he bent it to his will.

Why Ms Kilonzo is going to be disappointed.

This is not the United States of America. The spirit of the American Revolution is not alive and thriving in the savannas of this most East African of East African nations. The United States was built on the foundation of the greatest extent of human liberty that one could get away with in a nation-state. It is why the Supreme Court in Roe v Wade could read privacy into the First Amendment though neither pregnancies nor their terminations are mentioned at all in the First Amendment.

The American Declaration of Independence is a truly remarkable statement of intent. The Preamble to the Constitution of Kenya is a poor imitation.In it you will struggle to find the equivalent of a rallying call to extend human liberty to its most extreme end. Instead, it is a set of platitudes perfected by the rhetorical flourishes of carnivore buskers; it is incapable of even raising the hackles of those who feel that their right to privacy is under the greatest of threats from their government.

When Kethi D. Kilonzo asserts with authority that the right to privacy is essential to a free society and she quotes the principles and the right enshrined in Article 91, I wonder whether she has been keeping up with the changes that Kenya has undergone over the past fifty years (Leave me alone and just let me be, Sunday Standard, 26/01/14). Kenya is not the United States; its Mau Mau war is not the equivalent of the American Revolutionary War; its Preamble is not the battle-hymn that the Declaration of Independence is. Privacy may be enshrined in Article 31, but it is about as inspirational as a citation from an English-Swahili Dictionary.

In the United States, the Bill of Rights are the foundation for ideological battles between scholars steeped in decades of argumentation; Chapter Four, on the other hand, is a wish-list from the civil society industry for which few battles have been fought and fewer of those have been ideological or argumentative, if that. It is why the false narrative of privacy rights is being red-herringed in public discourse; red herring because whom do you know who could credibly argue that even in modern Kenya privacy is understood in the same libertarian way that it is in the United States?

For this reason, we must restate the argument in light of the experience of colonial Kenya and Independent Kenya, and the choices our rulers made for us between 1921 and 2010. The colonial government and its hated administration service were rulers. Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel Toroitich arap Moi were rulers. Kibaki will deny it until the day he is dead and gone, but he was a ruler too. Only Uhuru Kenyatta has a chance to be a leader, perhaps even a statesman. Kenyan rulers decided when Kenya would gain internal self rule; they decided who would form the self-government Kenyans demanded; they decided the form of government Kenyans would have; they decided whether or not to sustain that government or curse it with financial bankruptcy. The Mau Mau may have died in the name of land and freedom but they were not a revolutionary army and their war was not a revolutionary war, no matter how many hagiographical tales we tell about their heroism.

Privacy, the rights of arrested person, the power of the State to search ones home and seize ones property...all these are things that the State gave Kenyans. It is why many refer to government not as an uncountable noun but as a proper noun: Government even today in light of a progressive constitution. One of the clawbacks of the power of Government in light of the progressivism of the Bill of Rights is to be found in the scarcely-studied Article 24 that permits the State, or Government, to limit the application of the Bill of Rights. In contrast to the rest of the Bill of Rights, it is drafted in the weaselly words of a lawyer out to cheat you out of your point-something acre of land. It is proof that Government survives regardless of what the civil society industry wants, or wishes Kenyans would want.

IN Kenya, as a nation and as Republic, the State, and Government, came first; the people were an afterthought. They were an afterthought when the robbers of the Imperial British East Africa Company pushed the natives off their land; when the colonial administration all but enslaved the natives; when successive Independence regimes did everything in their power to sustain Government, whether the people were happy or unhappy. The people suffered; Government prospered.

Perhaps Ms Kilonzo is attempting to rally people to the cause, show them that they now come first and Government should be the afterthought. She seems to live in the Twilight Zone where the rule of law is the foundation of the relationship between the people and Government. She should know better. The rule of law is one of those fictions Kenyans have been sold on which in the darkest recesses of their hearts they know to be snake-oil, a flim-flam, not worth the paper on which it is printed. It is why Kenyans are going along with the sham that is judicial vetting. It is why we are not raising eyebrows at the spectre of the members of the police vetting board sitting pretty while their colleagues on the other side of the table are compelled to attempt to bamboozle their way to job security. We can ape the United States and become properly agitated about "assaults on our privacy" and "unwarranted State surveillance" but we know, deep in our hearts, we don't care. We never did. We probably never will.

One day, corruption will kill us all.

Just like tuberculosis, pertussis, measles, pneumonia, malaria, the Spanish Flu and cirrhosis of the liver, corruption kills. That should be the tag-line of all anti-corruption campaigns. Corruption Kills. many Kenyans have been animated by the back-and-forth warriors of the Standard Gauge Railway tender. One side alleges, vociferously, that the tender is not a tender and that it is illegal. The other side says that it is not a tender but a government-to-government contract on very favourable terms to Kenya and that it is legal. Both might be right. Equally, both might be wrong. That is for the Mwalimu Matis, the John Githongos and the Maiai Kiais of the civil society industry to tell us.

Whether the Single Gauge Railway project has been corrupted by the raiders of the national coffers is neither here nor there; what is critical is to understand that Grand Corruption - the sort that gets the Matis, Githongos and Kiais out of bed in the morning - is fought on such a Grand Scale that its effects are never examined on the minutiae of day-to-day lives of the walking masses. When a mother-to-be gives birth in a public health facility and her infant dies upon birth because the maternity ward is under-manned because the funds for hiring extra nurses are unavailable because the national government overspent on Volkswagen Passat saloons because the public officers making the decision to purchase the Passat saloon were...(unaelewa?), you will not see Messrs Mati, Githongo or Kiai penning long Letters to the Editor explaining the link between the VW Passat tender and the death of an infant at the Nyeri District Hospital.

Take the knotty problem of public safety. We pretend that we are safe when we have surrounded our homes with eight-feet high walls, electrified fences, flood-lights, guard dogs, private security personnel and privately-owned firearms (whether licenced or not). We take defensive driving courses as a precaution for when we are not behind our home-stockades (surely we do not ride in hijack-prone Public Service Vehicles out of choice). We bemoan the lack of "police presence" on our streets and curse the extra expense of replacing the missing police with private security but we do not link the missing police to the black hole of the Black Budget allocated to "national security" and its associated elements.

We have a slight idea idea of how much the national government spends on capital development in national-security-related matters (you know, guns, bullets, body armour, Murungarus, and the like); but we are all at sea at why rank-and-file policemen (and women) live in hovels; why they do not receive the equivalent of hazard pay; and why they are the bane of the anti-corruption establishment while their bosses seem to trouser tens of millions every year from "investments" by them and their spouses. We do not need the same numbers of police on the streets as the United States or the United Kingdom do; what we need are police that are motivated to uphold the rule of law at all times. So, we do not pay the rank-and-file well; and their bosses are not punished for their "investments" even these are of quite dubious antecedents. Despite all this we are shocked - SHOCKED - when bribes are solicited and paid; when official firearms and uniforms are "rented;" when response times to crime scenes depend entirely on whether responding officers will be given "something to fuel their vehicles;" and there is a growing and lucrative partnership between the forces of law and order and elements of the criminal underground.

Corruption kills. And we are complicit in the deaths that corruption leaves in its wake. We go along to get along. We play the game as the corrupt want it to be played. We wring our hands and whinge piteously when things go wrong. But we do not take an active part in routing corruption; we are part of the corruption. Every day we watch silently as perjury is suborned, as bribes are paid, as "petty" rules are bent and broken, as unfairness is visited on us, as nurses sleep while infants die on birth, as anti-corruption czars are permitted to receive "gifts" in the course of their duties...we are complicit in the wave of corruption that has engulfed this country like an epidemic. One day, corruption will kill us all.

The right partnership.

This blogger dares you to find any intelligent Kenyan who believes the National Police Service or the National Police Service Commission are intelligent or professional. This blogger dares you to classify the Administration Police as the cutting-edge in national security or public safety. Individual units, such as the Criminal Investigations Department and the General Service Unit (and its Recce Squad) have received deserved plaudits, but by an large, Kenyans view their police and police commission with undisguised loathing.

For this reason, millions of Kenyans greeted the attempted explanations by the Inspector-general with derision and hurtful mockery. The Inspector-General has been to a real school and obtained real degrees to boot. It is whispered in certain quarters that he is a doctoral candidate in one of Kenya's finer institutions of higher learning. At one point in his illustrious career, he headed the brutally, scarily effective GSU Presidential Escort Unit. You would not know this to listen to his ham-fisted atempts at setting the story straight about Westgate, narcotics trafficking in Kenya, high-profile murders, or anytjhing to do with the security mess at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport. Nor can you trust that his spokespersons will do a better communications job; other than the colourful Eric Kiraithe and the eloquent Charles Owino, these characters have cemented the impression in Kenyans' minds that any relationship that the National Police Service has with the English language (or Swahili, for the purists among us) is purely accidental.

This blogger has argued in the past that until the mandate of national policing shifts from national security to public safety, we will never have the police service that we deserve but the police force that we universally loath (and deride.) With the mulish determination to see everything in national security hues, just like the United States federal government, the people are a threat, to be corralled and controlled. The people cannot be trusted to do the right thing; they are to be feared as undeclared fifth columnists of foreign powers or transnational criminal networks. It is for this reason that draconian laws that treat even public officers like a threat are yet to be repealed  a decade after the Second Liberation war was declared won by the leading luminaries of the National Rainbow Coalition. Instead, even more draconian laws have been enacted, dozens of Kenyans have been renditioned to parts unknown, and the civic space necessary for democratic discourse has slowly been occupied by the oppressively mighty presence of the Government.

A change of focus from national security to public safety will see both objectives of a secure Government and a safe public achieved. The elements of national security truly charged with ensuring the continuity of government would find the field clear for them to go after enemies of the nation, whether or not these are synonymous with enemies of the government. The police, on the other hand, would develop new partnerships with county governments and municipal authorities to provide for a safe environment for Kenyans and visitors alike to engage in an activity the Government would encourage: the creation of wealth.

A partnership, for example, between the Nairobi City County government and the National Police Service would identify that the key drivers of violent crime are interconnected: poor traffic management, poor civic facilities; corruption among the police and City Fathers alike. A functioning partnership between the two institutions would ensure that street lights work; drains and sewers function; potholes are urban legends; physical plans are enforced (and complied with) without favour; and the corrupt in the public service are hounded out of the system and jailed. The spectre of an inarticulate Inspector-General as the laughingstock of the nation would be a thing of the past. The image of a bombastic but ineffective Governor would be banished to the ash-heap of history. More importantly, the people would have faith again in the institutions of government. That is the key; until our faith in government is restored, it will invite contempt, ridicule and ill-will.

Slow-roll Express.

The redoubtable Fatou Bensouda's much-delayed prosecution of Uhuru Kenyatta is turning into a Russian play, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, perhaps, though Mr Beckett was not a Russian. The International Criminal Court's prosecutor from the Gambia was always playing with a loaded deck when she inherited Luis Moreno-Ocampo's fiasco-ridden Kenyan cases. The doubts, both at home and abroad in Africa, about the rationale behind the heavy-handed ICC prosecutor's investigation meant that regardless of the power politics between Kenya and her development partners, Ms Bensouda was never going to get everything she wanted.

The to-ing and fro-ing between the prosecution and defence teams has supplied enough drama for at least 10 years of the leading lights of the Nigerian movie industry. Mr Moreno-Ocampo and Ms Bensouda, when they once master and apprentice, underestimated the Kenyan establishment's determination to prevail. Senior police, senior intelligence officers, senior civil servants, and senior provincial administration officers resisted the entreaties and threats of the ICC prosecutor. They dragged their feet until the whip was seemingly cracked by the President-Prime Minister combo. The machinery of government - something that Joseph Kaguthi knows a thing or two about - maneuvered and manipulated and got the outcome it wanted. No one doubts that if the system had sufficient time, the postponement of the President's trial would also have meant the postponement of the Deputy President's.

Makau Mutua, Maina Kiai and John Githongo must be staring in horror as Kenya somehow one-ups the ICC prosecutor. All three must surely know that the Government of Kenya is not and cannot be separated from its politicians, especially its president regardless of what the Constitution says. It is not that the president or deputy president are above the law; those days of presidential imperialism are well and truly over. But the reality is that even before Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta and William Samoei Ruto took their oaths of office, they were pretty big deals. Mr Kenyatta needed no introduction to the people of Kenya; he may not have spent his entire life in the public limelight, but millions of Kenyans knew of him and wanted him to win in 2013. Mr Ruto was a wily political operator who had made and broken political careers of others; this was his moment in the sun and the ICC prosecutor was not going to be the fly in his Deputy Presidential ointment.

What must also horrify the three is the narrative that has somehow whitewashed the terrible crimes of 2007/2008. The Judiciary has proven a disappointment, as have the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Attorney-General. The Kenya National Commission on Human Rights is out of commission and commissioners. The other Kenya Human Rights Commission is in the hands of the clever-but-flawed Atsango Chesoni; it will not be troubling Mr Kenyatta any time soon. Ndung'u Wainaina and his fellow-travelers leave one with the feeling that their intellectual journeys have proven terribly arduous...and exhausting; they are the human equivalent of a deflated tyre. On the home front, whether Messrs Makau, Kiai and Githongo will admit it or not, there is nothing to trouble Mr Kenyatta on the ICC personal challenge.

The good lady from The Gambia must look for a face-saving gambit from the demon-seed that Mr Moreno-Ocampo dumped on her lap. She has slow-rolled the withdrawal of charges against Mr Kenyatta in the hopes that the rats deserting her prosecution ship will somehow have a change of heart. It was hard enough to persuade them to come forward when Mr Kenyatta was a mere politician; it will be near impossible for her to persuade the remainder to stay now that he is the Commander-in-Chief of the Kenya Defence Forces. And she cant go dipping into the KNCHR/KHRC well given all the poison dumped in it since March 2008. She's on her own. She must wish she'd never left The Gambia; at least there it was easy to see the other guy pulling a fast one on you.

Hang your heads in shame.

The presence of water dispensers in the offices of public servants, whether they be Cabinet Secretaries, Principle Secretaries or the rank and file, or the presence of uncountable bottles of bottled-water on the high tables  of high-level chinwags attended by the aforementioned personages of the Government of Kenya are an indictment of over thirty-five years of the Clean Water for All Pledge that the Government of Kenya made to the people of Kenya.

It is symptomatic of the sloth with which the Government of Kenya has completed its projects for the improvement of the lives of the people. Since 1962, Kenya has metronomically held regular elections, and replaced one administration with another with only one or two major electoral crises. But the elections have not transformed the lives of the people all that much. There are those who are proud of the legacy left by Baba Moi in the education sector: all those schools, especially girls' schools, that he built and staffed. There are those who believe that Baba Jimmi's accomplishments in the rods sector trump all the achievements of Baba Moi and Mzee Kenyatta combined. Yet none are able to demonstrate that Kenyans are all that better off for all the schools Baba Moi built or the hundreds of kilometres of roads that Baba Jimmi built.

Many more Kenyans are less poor today than there were in 1963; more Kenyans have been educated and have educated their children that in 1963. The quality of life for hundreds of thousands is quite good; that of millions more is in the toilet (only that millions of Kenyans do not have toilets.) The big-ticket programmes that are and should be the concern of the Government of Kenya are education, healthcare, public safety...and potable water. A casual assessment of the situation leaves one with the sense that the Government of Kenya is stuck in the Egyptian dessert of want, without a Moses to lead it to the Promised Land of plenty.

If the Government of Kenya, whether at the national level or the county level, is unable to assure the people of potable water, affordable and reliable healthcare, or public safety, there is little that it can boast of to its neighbours. We are praised as a dynamic economy, the engine of East Africa, but this praise damns us to perpetual mediocrity it does not lead to the upliftment of the quality of life for the millions of Kenya still stuck in an agriculture-based economy that barely sustains livelihoods in the rural backwaters policy-makers never visit.

If Kenyan agriculture were the pride of East Africa, it would guarantee clean drinking water for the millions that it employs; dispensaries would be fully-staffed, well-stoked and efficient. But none of this is true. Agriculture, especially commercial industrial agriculture, seems to benefit an elite that lives in the swankiest palaces in Kenya while the labour that makes agriculture the economic engine of Kenya languish in smoke-filled hovels, barely able to send all their children to school and who die like flies every time there is an outbreak of one affliction or the other.

Therefore, when the President and Deputy President, the forty-seven governors and the army of functionaries and factotums host their visitors and offer them water dispensed from a machine or packaged in plastic, they should take a moment to wonder why the tap water in their offices is not to be trusted fifty years after Kenya decided to rule itself. If they cannot supply their own offices with clean water, it is almost certain that they cannot supply the people of Kenya with clean water...or clean anything, for that matter. They should hang their heads in shame and admit they have failed the people.