Let us be, Mr Kimaiyo.

Patrick Gathara asked a simple, yet difficult to answer, question the other day: why is it when the billion-shilling swindlers of Kenya are pursued by the forces of law and order, deadly forces is never employed yet the result of their billion-shilling swindles is usually death and destruction on an epic scale? He pointed out that while he deplored the brutal murders of twenty-three police, he did not understand why Kapedo was entitled to a Kenya Defence Forces deployment but not Kileleshwa.

It is not so difficult to observe the manner in which the rich and the poor are treated by the forces of law and order, especially the police and the judiciary. I am lucky enough to have spent my childhood in the City in the 1980s, not because I enjoyed superb civic amenities but because I can remember the general sense of "we are in this together" that united bothy the ruling elite and the hoi polloi. The elite still had their privileges, but they did not rub those privileges in our faces.

That block within the Parliament Road, Harambee Avenue, Taifa Road and City Hall Way square is all government buildings. You'll find iconic ones such as the Kenyatta International Conference Centre, Harambee House, Sheria House, the Attorney-General's Chambers, Jogoo House and Jogoo House "B", the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Trade Building and Commission House, the headquarters of the Public Service Commission. Outside the square but along Parliament Road are Parliament Building and the Jomo Kenyatta Mausoleum, along City Hall Way is City Hall, along Harambee Avenue are Harambe House Annexe, Vgilance House and the National Treasury, but opposite Jogoo House is just Reinsurance Plaza and its sunken car park. Before you roll your eyes over ths long list of buildings, indulge me a little more.

In the '80 and early '90s, the only premises you couldn't enter freely was the Harambee House-Sheria House-Commission House-Attorney-General's Chambers complex because, unlike Uhuru Kenyatta, Daniel Moi actually kept office hours at Harambee House, so his safety was not something we could begrudge him. However, one could walk from Taifa Road to Parliament Road without using either City Hall Way or Harambee Avenue. The processional road between Parliament Buildings and the KICC was open to the public. None of the buildings in the square were ringed with six-feet high steel fences, not even Parliament Building. But it is the benches surrounding the Reinsurance Plaza sunken car park that were a true testament to the acceptance of people from all walks of life the Government Square; those who had come to visit someone in any of the buildings who needed time to rest could sit on the benches as they awaited their appointed hour.

Inspector-General of Police David Kimaiyo, his civilian bosses and his hamfisted minions, and all the securocrats in their orbit of inanity have forgotten that this city will die if it is made any more hostile for those who do not have an ear in the corridors of Government Square. Mr Kimaiyo and his colleagues began by attempting to exile "idlers" from the Taifa Road side of the sunken car park benches by covering them in used motor oil. It never occurred to Mr Kimaiyo and his colleagues that there are inadequate waiting areas in the offices in Government Square and that the sunken car park benches were the only alternative because Uhuru Park and Central Park are so far away. Then Mr Kimaiyo and his colleagues decided to take away walking space for pedestrians.

It has never occurred to these people that the vast majority of visitors to the City are pedestrians, not motorists with private means of transport. Mr Kimaiyo and his colleagues have made a conscious decision to treat all pedestrians as a threat to the occupants of the buildings on Government Square so they are to be kept as far away from the gates to these buildings' premises and their fences. In some cases, walking space has been reduced to a third of what it was serving a walking population that shows no sign of reducing.

Uhuru Kenyatta's government promised to listen to its people. The President demonstrated this when he remonstrated his transport ministry over the incredible, job-destroying stupidity of banning matatu graffiti. It is time he wagged his fingers in the faces of Mr Kimaiyo and his fellow securocrats and ordered them to let the people walk and, when they tire, to rest their feet without being harrassed. The perception that Mr Kenyatta's government is militarised will be reinforced by the siege mentality that the "security" restrictions imposed by Mr Kimaiyo and his colleagues engender.

Thank you.

My friend Jennifer called me yesterday when I was walking down a rain-soaked Harambee Avenue and wished me many warm returns. I didn't have the heart to tell her that I had been holding my umbrella in one hand, my notebook in the other and that as soon as I awkwardly fished out my phone from my pocket, one or all three of us were going to enjoy a bit of Nairobi's glorious rain. I chose to ruin the notebook; paper can be replaced but a cut-rate albeit well-fitting black suit is not something I can replace with the swipe of a card.

Jennifer's phone call got me thinking, though, of all the friends I have made in the past decade. Even Lillian sent me warm wishes even though I hadn't seen her since she upped and married Pius. Of course I had drinks in the evening with Leonard and Maureen, but only because they love it very much when I wake up with a five-alarm hangover. At least that's what I tell them happens when we have drinks. It's nice to help your friends live in the happy delusion that their friends are also suffering from the effects and aftereffects of overindulgence, right?

A score remembered to plaster my facebook page with felicitations and ribald innuendo that is not fit to be repeated for the dis-edificaton of the readers of this post, who may include among them small children and the weak-minded. Needless to say, I will do a bit of nimble footwork to avoid having to sit down with Joseph, Hiram and John, because they are the agents of Beelzebub out to corrupt an otherwise simple public servant trying to make his way in a hostile world. Obviously my nearest and dearest did not even try to spare me the blushes; George and Rei and their kinder, better halves, Polly and Lizz, somehow wrangled the Prof and the Doc to sign a card in which their collective emotional restraint was, for once, quite admirable. (I have no idea what Rei wrote; it was in Cyrillic.)

Even Beryl, who wouldn't want me to reveal the number of summers I have seen, and Don and Andrew sent word that they thought it was pretty neat that I was nearing the greying age with avidity and positivity. I haven't seen Dagi since he flounced off to the USA over a decade-and-a-half ago and I can barely picture Ronnie's face sometimes, especially when I have a five-alarm hangover, but I was chuffed that they even bothered to acknowledge another milestone that only makes an actuary happy. Of course Ngina didn't forget; she's smart that way and one day she's going to either (a) own Mombasa or (b) run Mombasa, which is probably the same thing. 

Edgar and a whole bunch of Old Boys sent word that they were worried that I didn't seem to following the school motto - Ui wii mbee - in the spirit that it was intended; they can't understand why I am not the Solicitor-General yet. If I told them the truth, they'd probably find Tom Ojienda and demand he uses his influence on the Judicial Service Commission to "set things right" for a fellow Old Boy.

But it is what She did that took my breath away. I do not know if you have seen proper cursive penmanship. I have. If I were to describe a moment of utter bliss, it would be to read something in cursive script, in which the flawlessness of the grammatical syntax and the gentle ribbing caused a slow heat to emanate somewhere near my aorta and refused to die down for hours on end. Or perhaps that warm fuzzy feeling was the recurrence of the Man Flu I had conquered two weeks ago. We'll find out as soon as I have flushed out of my system the last of the Martell, Absolut, Finlandia, Peroni, Heineken and that strange concoction Mwatha was peddling on Saturday. (But She really has very beautiful penmanship.)

The day itself ended on a very high note. I hadn't seen Tom for a while; he spends an inordinate amount of time hanging out with very hard men with very hard stares who do very hard things in very hard places. But because Tom looks like the side of a house with the same kind of muscular consistency that telegraphs great will, I am unlikely to entertain doubts that every now and then, he'll shuffle into the Porterhouse, rearrange the Three Barrels with his sheer force of personality, and generally regale us with tales of derring-do which we will doubt until the next time we read his byline. All in all, my friends made it a wonderful three days and it's Jennifer you must thank for my remembering to say, "Thanks guys."

Njoki's debate.

I was prepared to take up literary cudgels against Njoki Chege. Instead I partook of a very large snifter of something that attracted a very heft excise duty, calmed down and considered my hypocritical reaction. At one time I vroom-vroomed around town in a cut-rate Subaru Impreza that I never quite finished paying for before it was written off in a Citi Hoppa-related encounter. My broking agent saw fit to jack up my premiums after that and that was that when it came to cut-rate anything. Njoki Chege is right to stop, and cross the street, when she encounters any of the specimens she described as being out of her league, especially if they even think of expressing amorous intentions.

Ms Chege has presented her CV, in a manner of speaking. She is forthright, she is employed gainfully, she is pursuing what I must assume is a post-graduate degree (perhaps even a doctorate if she is in the same mould as the impressive Yvonne Maingey), she is unimpressed by what I shall ungenerously assume are cut-rate "exhibition" iPhone 4s, and she will need to be impressed by erudition, intellect - and a very fat wallet. That a respected tabloid has given her a byline means that she is indeed a respectable member of the society and definitely not anyone's mother. It is for an equally respectable man to decide whether or not Ms Chege ticks off all the right check-boxes and whether he is prepared to risk his name being splashed in the previously mentioned tabloid if he proves less than advertised.

It is strange for someone who's spent the better part of his adult life meeting accomplished, strong-willed and opinionated women to be witness to the testosterone-fuelled violent misogyny directed at women such as Ms Chege. In this day and age it is no longer the exclusive preserve of men to have ideas about ideal mates, not when more and more women are bringing home fatter and fatter bacon. There are a few biological truths that will only be elided with a more rapid march of biotechnology: menopause will strike, but it will not strike men; childbirth is a natural outcome of conception, but not for men, and at every end of a menstrual cycle, it is wise for men in women's lives to find legitimate reasons to "travel to Kigali" on business for the sake of peace and sanity.

Why are there men who fear women today? I saw on the news last night that men in Garissa would rather murder their daughters than permit them to join the National Youth Service. These must be the same kinds of men who have a very strong abhorrence to a woman dictating what kind of man she deserves. I say the more Njoki Cheges we have out there, the faster everyone will get over the idea of stereotypical gendered roles of little practical utility in the twenty-first century.

There is a catch though. You cannot have your cake and eat it too. Women should be allowed to set standards for themselves about whom they will hitch themselves for the rest of their lives. But they must be prepared for the equality backlash when men give in and relent, especially over gendered roles. Of course here are those biological functions that only women will perform; but beyond that, a true partnership will also mean that Ms Chege's suitors will ask how fat a wallet she brings into the affair; no man will be looking for a voracious parasite. It is time that even the backwaters of Kenya where custom and tradition are as men declare them to be entered the twenty-first century of women who know exactly what they want.

Kanyari and GoK: Siamese Twins

I have the right to believe that Victor Kanyari is a prophet and a faith-healer, even if none has been healed when Victor Kanyari has interceded. I have the right to worship with Victor Kanyari's congregation, even if he demands money from me and my own. My right to believe cannot be restricted by anyone. How will you stop me from believing? There isn't a statutory switch in my brain or an intellectual switch in my mind that could be thrown so that I stopped believing. Secondly, the only reasonable restriction to whether or not I can worship with Victor Kanyari's congregation is if the church at which he preaches is unregistered or has failed to comply with the provisions of the Societies' Act.

I wonder what those calling for "more regulation of churches" mean. The statutory and regulatory environment is not as unsettled as we would imagine or we have been led to believe. The Societies' Act is robust; it follows the same pattern of registration and oversight as the Companies Act. In relation to "churches" the problem is not the law but is enforcement. Victor Kanyari may very well be a crook; his crookedness is not as a result of an inadequate law but the non-enforcement of the law that exists. The non-enforcement of the law, as is frequently the case in Kenya, is a political decision, and the nation's political leadership has had a hand in ensuring that the Victor Kanyaris of Kenya operate with impunity.

It is a spectacle that reveals the deep schisms in Kenya. The gap between the rich and the poor is not imaginary. There are shops in Kenya where the cost of a pair of shoes is equivalent a year's salary of some of its staff, sometimes even two years' salary. Faith-based organisations offer their members hope that a brighter future lies ahead. That brighter future is frequently described in financial and monetary terms. It is explained in the language of investment, promoted with assiduous zeal by banks, pension plans, mutual funds and, yes, the Government of Kenya. It is a language that has permeated many faith-based organisations' operational mantras and it has captured the imaginations of many Kenyans who are poor and who aspire to great wealth and power.

Victor Kanyari is an indictment of public policy, statutory and regulatory frameworks, and social values and mores. Victor Kanyari bluntly reminds the government that in all its iterations, it has failed the peoples of Kenya; it has only benefitted an elite few. Even the so-called middle classes, those with white-collar jobs or are "self-employed" investors, engage in more than one income-generating activity simply to keep their heads above water and stave off financial disaster. Meanwhile, especially in the public sector, there are many who may have had moderate success in the private sector who have leveraged conflicts of interest in their favour and become fabulously wealthy. Victor Kanyari and the other prosperity-gospel churches have merely copied what the State has permitted to permeate among its very own ranks.

It is fashionable these days to give away free gifts for minor tokens. Kenyans are encouraged to participate in essentially get-rich-quick schemes by the biggest companies, with the tacit approval of the government. They stand chances of winning cars, houses, and million-shilling cash prizes. The virtues of thrift and hard work are not promoted as assiduously. More and more Kenyans today believe that there are free lunches and that wealth and power are easy to obtain; all you need is luck and the right connections to the right people. These are the Kenyans who "plant seeds" and expect miracles but end up enriching unscrupulous false prophets who go on to amass political influence which they then leverage to mock the law and act with impunity.

Play your cards right.

It got done. It got done even when all pointed to a damp squib of a plan. It worked despite the snobbish punditry and predictions of utter failure. It didn't work out exactly as had been planned, but the result places him a heartbeat away from the seat of ultimate political power in Kenya. Despite the International Criminal Court, William Samoei Ruto is sitting pretty - prettier than Raila Odinga, and certainly prettier than Martha Karua, Peter Kenneth, Kalonzo Musyoka and James Ole Kiyiapi.

Mr Ruto played a high-risk game with his legal fumbling at the beginning of the process. His choice of Kithure Kindiki at first blush looked sensible - until the good professor started speaking. In short order, Mr Ruto re-assessed hs options, somehow managed to find the fat wallet he needed and he plumped for the sharp-as-a-tack Karim Khan. The narrative from then on was a piece of cake: blame Raila Odinga and blame him good.

But what really sealed it for him was the partnership with Uhuru Kenyatta. Fumbling about for a party took its toll on Mr Ruto, but once he found the United Republican Party, and he sealed his partnership with Uhuru Kenyatta's The National Alliance, he proceeded to whip his political troops into disciplined shape - aping to the uniformed discipline Uhuru Kenyatta instilled in his political troops. (Perhaps this is when Kenyans should have noticed the martial mien of the Jubilee Alliance and prepared themselves for a fatigues-wearing Commander-in-Chief.)

In any case, between September 2012 and March 2013, William Ruto fulfilled a political dream - to be a major political player in his own right. However, again, this may all be another high-wire act by Mr Ruto. Uhuru Kenyatta has a relatively becalmed backyard. Central Kenya, Meru, Embu, Isiolo, Laikipia, Kajiado and Nakuru are without significant degrees of discontent. Mr Ruto, on the other hand, not only has significant pockets of the Rift Valley under the thumbs of Mr Odinga's minions, the whole area is in violent ferment...it may have began with Baragoi but it is most certainly not going to end with Kapedo.

Then there are the tenderpreneurs who felt cheated out of their fair share of the UhuRuto spoils of war. They are not going to be assuaged any time soon without massive dollops of cold hard tenderprising cash. Their marionettes in Parliament are going to have move with alacrity and deftness to ensure that if the laptops tender is ever implemented, there will be enough largesse to go around so that it doesn't seem as if the Deputy President is a nobody.

Finally, there is the impression that Mr Ruto is being shortchanged. After all, it is him and Joshua arap Sang alone who are being tried; Uhuru Kenyatta's trial has not taken off because, some of Mr Ruto's excitable acolytes allege, the Government of Kenya's senior-most State officers and civil servants have entered into a secret conspiracy to stymie the ICC at every turn. But they seem to have been mollified by the epidemic of recanting by witness, hostility and downright non-co-operation; they believe that the same blanket of conspiracy now covers their man.

We underestimated Mr Ruto's capacity for survival and reinvention. We underestimated his intelligence and capacity to seize opportunities as they presented themselves. We naively believed that the rule of law would prevail when it came to someone of his political cunning. We are paying the price for our naivete. In a decade or so we will look back and marvel at how he did it all. One thing is for sure, even those who think they have a handle on Mr Ruto continue to underestimate him gravely. They will regret their miscalculation - unless some of them come to their senses and play their cards right.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

Baragoi. Westgate. Mpeketoni. Kapedo. Major security events. Scores are dead. Score are maimed. Scores of guns and ammunition go missing. Securocrats talk tough. The Commander-in-Chief visits scenes of crime - and talks tough. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. Since 2010 only one securocrat of note has resigned "for personal reasons": Maj Gen Michael Gichangi. What many speculatively declare is that the former Director-General of the national Intelligence Service did not retire, but was fired because many senior Jubilants were uncomfortable with his hand in the indictment of #TeamDigital at The Hague. Whatever the truth may be, Maj Gen Gichangi remains a gentleman of no mean repute and with his resignation, even if he was the most incompetent spy chief ever, he has achieved saint-like status in my eyes.

The Cabinet Secretary-Interior, the Principal Secretary-Interior, the Inspector-General of Police, and the new Director of National Intelligence have chosen to stay put, come hell or high water. The Inspector-General of Police has promised to leave no stone unturned to bring the killers of twenty one of his officers to book. So too have the Cabinet Secretary and his Principal Secretary. To his end, they have called for the Kenya Defence Forces to deploy in Baringo, West Pokot, Turkana, Samburu and Laikipia, the swathe of territory in which the bandits suspected to have murdered the twenty one police allegedly operate. The Kenya Defence Forces have deployed with shock and awe, bombing forested areas. So far, sixteen of "missing" firearms - sans bullets - belonging to the police have been "surrendered" to the authorities.

Affairs are not in order, never mind the securocracy's determination not to rock the boat. The Cabinet Secretary has opened a new front while dealing with everything else the securocrats are throwing at him. He has decided to take a firm line against the online intimidation tactics of a senior counsel, who has accused the Cabinet Secretary of being party to a scheme to grab 154,000 acres of much-troubled land from a mzungu landowner. Meanwhile, after a game of Principal Secretary musical chars, the newish Principal Secretary is doing her best to change the security narrative by redefining banditry and rustling as commercial and not cultural to explain the failure of the police forces in tracing hundreds of heads of cattle that "vanish into thin air" after a raid. We hope that she brings greater intellectual heft to her job in future. 

We can only speculate about what the Director of National Intelligence intends to do; he has maintained a studiously cryptic silence since he was appointed in the wake of the drumming out of his predecessor from the Service. The Defence Forces are doing what the Defence Forces are trained to do - they are going to war against domestic enemies and they will shoot and bomb their way to victory, never mind that Parliament seems to be in the dark about their deployment and human rights concerns are a figment of our civil society industry's overactive imagination. Mt Elgon-like allegations will be treated in exactly the same way they have always been treated: with contempt!

What is certain in this now familiar cycle is that Maj Gen Gichangi will forever remain an anomaly. Mr Ole Lenku will not resign. Dr Juma will not resign. Mr Kimaiyo will not resign. Mr Kameru will maintain his silence. He will not be resigning either. All of them will remind us that they are doing their best. All of us will remind us that they are making progress. Dr Juma will definitely say that the securocracy has "foiled dozens of plots." She will not provide details of the foiled plots for "security reasons." Parliament will fall in line. It has always fallen in line when it comes to security matters. It will fail, again, to summon the securocrats responsible for Baragoi, Westgate, Mpeketoni and Kapedo. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. No wonder Nakumatt is selling so many washing machines. The securocracy has already trained us how to use them.

Love them. Don't leave them.

Pregnancy is not a disease. Motherhood, even single motherhood, is not a social disease. It is not a sin. It is not a crime. It is not wrong. That said, a primary school girl below the age of fourteen should not be having babies. Ever. She should be plotting, just like her co-educationists of the masculine gender, to sneak out of her daddy's house and head for the Jam Session at Dolce or whatever new joint hormonal teens seem to discover these days. Or if she happens to be the more experimental type, she should be working out the various potencies of the various strains of cannabis grown in Kenya. She should not be having babies.

But if she does, the last thing she needs is for her father to condemn her for bringing his name low, her mother to be ashamed of her because she is no longer a "good girl", her teachers to abandon her education, he headmaster to expel her from school, her friends to ostracize her, her church to reject her and her extended family to punish her. What she needs is love, care, support and counselling. What she needs is her father to defend her against the world if she needs him to, her mother to hold her head high and declare her daughter beyond reproach, her teachers to guarantee that a baby will not stop them from getting her to attain the academic distinctions she will surely need, her friends to accept that she has not changed save for having a baby, her church to remember the words of Jesus regarding the fallen woman, and her extended family to rally behind her because it really does take a village to raise a child in Kenya.

I do not know from where this puritanical bent arose in the breast of the Victorian man, but its export to Kenya has been devastating to our sense of community that for so long was the only bulwark in sometimes harsh times. It is drilled into our heads from the moment we can sub-consciously conjugate verbs that sex is wrong, bad, evil - bad manners! By and large our primary schools are co-ed, boys and girls rubbing along together. But our teachers, our parents, our faith-leaders, everyone goes out of their way to reinforce the sex-is-bad mantra with corollaries - talking to boys/girls alone is wrong; touching boys/girls is wrong; walking with boys/girls alone is wrong; thinking about boys./girls is wrong; boys/girls are wrong, wrong, wrong! Generation after generation has heard this message and generation after generation teen pregnancies have defied the sex-is-wrong, boys/girls-are-wrong message.

We have a better understanding of the effects of hormones on decision-making among teenagers. There are still mysteries to how the brain, and therefore the mind, functions, but a lot more scientific data is available about the effects of biochemistry, the environment, parental supervision, physical health, economic status, psychological maturity and much more on why some boys and some girls will experiment sexually and why others will not, and as a result, some girls will fall pregnant, others will not. Instead of accepting what the rest of the educated world has come to accept regarding the choices available to a young mother or her needs, our entire society freaks out on a massive scale and declares that the sky is falling. We abandon them. We make their lives hell. We act with un-Christian cruelty.

Any father who throws his daughter out of the family home for having a child should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, if he will not reconsider his cruel decree. Any teacher who refuses to teach a pregnant student should give up on educating other children. Any headmaster who expels the girl should be shot. And mothers must learn to put their children first, even if it means putting them first before God, family, friends or society. It is the only way we can learn to live with the choices made in hormonal haste and design programmes to cope with them, for they will always be there. The hundreds of thousands of successful, thriving single mothers are all the proof we need that it is not wrong to help them, support them and, yes, love them as Christ asked us to love them.

Safety, not security (Part Deux)

Bob Collymore was blunt: Safaricom will give the police the metadata relating to a phone number, and nothing else, and only after a magistrate orders them to do so. Or of the law says that Safaricom must. It was refreshing to see at least one CEO not drinking the securocracy's Kool-Aid. If even intelligent business news reporters are suggesting that when it comes to security the mobile phone operators should share information about "suspicious" numbers you know we have travelled so far down this road that it is only a matter of time before Kenyans start suggesting that it would be a very good idea for the National Intelligence Service to embed "security" officers with every family.

There was this unhinged former military man on KTN this morning who was nostalgic for the thousands of semi-literate spies Baba Moi employed in the Special Branch. In his twisted imagination, Kenya was secure because Moi spied on everybody; one couldn't trust that the mama mboga, the kanges or the maize-roasting idler were not Special Branch men keeping an eye on the nefarious among us. What this former air force pilot seemed to have forgotten is that because of the semi-literacy of the spies and their absolute and unyielding loyalty in Baba Moi, any and all Kenyans were potential "security threats" and thousands of Kenyans suffered at the hands of Baba Moi's secret police: death, castration, rape, torture, crippling injuries. 

What really shocked me, perhaps because they were having an off day because of the Kapedo massacre a week ago, was the silence from Senators Naisula Lesuuda and John Lonyangapuo over the harebrained proposal to embed spies in every nook and cranny so that the security of the State is not undermined. There is a very good reason why rejected Uhuru Kenyatta and Musalia Mudavadi in December 2002; we believed, rightly or wrongly, that they would sale up the rolled back human rights abuses of Baba Moi's regime. It is why despite our innate suspicions about Baba Jimmi's competence, we overwhelmingly brought him and the rotten apples in his party to power under the NARC umbrella. If Senators Lesuuda and Lonyangapuo are incapable of seeing this simple fact, it would behoove the peoples of their communities to look for new parliamentary representation come August 2017.

Of course every government maintains a spy agency and quite frequently that spy agency spies on its own people. But it has always been the place of the media and the elected classes to reject the attempts of the State and its agents to control he people including by spying on them. Even Jeff Koinange seemed to miss this point when he had, again, John Lonyangapuo on his bench on Wednesday, 5th November. For a reporter who had first hand knowledge of the United States' obsession with the First Amendment's freedom of the press, Mr Koinange betrayed a shockingly callous understanding of what it means for a State to be secure. It is the same kind of understanding that prevails in the corridors of Harambee House, Jogoo House, Vigilance House, DOD HQ and, almost certainly today, State House.

We have known for a generation at least what makes a State insecure; it is not the total number of arms in the hands of private citizens otherwise Switzerland would be the most unsafe place in the world. It is not the number of "radical" preachers among the civilian population, otherwise India (save for Jammu and Kashmir) would be under martial law today. It is the simple things that the State denies the people that radicalise the people. Baba Moi graft-riddled twenty-four year rule guaranteed that roads would not be built, piped water would not be delivered, primary healthcare was a mirage, basic education was of poor quality, youth unemployment would balloon, and the opportunities for advancement would continually favour an elite few. The banditry that prevails in Baringo, Laikipia, Samburu, West Pokot, Turkana, Mandera, Wajir, Tana River and Marsabit is a reflection of Baba Moi's and Mzee Kenyatta's forty years of their peculiar understanding of State security.

We have the opportunity to stem the tide of stupidity when it comes to security. We are missing it by a country mile. Guns and bombs will not build roads, schools, hospitals or markets, or provide jobs or opportunities for advancement. Embedding spies, again, in places of work and leisure is a throwback to Stalinism that only prevails in Putin's Russia or the true Stalinist model, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. It will not work here. Ever harsher penalties for petty offences will only encourage an already graft-riven policing apparatus to redouble its efforts at graft-related activities. Maintaining the focus on the State's agents and the State's guns only guarantees that the State will forever remain a threat to the people.

The United States sometimes learns from its mistakes. Between its invasion of Afghanistan in 2002 and The Surge in 2008, thousands of US soldiers died on the field of battle. Force of arms alone was not going to assure the US and its allies of victory. David Petraeus, learning lessons from the British experience a century before, came up with a counterinsurgency programme that stemmed the tide of blood. Kenya must find its own David Petraeus and its own counterinsurgency programme. Reprisals against bandits and collective punishments have not worked for almost a century. We must shift our focus from the security of the State to the safety of the people. It is what the US did and it is what gave them the long-sought pretext for leaving Afghanistan.

You could always die anonymously.

Even by the standards of the Government of Kenya, what the Cabinet Secretary for Foreign Affairs and International Trade said was a bit harsh. In essence what she said was if any of you were fucking idiots and decided to make a beeline for the sandy expanse of the Arabian peninsula and it all went tits up and you were enslaved or murdered or whatever, you were on your own. Don't go whingeing to the consulate. Don't go whingeing to the Ministry. And for God's sake, die in silence like all the other fucking idiots out there.

The United States has demonstrated that citizens are the stupidest people in the world, and when they do stupid things, they expect their government to sort it out for them. So US citizens will foolishly travel to Syria and Iraq to "tell the truth about the Islamic State", they will get abducted and some of them will be beheaded on gruesome videos. The moment it goes ape shit for any one of those foolish, brave souls, their mothers and their congressman will write to Barack Obama, John Kerry, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs...anyone and demand action to bring their boy back home safe. You will be surprised how many stupid US citizens are rescued by the US government after doing patently stupid things.

The Kenya government, a bit like the UK government, doesn't really like fucking idiots. It likes them even less when they do fucking idiotic things like get enslaved in Saudi Arabia or one of those West Asian hellholes. The two governments will ignore you because at the end of the day, if you are not DJ CK or any member of the Capital Club, if you are not a person of some considerable means whose misfortunes could plausibly become the misfortunes of the State, then your ass is on its own, fucking torture notwithstanding. It doesn't really matter if you follow the correct procedure to verify that the shady woman with the Kiambu accent, Murang'a weave and multiple menacing silent partners has all the proper permits to operate as a labour recruiter, that your prospective employer avers to abide by the labour laws of fucking Qatar, or that everything so far as you can see is on the up and up. If it goes to shit, and it most likely will, Amb Mohammed says you really can't expect your government to do jack shit about it.

Which, I suppose, is how it should be. We know for the most part that West Asia is still living in medieval times despite the hundreds of billions of petro-dollars it has spent on gold-plated loos in gold-plated Airbus A380s. These people are still remarkably backward. It's why they still seem to have princess and princesses, regents and court cryers. Their royal families are a fucked up lot. But it is the religious nutters who make the whole thing surreal, with their penchant for blowing up, in this order, infidels, Jews, apostates and US citizens.

And every prince or princess seems to be connected to one nutter or another. With that kind of networking, it is almost certain that many employers in that part of the globe are not really sticklers for the finer points of the ILO Convention; their idea of "acceptable working conditions" is that they don't use the whip while you are sleeping in the two hours they let you sleep. So if you want to be a fucking idiot about it and sneak into any of the employable bits of West Asia and you suddenly find your ass in sexual bondage, don't go fucking crying to the consulate. Find Rambo. Or Jack Bauer. Let them sort it out for you. Or you could do the decent thing and die anonymously.

Old man, old ideas. Pity.

The more you see, the less appealing it is, isn't it? The Orange Democratic Movement, ODM, the insurgency that rendered Mwai Kibaki's first administration a damp squib on so many parameters, has become a caricature of an authoritarian, Stalinist party. The elected representatives who manhandled their Executive Director, frogmarched him out of a party meeting, and deflated his vehicle's tyres are a harbinger of the intolerance we are to expect the second Raila Odinga is elected President of Kenya - if that day ever comes, that is. ODM is getting away from the hands of its leader, Raila Odinga, and increasingly in the hands of loyal elements who cannot countenance a political future for the country without Raila Odinga.

In the manner that Magerer Langat was treated by Naiprobi City Councy's members of the assembly are vital lessons, lessons that the Men in Black Incident failed to instil in the elected classes. The violence of the 2007 general election was an anomaly because it quickly became ethnicised and flared far beyond the "spontaneous" demonstrations argument favoured by Raila Odinga and William Ruto. Someone took advantage of the general disaffection with the re-election of Mwai Kibaki and Kenya suffered three years of economic stagnation and the ignominy, fiver years on, of their President being an indictee at the International Criminal Court and his deputy undergoing trial at the same court.

Mr Odinga has always rode on his mage as a leader with strong pro-democracy credentials. Until his appointment of Miguna Miguna to his staff, Kenyans were prepared to live with his peculiar demands for carpetted loos and the like. But Miguna Miguna put paid to the idea that democracy is something that Mr Odinga practiced or something that he truly believed in because of the manner he threw his weight around, aping the hardliners surrounding Mwai Kibaki and carrying out Mwai Kibaki's orders. Had Mr Miguna been less abrasive, even as he fought equally viciously for a fair share of the political spoils for ODM, we may have carried on with our rose-tinted-glasses view of Mr Odinga as a capable statesman with his heart in the right place.

Since Mr Odinga fired Mr Miguna in the dying days of the Grand Coalition, much has come to light of the manner Mr Odinga intends to rule should the right number of voters put the right number of marks on the right number of ballots. Kasarani in 2013 was the first example. Party elections that threatened to upend Mr Odinga's carefully crafted leadership cadre were disrupted and the promised report of the investigations into the fiasco is yet to be published. With Mr Langat's violent ejection from the party's management structure on accusations of being a mole despite his long and consistently loyal record to Mr Odinga and the party, it is time for Kenyan's to question the wisdom of having one man wield such a perverse influence on the political affairs of the nation.

My friend Eric will appreciate this; since the election of #TeamDigital, and despite their missteps along the way, Kenyans are not prepared to elect geriatrics in the future. All the dye in the world will not hide the fact that Mr Odinga is an old school politician with old school political ideas about command and control. We may abhor Mr Kenyatta's militaristic tendencies, but we appreciate the youthful vigour with which he is taking on the onerous tasks of being Commander-in-Chief and few of us lack faith that he will strike the right balance before he is forced to seek a fresh mandate from the people. Mr Odinga, sadly, seems stuck to the style of politics that prevailed before the repeal of section 2A of the former constitution, in which it was the will of the party leader that determined the party's fortunes. Mr Odinga is old. Much worse, his ideas are old too.

What have you been smoking over there?

Never pick a fight with a man who buys ink by the barrel. That was the received wisdom. Today, unless you have a penchant for the masochistic, never pick a fight with a billionaire whose ego is the size of a small planet and who isn't afraid to set his own house on fire in order  to win an argument. Joseph Ole Lenku is discovering that when it comes to fighting wars and winning battles, Senior Counsel Ahmednasir Abdullahi is not only willing to lay it all on the line, he will only back down when the Almighty pries the Grand Mullah's cold, dead fingers from his equally cold, dead iPhone 6 Plus. By retaining Donald B Kipkorir, Mr Ole Lenku is determined to bring his A-Game. It will not end well, if it ends at all.

Under Jomo Kenyatta, Daniel Moi and Mwai Kibaki, save for the spectacularly foolish appointment of Katoo Ole Metito, appointed well and truly feared Ministers for Internal Security. Two stand out; John Michuki and Christopher Murungaru. We may question the wisdom or propriety of many of their decisions, like Mr Murungaru's war on the Mungiki or Mr Michuki's war with the Standard Group, but none of us is in doubt that they were respected and feared in equal measure when they headed the internal security machinery of the government.

In President Kenyatta's choice of Mr Ole Lenku as Interior Cabinet Secretary, few were prepared for the problems that would come to bedevil the security sector or how intense feelings would get regarding Mr Ole Lenku. Mr Ole Lenku was unfortunate to have been appointed during a fraught transition period, saddled with an uninspired and uninspiring Principal Secretary in Mutea Iringo, and appointed at a time when the Secretary to the Cabinet commanded greater loyalty in the ministry than the CS and used that loyalty to undermine the CS and his commands. It did not matter that the worst start to the reforms in policing had commenced against the backdrop of escalating terror attacks, an explosion in petty corruption, and rising police-on-police violence and murder. Mr Ole Lenku was dropped into the deep end of internal security affairs; we are not sure whether he is swimming or drowning.

Adolf Hitler invaded Poland on the pretext that Germanic peoples needed Lebensraum to grow and prosper. He should never have turned his attention to British Isles after his conquest of France, Belgium and Luxembourg. Instead he should have shifted his vast and professional military forces to the Eastern Front before the winter of 1941, committed his logistics to the war, blitzkrieged Moscow and occupied it before taking on Stalingrad. In any case, Hitler fought full-fledged wars on two fronts and lost in the bargain.

Mr Ole Lenku is in the middle of a stalled policing reform process, he is mediating a war between the Inspector-General and the National Police Service Commission, one between the National Police Service and the Independent Policing Oversight Commission, an escalation in the banditry and cattle-rustling prevalent in Baringo, West Pokot, Samburu and Turkana, an escalation in attacks against police, a curfew in Lamu, and public perceptions of his competence having hit the floor and carried on plummeting. It would not be wise to open up a new front with a war against the acerbic senior counsel. The Grand Mullah has not made his reputation by being a delicate flower but by being a verbal and litigious sledgehammer against which every challenge is a nail.

Mr Ole Lenku has very little to gain by pursuing Mr Abdullahi in the courts, but he has everything to lose. Mr Kipkorir is an excellent litigator; look at how he managed to set the legal case straight with the Shollei victory in the courts. But he takes on a fool's errand to fight Mr Ole Lenku's war with Mr Abdullahi in the courts. Whether he prevails or not, the damage is done. Mr Abdullahi will drag out the process for as long as it is embarassing for the Cabinet Secretary. By the time the apology is given, if it ever, it is almost likely that more and more mud will have been flung that it won't matter. Mr Ole Lenku may have the National Police Service at his command but he is neither feared nor respected in the same that Murungaru, the late Michuki and the late Saitoti were respected and feared. It will end badly for Mr Ole Lenku; only Mr Abdullahi will get what he wants.

Let's try a ban now.

Kipsang. Ketany. Sumgong. When the rest of the marathon field sees their names, do they weep in despair? Do their hearts sink a little knowing that the hi-tech training regimen, the overwrought nutrition guidelines and the prayers to all the known gods are in vain? Kipsan, Keitany and Sumgong blew away the field in New York to win in that city's signature marathon. They brought glory to themselves and to the long-distance running traditions of this fair land - despite the very best efforts of Athletics Kenya.

Gor Mahia. AFC Leopards. Two names that send a shudder down your entire body. They may have their devoted and dedicated fans - K'Ogalo aka the KDF aka the Green Army for the former; Ingwe for the latter - but no one in his right mind entertains a visit to the City or Nyayo stadium, or any stadium for that matter, when the mashemeji are playing, especially when they are playing each other. The two football teams have a reputation that has survived Baba Moi and Baba Jimmi and will surely survive #TeamDigital - fanatical hooliganism.

The destruction of property associated with a loss - or a win - of the K'Ogalo or the Ingwe is astonishing. Their utter lack of remorse is more so, especially as we are constantly reminded of the humaneness of Kenyans in general. I suppose that every rule has an exception and the K'Ogalo and Ingwe are the exception that proves the rule of Kenyans' humaneness. Five years after the deaths of football spectators at another Nyayo Stadium clash between the mashemeji and Ambrose Rachier and his Ingwe counterpart Allan Kasavuli are yet to instil a sense of responsibility in their hundreds of dedicated fans whose passions sometimes get the better of them.

Prayer, obviously, has not helped. Neither, it seems, has the pain and suffering innocent bystanders undergo whenever the Green Army or its perennial bete noir feels miffed about something to do with a win or a loss. Year after year, the story remains the same - whether the tow are up or not, their fanatical hooligan fans will ensure that their presence is felt on the streets of each and every town that is foolishly audacious to host them. Banning them from the terraces whenever their teams play seems not to temper their violent enthusiasms; rather it only seems to bottle it up ready for the next opportunity to erupt with passionate intensity.

Solutions are not presenting themselves save the obvious: ban the clubs altogether. They may be a source of employment to many youthful men, and they may generate revenues in the hundreds of millions of shillings, but the billions of shillings in property damage attributed to the clubs and their fanatical hooligan fans are yet to be reclaimed in any serious fashion. It is time they were erased from the public sphere, their managers banned from football for a decade, and their players scattered to the four winds of Kenyan football, away from the mad passions of their hooligan fans.

Of course there are those constitutional whingers who will argue that the K'Ogalo and Ingwe are being denied their right to associate with whomever they wish. I will counter that so lone as you are associating with each other for peaceable purposes, I will respect your constitutional rights, even defend them. But when your associating leads to funerals, orthopaedic surgery and insurance claims in the hundreds of millions of shillings that threaten to bring down insurance companies, I will lead the fight in declaring your association to be  terrorist association at worst and a criminal organisation at least. The Mungiki had the good sense to behead people who refused to pay their "protection" fees; K'Ogalo and Ingwe are indiscriminate in whom they target for their misplaced wrath.

Before you argue that K'Ogalo and Ingwe are cultural bastions that should be reformed rather than destroyed, remember that their hooliganism has been a staple of the dysfunction in Kenyan football for twenty five years. I think we have had enough of that particular culture. It is time we started stamping out the culture of violence in our nation's social fabric. If we are to tackle the other cultural hooligans - cattle rustlers, female genital mutilators, wife inheritors, political chauvinists, child abusers, sexual predators - we might as well begin with shibboleths that have for long operated as if thy are protected by the Lord Almighty from On High from the consequences of their violent fans' actions.

Don't snigger yet.

Smugly, some of us are staring down our noses at the congregants at the Salvation Healing Ministry even while we get fleeced at our own houses of sanctuary. This is not a new phenomenon; Kenyans have been paying the price for their absolute faith in their godmen for the past twenty five years. It is not something that will change any time soon, no matter the number of exposes done by news reporters. Victor Kanyari is unpolished, but he is not the only false prophet. He is not the first; he is unlikely to be the last.

Our constitution protects our freedom of conscience, religion, belief and opinion. That means if one chooses to believe that a man is a prophet and that he has performed miracles, there is little that the State or anyone can do about it. And Eric Mutua's assertion that Victor Kanyari has obtained money by false pretenses will be laughed out of the High Court because even if Mr Kanyari solicits money to perform miracles, how will Mr Mutua and his Law Society prove that the miracles did not occur? All Mr Kanyari has to argue is that faith was lacking!

We are raised to believe that what our parents introduce us to is true. Few of us question what our parents taught us. Those who do tend to simply rebel, slightly, while staying true to much of what they were taught. So a son is likely to abandon his fathers Roman catholic ism for his girlfriend's Anglicanism or his teachers Pentecostalism. It is the rare rebel who will change faiths completely. Therefore, Mr Kanyari is unlikely to lose congregants, he is unlikely to lose his gospel-music-singing wife and he is unlikely to lose the millions he has finagled out of the people who have faith he is a "doctor" and a "prophet".

Those of you who are smug in your derision of Victor Kanyari's "victims" best wipe off those smiles. You are in much the same boat. Many of you have absolute faith that the interpretation of the bible by the men and women who speak to you every Sunday from the pulpit is true and is motivated only by your spiritual well-being. Yet you have done precious little to question how and where your tithes and offerings are spent. Does your congregation run a food kitchen? Does it minister to the sick by paying their hospital bills? Does it spend money in rehabilitating the drug-addled bodies of those living on the streets? Do have any idea how many commercial enterprises your congregation pays for? When it comes down to it, you choose to turn a blind eye to what your faith-leaders do so long as they do not directly ask you for money "like in other churches" you are contempt to live under the delusion that yours is a body of Christ founded on faith.

It is amazing how otherwise rational professional adults suspend rational thought and professionalism when it comes to "matters of faith." They will explain it away by anecdotes of paranormal phenomena which they were unable to explain. They will psychologically justify the smug satisfaction of being among the chosen ones on their way to divine glory. They will determinedly turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to what they see and what they hear about the godmen who hold their spiritual loves in their hands. Your godman is engaged and the wedding is suddenly called off? Blame it on "haters". Your godman is pending hundreds of millions on a luxurious lifestyle? God has been very, very providential. Your godman is caught in a lodging house with a another man's wife? Blame it on the devil. We will live in denial about what we see, what we know and what we hear, because our vacuous empty lives would come crashing down our ears if we were to admit the truth: we are just as gullible as the poor woman who was felt up on camera by Victor Kanyari.

Same shit, different year.

Two years ago forty two police were ambushed and massacred at Baragoi. Matthew Iteere, the Commissioner of Police, promised that those who had tested the waters would discover that the waters of the security services' resolve were deep. This past week 21 police were ambushed and massacred at Kapedo. Inspector-General David Mwole Kimaiyo has promised that no stone will be left unturned to bring the perpetrators of the ambush before court to face charges. In both cases, the police lost firearms and ammunition. In both cases the President ordered the return of the weapons and the identification of the perpetrators. In both cases, the Commissioner of Police and Inspector-General, and the President were ignored. In both cases reinforcements were called in from the Kenya Defence Forces.

Some wild-eyed and excited reporters are wondering why the police do not have armoured personnel carriers. There was a particularly excitable character from the Royal Media stable who wondered why the police did not receive "extensive counterinsurgency training" in places such as Israel, England or Germany. The Independent Policing Oversight Authority weighed in with an unseemly hysterically strident demand for the resignation of Davide Mwole Kimaiyo and his two deputies. Meanwhile, most Kenyans were obsessed with the perverse cult-like antics of a psychopathic faith-healing godman with a penchant for feeling up his victims on TV. The civil society industry, as is their wont when police are getting massacred, maintained a very loud and very studious silence.

Ambassador Dr Monica Juma, the Principal Secretary in the Ministry of the Interior and Co-ordination of National Government,was on air on Sunday to assure Kenyans that all was well, that the Nyumba Kumi gambit was a valuable tool in addressing security-related challenges, that security was a shared responsibility between the people and their government, and that the security services had foiled many, many attacks against the people. What is notable is that Dr Juma sounds and seems way more intelligent than the hapless Mutea Iringo; thank God we do not have to suffer through his inarticulate and unpersuasive explanations about national security affairs. But despite Dr Juma's polished and nuanced case for the State, she is still selling something that many Kenyans are not buying. Not when rather combative elements such as Nelson Marwa attempt to come across as caricatures of cartoon characters such as John Rambo or Jack Bauer.

We have been here before. The official securocracy reaction has not changed. The outcome, similarly, will not change. Our focus on the security of the State, rather than the safety of the people, guarantees that Baragoi and Kapedo will recur. The principal difference is that now they will recur in an age where information control is no longer possible. There are more people with more access to more tools of communication than at any time in the past decade. And they all have a taste for the freedom that comes with the ability to communicate with their peers, and their leaders, at any time on any matter and that affects their lives.

A public safety policy should shift focus from keeping the likes of Asman Kamama safe at the expense of the good people of Tiaty. This would include shifting policing resources from "protecting" elected representatives from harm, to patrolling villages and markets. It would mean paving or repairing tarmacked roads, building and maintaining murrum roads where there were none, building and maintaining sewers and surface drains, erecting and maintaining street lights, clearing bushes and stagnant water bodies, lighting up all public buildings including churches, mosques, temples, gurudwaras, schools and health centres, clearly identifying and marking police stations and posts including by posting the names of all officers in charge and their contact information, and rebuilding and maintaining social amenities such as social halls, public parks and public sports facilities. Shift the focus from "leaders" to the people by providing facilities that make their lives bearable and they will partner with the State in programmes such as Nyumba Kumi to identify those who would threaten their bearable lives. Maintain focus on "security" and all you will get is resistance and grumbling which will blow up, time and again, in events such as Baragoi and Kapedo.

Put him out to pasture.

It is dead. All we are waiting for is the funeral. The Orange Democratic Movement is dead. Raila Odinga knows this to be true. Magerer Langat found out the hard way yesterday, Thursday 30 October 2014. (He'll be needing a new set of tyres for his humongous SUV, too.) From the Men In Black Incident to the Magerer Langat Fiasco, ODM has done everything in its considerable repertoire of skill sets to bring itself low. It doesn't get any lower than having the Jubilee Alliance's garrulously inarticulate members hold a press conference in order to plead for government intervention in the affairs of the ODM.

It is difficult holding your own when you don't have anything to hold. Raila Odinga is fast coming to realise that his all-in gambit was a foolhardy errand. He has to telegraph his intentions through Moses Wetangula, Jakoyo Midiwo, Otieno Kajwang' - and ODM's Nairobi's MCAs. "Party leader" may sound grand to the Great Unwashed, but the reality of the title is that it means diddly squat to the men with real power. They will not listen to you. They will not pay obeisance to you. They will not fawn and genuflect. They will treat you increasing;y like a skunk: delicately enough that you don't raise a stink, but yet at arms length because you almost certainly will. "Party leader" is a political figleaf for political irrelevance.

The slow decline of a political colossus continues. Mr Odinga single-handedly re-branded opposition politics in 2005-2007 (Orange v Banana, Round 1). But he failed to grow out of it, bitching all through his coalition with Mwai Kibaki. Instead of building up his political leadership credentials, he reinforced his image as a hard-headed political anarchist out to shake things up. He surrounded himself with equally fish-out-of-water flunkies and advisers. It all ended in tears. He couldn't even be bothered to establish a credible machinery to fight the 2013 general election; he couldn't be bothered to set up a war room to troubleshoot the political, legal and constitutional problems that the general election brought up; and he couldn't be bothered to instil discipline in his political troops leading to the best opposition performance for a long time but the worst outcome since 1992. 2013 was Mr Odinga's to lose; he managed to do just that. Twice. First at the ballot; then in the Supreme Court.

It is only then that his leadership flaws became painfully apparent. He vacillated for so long over whether a party member would step down for him in the National assembly or Senate and ended up pissing off potential sacrificial lambs into hardening their hearts against him. He couldn't decide whether his would be a loyal opposition or it would be a flame-throwing party of "No!" He couldn't even force a credible party poll. Then he pushed off to the US for three months without leaving a management team in place to take care of the nuts and bolts of political leading. Now his Okoa Kenya gambit is being painted by Kanini Kega of all jokers as the last feeble grasps at the brass ring of national power sharing and he does not have a credible riposte to the allegation. He is done. He is a has been. It is time that Ababu Namwamba and his fellow restless and rebellious members did the merciful thing and stuck political knives in his back right out there on the senate floor. It is time Mr Odinga was put out to pasture.

The are all political, Mr Gathara

If the civil society industry wants to prevail against Moses Kuria and his Jubilee band of raiders, they must go beyond listening to the whingeing by Patrick Gathara, Harun Ndubi and their friends in the trenches. One step in this direction will be to recognise that the Government of Kenya is not staffed by idiots. Moses Kuria may come across as the latest member of the Jubilee lunatic fringe, but seen in context, the Jubilee juggernaut has not stopped rolling since the day secret talks opened between Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto in the ignominious days of the Gang of Seven. All that have attempted to put paid to the UhuRuto plans have come to grief. Payback, they say in the United States, is a female dog.

The Government of Kenya is adept at adjusting to shifting sands. It's basic perfidious, corrupt, autocratic heart has not changed since the days of the Legislative Council. It may have a different cast of characters, but at its core, the GoK has remained surprisingly the same. One of its adaptive techniques has been to co-opt potential competitors - or destroy them. Civil society for the longest time has been a "partner" in development; what it never realised is that it was co-opted by the dark heart of the GoK, adopting its language, its systems, its style. Look at the rife corruption regarding funds and finances and the only difference between civil society and GoK is that the former doesn't seem to have a dress code.

What Mwai Kibaki did was to formalise an already insidiously incestuous relationship between civil society and the GoK. The results have been plain to see. If this were the peculiar Kenyan version of George Orwell's Animal Farm, the metamorphosis of civil society into the dark heart of GoK would be astounding. It did not matter that the co-opted belonged to "political" civil society organisations or non-political ones; they all lost their heads when they were appointed as Ministers, Assistant Ministers, Permanent Secretaries, heads of parastatals, heads of commissions of inquiry, heads of task forces...the list is rather long.

I think it is time civil society did the unthinkable and cut all incestuous ties with the GoK and truly went out on its own. This means all those dodgy lawyers from the LSK sitting on boards of parastatals, or serving on task forces and commissions, quitting and letting the LSK truly hold the GoK's feet to the fire over all maters related to the Constitution, the law and governance. You cannot purport to speak truth to power if your truth is being shaped by the power your are in bed with doing God knows what. If any civil society whinger is getting money from the GoK, it is time they sent back the change with a polite note saying that the time has come for a civil society organisation to let the nation come first.

The distinction between political and non-political public benefit organisations (PBOs) is specious; they are all political PBOs when they perform functions that should be performed by the government. If a PBO is immunising children in West Pokot against polio, that is a political act because it is the job of the GoK to kick polio in its teeth. If a PBO is building classrooms in Wajir, that is a political act because it is the job of the government to build, and staff, schools. A PBO digging boreholes in Turkana is as much a political PBO as the one that is demanding the release of "political" prisoners. It is time Gathara & Co upped their game and quit flower-girling Moses Kuria and his odious colleagues to ever greater power. If they are not careful, when Moses Kuria and Jubilee attain ultimate, popular total power in Parliament and in the national Executive, it will be a short hop, step and jump before assassinations are back in vogue, presidencies-for-life are a fact of life, and testicular fortitudes are tested in the reopened dungeons of Nyayo House.

Not Marie Antoinette, Thank God!

The few misguided characters that find their way onto this blog sense that if there is something bad to be said about any public figure, I will find it and I will most likely say it. (I'm sorry, Eric, for picking on you and poor Manoah these past few months; I won't do it overmuch any more.) So you can imagine the deep shame I am feeling for failing to find something bad to say about her. Not for lack of trying, but I have searched, nay, scoured! the internet looking for dirt on her and it simply does not exist.

That crazy white chick, Tilda Swinton, played a mean-looking Archangel in Constantine, but since archangels tend to fight wars for God, they have to be mean-looking I suppose. Angels, on the other had, are sweet-looking and terribly inoffensive. She is sweet, sweet-looking, motherly, totally inoffensive and really, really fit. Anyone who dislikes her is a mean little shit and deserves to be kicked in the head by a donkey.

You must have seen the photos on the internet when she finished that marathon. Sure she took several hours more than everyone else, but so what? I haven't run a metre since I bid adieu to the hallowed grounds of my beloved Masaku. I suspect the only marathon you have run is the one from your place of business to the doors of that annoyingly loud, smelly, hooker-ish joint that sells alcoholic beverages for which excise is yet to be paid and nyama choma whose providence would exercise your mind if you ever bothered to consider it. She looked genuinely excited to have done it. If she was faking that thousand-watt smile, she is a better actor than all those pale-skinned Oscar winners we suffer on screen these days. (OK, Lupita is hardly pale-skined, but still...) What really tugged at the one heart-string I have left was the radiant, joyous smile her husband had for her when he met her at the finish line. That man was prepared to give her anything she demanded right there and then!

And then there's the reason she is running marathons and half-marathons and mini-marathons: preventing the deaths of mothers during childbirth. He predecessor loved children, especially girls. She spoke out often and forcefully for their protection and care. But this one loves the family as a unit and she knows that it is fucked if the mum is dead. You must be a royal shit if you can't even admit that a mom is the family; without her, the boys will be rough-edged rungus with the subtlety of a nuclear weapon and the girls will look increasingly like the dad's gateway to hundreds of cows. The Beyond Zero Campaign is important. It is a critical weapon in safeguarding and securing the family unit. If you're not going to give money to it, that's your selfish prerogative but keep any negative comments you have about it to yourself.

Margaret Kenyatta is the mother of our nation. I'm sure she never, ever wanted this job; Kenyans have a nasty habit of treating their mothers like shit, after all. But she is and she is doing it with style, poise, grace and that unbridled joy she demonstrated after the London Marathon. Thank God she is not a politician; thank God she is a mother who cares about other women and doesn't appear to be the African caricature of Marie Antoinette. Thank God!

Saving our national soul.

It is a national pass-time, almost a sport. Every end of year we all freak out when our sprogs sit for national certificate exams. Because every mum wants her son to go to Alliance or her daughter to go to Kenya High, the degree of freaking out is usually out of all known proportion when the exam is the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education. But it is taken several extreme degrees higher when a son or a daughter is confronting the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education; parents, teachers, pastors, friends, headmasters...everybody freaks the hell out and do things that really reveal just what an individual is willing to do to "succeed" in Kenya.

Exam cheating is the national pass-time these days. I think it is time we decriminalised it. We are spending too much time, too much money and too many man hours trying to keep candidates from circumventing our clearly inadequate anti-cheating controls. The idiocy of extreme penalties for exam cheaters who get caught will eventually be made manifest. Getting caught cheating should only warrant the cancellation of ones results, not a supid five-year ban from sitting the exams again.

I think it is time we "leaked" the details of each year's exam at the beginning of the year. Given the mechanised manner in which syllabi are gotten through in the year, we all know that the last three academic months of the year are devoted to cramming as many potential answers as a seventeen-year old can retain without losing their mind. Why not ease the pressure; give them the test questions at the begging of the year without indicating whether the answers will be in multiple-choice form or in essay form and let them "read for the exam" in relative mental peace.

In one fell swoop we will have killed the market for corrupting Kenya National Examinations' Council officials, County Education Office officials, and the dozens of officials and middlemen between the national examiner and the candidate. Parents will no longer have to sell the family goat to finance a harebrained exam-paper-buying scheme. Candidates will not have to come up with elaborate, multi-player plots to sneak answers into the examinations hall. And invigilators will not have to worry about watching their backs because they might have offended quick-tempered, nervous and hormonal teens when they clamped down a bit to strongly on attempted cheating.

Since we already accept that our system is out to weed out the last ounce of free-thought among the hormonally-driven thirteen to eighteen demographic, there is no reason not to guarantee that all free thought is extinguished. This is achieved by allowing them to get the test in advance. They can work with whichever witchdoctors and consultants they fancy, but by the time they are siting for the exam, they must have memorised every possible solution to every question.

Before you freak out and call be a flame-throwing anarchist out to drive a nail in Kenya's creativity coffin, just because some kid managed to cram his or her way to an A in the KCSE does not mean that they will be automatically admitted to the university of their choice to pursue the course of their heart's desire. No, far from it. All they have done is to prove that they are very capable robots. For them to prove that they can read and think, they will need to sit for an entrance exam whose questions will be kept secret on the pain of academic excommunication for anyone who attempts to sabotage the system. The universities will manage the entrance exam for each course they offer. Only those who meet the strict qualifications set by the university will be admitted. The rest can try their luck in "tertiary colleges", polytechnics, the National Youth Service, the Mungiki Welfare Association or any of the three thousand five hundred "SACCOs" operating in the transport sector with wild abandon.

The reason I think they should be allowed to know the questions in advance is that the skills they demonstrate in their efforts to cheat are usually scaled up when they join the formal and informal workforce. Many of them become managers, elected representatives, preachers, teachers, doctors or lawyers and, having gotten used to lying and cheating their way to "success", they see it as a virtue to inculcate those same tendencies in their children and those under their care. They corrode the moral fabric of society even before most of them learn how to shave. Take away the incentive to cheat and save the soul of the nation. I beg you!

Fourth Estate Betrayal

If it was not clear yet, let me make it plainly so: I am not a journalist. Which makes me perfectly suited to stand in judgment of the Fourth Estate, doesn't it? After all, as Michael Joseph will sooner or later endorse, that is another of our peculiar habits. Carrying on from where I left off in my previous post, our conflation of "media" and "press" has led to an unfortunate understanding of the media and the press in Kenya. 

When we talk of "media", I do not automatically think of journalists or news reporters, though that is its modern meaning. I usually think of television, radio, newspapers and the internet as "media". I believe that in Kenya this failure to distinguish between the media houses that employ journalists and those journalists has contributed greatly to the friction between the media houses and the government, the media houses and the consumers of news, especially political news, and between journalists and the government. As I understand it, a democracy only works if the people choose who governs them freely, if the choices their government makes are made with the people's consent, and where the people shall know of their government's deeds and misdeeds from an unrestrained press.

We may have held free elections in 1960 and 1962, but the doubts surrounding the Little General Election and all subsequent elections will never, ever subside because with the deterioration of the political process came a co-option of the press for the perfidious ends of a few, usually the president and his closest business and political cronies. Fateful events have taken place n Kenya since Independence; journalists have reported the news, sometimes even faithfully, but they have done little to contextualise the events. I wasn't alive, but the impression I got from my father's generation of the assassinations of Pio Gama Pinto, Tom Mboya and JM Kariuki was that it were insiders in Jomo Kenyatta's government who plotted and executed the assassinations, that journalists knew and that they kept the truth from the people. Few of them even considered consigning their suspicions in private journals that could get published posthumously.

With the assassination of Robert Ouko and the suspected hi-tech assassination of Masinde Muliro, Kenyan journalists had an opportunity to redeem themselves. They let it go without asking of Daniel Moi's government the hard questions that lead to the fall of governments elsewhere. Then came the 1992 and 1997 election-linked clashes and the journalists sensationally reported the murder, rape, rapine, arson and banditry in gory detail, but they studiously turned a blind eye to the burning embers of the rumours of provincial administration and Kenya Police Force bigwigs supplying firearms, simis, spears and rungus to militia who were funded by politicians close to Daniel Moi's government.

Then came the All Africa Games and the two-hundred million shilling hold that Henry Kosgei left behind when the last athletes had left for home. Even then the journalists would not raise their heads above the parapet. Soon after came Goldenberg and the "liberalisation" of the economy through the privatisation of parastatals like the  Kenya Posts & Telecommunications Corporation. What ran through all the sensational stories published "bravely" by the Daily Nation and the East African Standard was the softly-softly approach they took when it came to Moi's favourite MPs. The newspapers' journalists and commentators have never been able to effectively explain why they did not take a stand against the spectre of suspects getting courts to whitewash the suspects' alleged crimes by "removing their names from reports" of commissions of inquiry or parliamentary investigative committees.

We believed that the Second Republic would use the constitutional protections of speech and access to information to keep the government on its toes. It is time to admit that ours is a false hope and that the only difference between the Second Republic and the Independence one is one of size and scale. There are no so many power centres and avenues for corruption that it makes no sense to think of ourselves as living in a democracy. We are living in the age of betrayal and no betrayal bites as much as that by the Fourth Estate.

All for a belly rub.

I feel bad for Patrick Gathara. I watched as he unsuccessfully made the case for the public-interest obligations of the "media" before Clay Muganda, Ngunjiri Wambugu and Denis Itumbi on Sophia Wanuna's Morning Express on KTN. I might be pedantic about it, but I believe Mr Gathara's first mistake is to equate the "media" with a press. That may be the modern and lazy thing to do, but the two are not synonyms of each other. The press may employ media, but the media isn't necessarily a press in the context of reporting the news, especially political news. Mr Gathara's second problem is assuming that Kenya has a press.

It is only a matter of time before it dawns on Mr Gathara and his fellow-travellers that what Mr Itumbi and his colleagues in the Presidential Strategic Communications Unit have achieved is nothing short of a propaganda victory against Kenya's leading media houses, Royal Media, the Standard Group and the Nation Media Group. Mr Itumbi and his colleagues have managed to make the national Executive tail wag the Fourth Estate dog; rather than the press, through their media houses, reporting the news of the day, it is the PSCU that recites the events of the day to media houses through the press. What Mr Itumbi and the PSCU have achieved is the recreation of the All Moi, All the Time "reporting" that was the staple of the voice of Kenya/Kenya Broadcasting Corporation for nigh on two decades. And they have done it without plastering the Commander-in-Chief's face on our TV screens every second of the day. It has been a brilliant coup.

The other night I watched Macharia Gaitho defending the press on Mark Masai's PressPass on NTV against Mr Itumbi again. He did his best to remind NTV's viewers of the glorious past of the press before and after independence. But Mr Gatho and Mr Gathara, eventually, will have to take a step back and examine the news media environment. If they do not weep in shame, then they are stronger men than many. The press, especially the news media, is lying supine on the floor for all manner of strangers to rub its belly. While these allegations have never been proven, the fall from grace seems to have started when Kamlesh Pattni became a frequent visitor along the corridors of justice. The rumours of brown envelopes of cash exchanging hands between press-hacks and Mr Pattni's minders for favourable coverage of Mr Pattni's shenanigans have refused to die down.

Mr Gathara's plea for the press to report the news and to offer objective coverage of issues of public interest will fall on deaf ears and Mr Gaitho's spirited defense of a sector that has become more capitalist than most will be met with eye-rolling from insiders. It is up to "citizen" journalists to keep the fire burning by dedicating their resources to holding their government to account. What used to be the job of the press has been overshadowed by their parent companies' desire for profit at all costs, even if part of the price to be paid is to cozy up to the powers-that-be for a belly rub.