Tax the church.

Are these the end times that Christians look forward to with a rather disturbing anticipation?

About two or thee years ago, an audio clip surfaced on the net about this woman who had called a certain Mwaura to come to her house for a bit of the slap and tickle but he didn't seem all that into her. Now we have Morris. But these two pale into insignificance when compared to the depths men of the cloth will fall to protect their following, their wealth and their power.

I have no idea whether a Ranger Rover-loving pastor hit-and-ran, killing a road user and injuring another. The way he has behaved, though, the statements he has made, do not persuade me that he is an innocent man. The manner in which the officers of the law have behaved regarding the fatal road crash do not fill me with hope that the nexus between godmen, policemen and politicians is healthy or for the public good.

A few months ago we had the spectacle of a godman indecently exposing a member of his congregation, while at the same time lying to her that he had found a cure for her breast cancer. He was unapologetic. He has since had his reputation sanitised by appearing on a popular comedy show. He is not the only snake-oil salesman in the guise of a man of the cloth. Some have built financial and real estate empires by capturing the imaginations of their congregations - as well as their wallets. There is a celebrity evangelist couple that holidays in the United States ad plays golf in South Africa - and does not welcome "poor" people to their church.

A church was a sanctuary once. It was open to one and all. It offered more than spiritual succour to the spiritually poor; it offered shelter for the orphaned and the widowed; it offered education where the government did not; and it ran primary healthcare clinics while the community built capacity. That, at least, is the rosy view of what the church once was. The church hid it avaricious hypocrisy well with acts of charity - what we would call corporate social responsibility in the business world.

These days it acts without shame. Pastors, preachers, bishops, archbishops, evangelists, prophets, apostles - the whole lot is motivated with the desire for material wealth, financial superiority and political power. Widows, orphans and the poor are not welcome. They couldn't care less whether you believed in God and the Second Coming; all that matters is that you will fork over ever larger sums of money to them and obey them in every thing without thought or reason. In return there are ever fewer people willing to cut the church any slack - and that is why all of them are surrounded by high fences, alarms and dogs.

Because the church is now a for-profit organisation, it is time we did away with its charitable status and compelled it to keep accurate books of account so that we could tax it like any other corporation. Its agents have become conmen and murderers. It is time we held it to the same secular standards we hold everyone else and let it survive like its perfidious forebears. If they will no longer offer charity, then they must pay the going rate for conning us too.

What is wrong with you people?

Let me aim a few sharp kicks at the shins of parents.

What is wrong with you people? Do you love and care for your children? Do you care for their welfare? Do you maintain an iron grip on their fates? Do you know what is going on in the lives of your children? Do you know what dangers your children face every day?

What is wrong with you people?!

StephJoy is now a byword for unacceptable risk. It is connected to two boarding secondary schools at which the safety of the inmates - for that is what the boarders are -  is far from assured. It is not the only one. There are thousands of boarding schools that are little more than deathtraps. That parents willingly send their children to these death camps defies logic.

From the little that we have seen in the news media, StephJoy's sleeping arrangements dealt with the inmates like sardines: packing them in and stacking them three-high. The rooms were poorly ventilated and did not have easy access to escape routes when tragedy struck, as it inevitably did. From the harrowing testimony of the survivors, StephJoy did not have a health and safety policy, it did not have a health and safety manual, it did not have health and safety equipment, and the inmates were neither trained nor drilled in health and safety operations.

Now there are three sets of parents and the other members of their families reeling after their tragic losses. They must wonder whether they are to blame for the hell to which they cast their children into. How could they not have seen the obvious signs of a facility designed to gouge them for all they were worth without assuring them that their children would be safe? Were they blinded by the promise of As and Bs at the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education? Why didn't they ask StephJoy's proprietors about the school's emergency preparedness?

We are going to lay the blame for the horrific deaths at the feet of the greedy StephJoy proprietors, the negligent teaching and non-teaching staff and the lackadaisical Ministry of Education, Science and Technology. The more religiously minded among us will blame the devil. The social-science true believers will blame alcohol, drugs and hormones. The mean-spirited, including me, will lay the blame at the feet of the parents.

Of course boarding schools cannot provide the comforts of home at the price that 99% of parents are willing to pay. But the price they were charged for the privilege of educating their children should have been warning enough. A casual walk around the school's facilities should have raised their hackles. The fact that the sister school had nipped an arson plot in the bud should have served as fair warning, especially after the schoolgirls involved in the plot confessed that some of the boys from the boys' school were involved. Clue after clue were ignored by the parents. And three boys were murdered by their schoolmates.

What is wrong with you people?

I say a prayer.

Jesus, take the wheel!

It is only Tuesday!

Look, Jesus made specific promises according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. I am here to collect. I fear that if He does not keep his end of the deal, there will be blood on the streets.

The instinct to push back - hard! - is growing harder to suppress. If I do push back, it will not end well because I have a feeling voices will be raised, office furniture will be destroyed, and computers will suddenly find themselves in flight. Whether they will be flying towards heads or out of windows remains a tantalising mystery.

I have decided to focus what little patience I have left to saying a prayer for my friend who is being interviewed by what sounds like an excellent HR manager tomorrow.  She is a rather cheerful person though every now and then you tend to get a sense that when she blows her stack it takes victims of her wrath considerably more than a few minutes to settle down. So, obviously, I am praying that it is her cheerful self that turns up for the interview.

I am also saying a prayer for my other friend who is signing a new contract with some unknown business entity with bags of money, though I doubt he needs my prayers.

I will also think about Saturday. It seems so far off. But it promises respite. They know better than to call on Saturday. God, I hope they know better than to call on Saturday. That would be a phone call too far. I don't think my customary sunniness would keep back...well, anyway, Saturday and the promise of good mental health.

Do we need boarding schools today?

It's time we asked whether boarding schools are truly necessary for the vast majority of Kenya's children. A school in Kiambu county is grappling with the horrific fact that some of the children under its care conspired to set on fire school property killing three schoolmates. Six girls from a sister school had earlier on left school without authority and were missing for a week before they showed up at a television studio of leading media company with a cockamamie explanation that raises serious doubts about the education children receive these days.

In colonial Kenya, very few Kenyans attended boarding schools which were almost always exclusively for secondary education. Indeed, very few Kenyans attended secondary schools at all. The reasons were many, but the principal one was that the few secondary schools available were reserved for the best and the brightest which was a precious small number. It is how Alliance, Mang'u, Lenana and Kenya High could provide such excellent facilities and why their alumni are the who's who of Kenya.

Another reason was that the cost of providing a secondary education at these schools was heavily subsidised, either by the colonial government or the church, mainly the Catholic church or the Anglican church. That remains true today only for the "national" schools, which are legacy schools from the colonial era.

One of the outcomes of expanding the number of residential schools throughout the country has been an explosion in the total number of inmates of these institutions. The number is unmanageable. The attention of detail that is achieved by Alliance and Mang'u is nowhere to be seen in institutions such as the troubled Stephjoy Boys' High School in Kiambu, where three students lost their lives yesterday. The quality of the faculty at Kenya High and Kianda is substantially lower at Stephjoy Girls' High School and its ilk. The Ministry of Education, captured as it is by special interests interested in tenders and political power, has lost its touch when it comes to the administration of the education sector. In the short to medium term, student unrest is not going to abate.

Every year since the death of a student at Upper Hill High School in Nairobi in 2008, there have been reported the deaths of students in residential secondary schools. Each time after a tragedy key stakeholders have pledge to address the matter. One of the most asinine decisions was to "ban" mock exams in 2001. Guess what? Mock exams are still being administered without the authority of the Ministry and the anxiety, stress and violence that accompanies the mock exams remains unaddressed.

The economics of a residential school system no longer make sense. By the end of the 1990s it was apparent that the cost of offering both a quality education and a reasonable standard of living in a residential school was beyond the means of many parents, yet the population of boarders has steadily risen. I believe it is time Kenya had an honest discussion with itself about the value of residential schools in the twenty-first century.

Some of the challenges of boarding schools can only be solved by shutting them down, death being the most obvious. In recent years drugs, "devil" worship and homosexual scares have become more prevalent. These can't be solved by cramming a thousand children in a poor-designed, poorly managed institution and cared for by poorly trained and unmotivated teachers and other staff. Parents have to become parents again. The crisis in boarding schools will not be solved by ignoring the realities on the ground. I believe that it is time to convert boarding schools into day schools, and reserve boarding schools for those with the hundreds of thousands per year that they can afford to pay for a quality education and assure the safety of their children.

Silver Lining.

And it is only Monday.

There is a terribly large dark cloud in my sunny sky. I don't like dark clouds. Even when they have silver linings, I don't like dark clouds. Except today. My silver lining is unlike any that I have had in the past. Back then it was easy to accept the casual way that certain libations simply made the ghosts of the day to melt away. It was easy to revel in the first gaff of the day, when a deep, long-drawn inhalation-exhalation meant that you had kicked back, loosened the tie, put on something Old School and for the next three minutes, forgot about the dog's breakfast of a day.

These days, things have taken quite a turn. To be honest, they have escalated quite a bit.

There is a permanent dark cloud in my sky. Every now and then, when I have made a triumphal; return from Mt Olympus, having jousted with the gods and survived by the skin of my teeth, that dark cloud has rained on my parade, soaked me to the bone with its ill-will, ill-humour and mean spirit. Bob says, Some feel the rain; others just get wet. Now it could be that one day the storm will raise a flood and overwhelm me, but for now, rain-soaked parades or not, my silver lining guarantees that I never, ever get wet.

Because of that silver lining, that ray of sunshine in the midst of a tropical-storm buildup, I see no reason but to hold my head high, hold my tongue, keep my nerve and remember that coffee solves everything. Properly brewed. Black. Lots and lots of sugar. Hot. Yes! Coffee solves everything. (But that is not my silver lining.)

Silver linings take many forms. I didn't know that. Mine had always been the Big Three: libations, music and sleep. Then in one fell swoop Silver Lining took on a whole other meaning. Nowadays, dark clouds can piss all over themselves because I am no longer playing that game. I am above it. I am, according to the never-seems-to-die Mr White in Spectre's trailer, the kite dancing in the hurricane. But only if you are great fan of aerodynamics will you appreciate that sometimes hurricanes benefit some kites.

Anyway, I have a permanent dark cloud above me these days. It won't prevail. My silver lining is the silver bullet to the werewolf of bad days. And She is awesome.

A lack of imagination.

Kwame Owino's Institute of Economic Affairs, IEA, argues that alcohol regulation is a health issue and not a law-and-order problem. Setting the provincial administration on the illegal brewers, he argues, misses the point, going for  symbolism instead of effectiveness. He is partly right. Alcohol regulation is not just a law an order matter; it is a standards one, a public health one, a cultural one and, in Kenya, a deeply political one.

Eastern Africa's written history is patchy but we know that alcoholic beverages are a seminal part of the cultures of the peoples of Eastern Africa. With the arrival of the settlers and the colonial government, British sensibilities surrounding alcohol were imported into East Africa - high class and low class varieties; distillation; "modern" brewing; licensed production; offences related to alcohol production, distribution and consumption. These British sensibilities - this British culture - survived Independence because, and I agree with the IEA on this, of a spectacular lack of imagination among Kenya's policy-making classes.

Ironically, it is to a modern imperial power that we are to find our best example of what to do when it comes to our alcohol problem. In 1920 the United States of America ratified the Eighteenth Amendment which imposed a nationwide ban on the sale, production, importation, and transportation of alcoholic beverages. In 1933 the Twenty-third Amendment revoked the ban. In the intervening fourteen years, the United States had cause to learn many lessons on the pernicious effects of prohibition, the most important being that had it not been for prohibition, the rise of organised criminal syndicates may have been slower and less bloody and the corruption of the offices of state, including the Presidency may have been a bit tempered.

In Kenya there is an unofficial prohibition on the production, distribution, sale and consumption of traditional alcoholic beverages, whether they are distilled, like chang'aa, or brewed, like busaa, despite the repeal of the laws that made their production, distribution, sale and consumption illegal. Together with the traditional traditional alcoholic beverages have been lumped the so-called second-generation alcoholic beverages which are, apparently, alcoholic beverages produced on license after Kenya Breweries Limited's near-monopoly was broken some time in the early 2000s and Kuguru Foods nearly went belly up trying to take on the behemoth.

Our version of prohibition is political in nature; it has nothing to do with law and order or the public health. It is a cudgel to keep one political agent in the ascendancy and not another. It is why the President saw nothing strange in placing responsibility for the anti-illegal drinks drive on the rather dubious shoulders of elected representatives. He miscalculated, though; many of the men and women he gave this responsibility to have benefitted greatly from alcohol, either as distributors of the behemoth or as underground distillers and brewers, one step ahead of the forces of law and order. He set the fox to guard the hen-house.

It is only on the maturity of the political institutions that a relatively simple problem like the production, distribution and sale of alcohol will be regulated with the objectives of protecting consumers, increasing revenues and creating employment. The President is not confident that Kenya's political institutions are mature or that they are on their way to maturity. He is therefore relying on institutions that are tried and tested: a statutory and regulatory framework from the colonial era and a provincial administration built to enforce them.

What a terrible Christian.

I am a terrible Christian.

Let me explain. I lie. A lot. To my barman that Ninarudi saa hii. To Jared that Sina dough leo; mwezi haijakata kona vizuri. To my landlady that I was swamped over lunch hour but for sure I'll make the transfer tomorrow. To my mother that kesho nitakuja supper. Okay, that last one is technically not true. See? I lie a lot. Very, very un-Christian.

I absolutely never, ever turn the other cheek. Instead I fester and stew and get all bilious and shit and exact a cold revenge. I don't care the revenge comes immediately or a decade later; you cross me and I will find a way to make your life harder than it needs to be. Motherfuckers can't fuck with me without consequences.

I definitely don't love my neighbours. I think they are asses. Enough said, I think.

In only one area do I think I am a Christian. It's the least important bit of that Christian thing. It is the only thing that I am capable of. It is the one thing that makes me joyous. I am honest with those who deserve my honesty. That's a pretty small number. The Scientist, the Linguist, the Communicator, the Teacher, the Engineer, the Nurse, the New Lawyer. They are all that matters. 

If you're on the list, thank God. If you ain't, don't take it personally. At least I am not pushing you in front of a speeding Citi Hoppa, am I?

Like Monopoly money.

Kenya's national flag carrier, Kenya Airways (KQ), lost 25.7 billion shillings last financial years. The government bailed out Mumias Sugar (MSC) last month with a billion shillings. The Auditor-General reports that 66 billion shillings cannot be accounted for in the 2013/2014 financial year. A billion here. A billion there. It's Monopoly money when the word "billion" is bandied about with such ease. It's always someone elses money.

We bandy these numbers about without considering what they mean any more. A billion is a very large number to a very large number of Kenyans. The majority, in fact. There is a tiny minority that thinks of a billion as the bare minimum. These are these are the men, and an even tinier number of women, who command attention at the highest levels of government. They receive the right attention from the government.

Yet we remain poor. Poor people behave like poor people behave. Charles Onyango-Obbo has a humourous description of a visiting bigwig and new dresses worn in turn to impress the bigwig. He was writing in the context of the primping up of our city for the visiting United States' President, but he could just have easily been talking about Kenyans who struggle to get by living cheek-to-jowl with other equally struggling Kenyans while a tiny elite dreams up new schemes to line their bulging pockets with billions more.

This is the twenty-first century. Except for lifestyle diseases, and a few devastatingly efficient tropical virus, there is little new in the world of diseases. Mumps, measles and rubella used to wipe out infants until infant vaccination became a mandatory requirement. So too did tetanus, polio, diarrhoea and whooping cough. Vaccines and other therapies made childhood mortality rates to plunge. Modern medicine has all but wiped out polio and small pox from the world. Except in Kenya.

The government will find billions to bail out Kenya Airways, just as it found a spare billion to bail out Mumias Sugar. It will, however, rely on "development partners" to "fight" polio, malaria, and tuberculosis. By and large, the tiny elite and the small-ish middle-class will enjoy a measure of security when it comes to their health. The poor will not. The poor who form the vast majority of Kenyans - and the vast majority of the victims of preventable diseases. Those billions that seem to vanish into thin air will not be recovered, and if they are recovered, they will be dedicated to monuments of the pampered elite: "super" highways; technocities; railways; ports; presidential visits; and the harems that "keep them young."

Why?

If you hate me and you take steps to murder me, I am under absolutely no obligation to love you and ignore your attempts on my life. I am well within my rights to hate you back - and to hit back with equal or greater force. But that is not what Jesus who was the Christ wanted.

The Gospel according to Matthew reminds us that the Christ said in Chapter 5: 38"You have heard that it was said, 'AN EYE FOR AN EYE, AND A TOOTH FOR A TOOTH.' 39"But I say to you, do not resist an evil person; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also. 40"If anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, let him have your coat also."

I am not a good Christian. I do not have the Christ's incredible forbearance. I have no intention of getting murdered without lifting a finger in defence. Because I am a human, a man. I am not a god. Why should I mitigate your hatred because your circumstances are the reason why you would do me harm? Are my circumstances reason enough for you to do me harm?

I will arm myself. I will not sit still while you poke holes in my god-given skin. I will not indulge your lunacy simply because you claim it as a divine obligation. If you strike at me, I shall strike back. When I strike back it shall be to destroy you. We are not friends. For my friends there is the possibility mercy for a betrayal. You are my enemy. For my enemies there is only utter destruction in store. Consider your next act carefully.

It would have been nice.

Someone asked them about homosexuals, and it seems like practice did make perfect because both had their answers down pat. In essence, they agreed to disagree. That is as it should be; it matters not that we still criminalise sexual acts against the order of nature because one day we will stop dying of preventable diseases in large numbers, we will educate our children to the highest standards to the highest level and we will have the luxury to ponder over our own share of First World Problems. That day is not today.

There were many Kenyan reporters who couldn't get over the fact that they saw, with their own eyes, the United States Air Force's VC-25A, or the United States Marine Corps' VH-60Ns and V-22 Ospreys. They were fascinated by the armoured Lincoln limousines, Chevrolet Suburbans and Ford Expeditions. They couldn't get enough of comely and not-so-comely agents of the United States Secret Service, which, apparently is no longer a part of the Department of the Treasury but of the Department of Homeland Security.

Very few of them seemed to have an actual interest in entrepreneurship, generally, or the Global Entrepreneurship Summit that was the reason why the VC-25A landed in Kenya and the V-22s and VH-60Ns were flitting about Nairobi in sinister and menacing fashion. The deals inked between the governments of Kenya and the United States received scant attention compared to the amount of nattering that occurred over the difference a tailor would have on a president's wardrobe.

The President of the United States dwelled on the Big Picture; the specifics were left to his secretaries of commerce and the like and his Special Assistant on National Security Affairs. It is curious that the Kenyan news media chose to largely ignore these questions in favour of aeroplanes, helicopters, limousines and SUVs. The Big Picture still had sufficient detail that had the news media concentrated n that alone,w e wouldn't be left with the feeling that we should know more about the Global Entrepreneurship Summit and whether it will lead to job-creation in Kenya, unemployment reduction, economic growth, political stability, public safety or national security.

Don't get me wrong; I am a guy and guys sure love gadgets. If the gadgets happen to be presidential gadgets, that love remains unrequited but no less passionate and true. But rational people know that there is a time for unrequited pining and a time for hardnosed realpolitik. Kenya's news media is owned by hardnosed businessmen in the business of making money for themselves and their shareholders. The news media houses are populated, by and large, by natterers who resemble small babies, fascinated by shiny toys and incapable of reasoning logically about matters outside the sightlines of shiny things.

For the curious among us, where sober analysis would have been welcome from the minds residing deep in the bowels of the news media houses, we will have to rely on our own faculties to track down every morsel of information from the Global Entrepreneurship Summit, 2015, and attempt to make sense of it all without losing the last of our hair. It would have been nice, though, for the news hacks to pry their snotty noses from the portholes of The Beast in order to tell us what we bought, what we sold, what we gained, what we lost and what it all meant at the end of the day, wouldn't it?

Obama and Pan-Africanism.

Dear Barack,

Welcome home. For a Son of the Soil, you have been a bit too casual with your timetables. It took you seven years to come home? We will cut you some slack if you promise that once you stop that nonsense of being the Leader of the Free World you will buy a small shamba near Nyakach and plant sugarcane or keep a few cows.

That isn't why I am writing. I know many people are curious about what you and Uhuru will have to say to each other, but since Uhuru is a bit secretive, I don't really expect I will ever really know - so I don't care about that. I don't care if you and Ruto shake hands. It's not like I know the guy. I don't even care that your Supreme Court said gays can marry in all fifty States. I know Mark Kariuki and the wingnuts in his crew do, but since most of them are crooks, I don't care what they think either.

I want to talk to you about something more important.

You're going to be out of a job in less than two years. What exactly do you plan o to do after that? Bill has already cornered the market on ex-presidential do-gooding and no one does Bill better than Bill. So that job is out. You weren't exactly the sharpest economic thinker of your generation, so the World Bank and IMF are out. Take a lesson from the Paul Wolfowitz fiasco and let those ones go.

We can't give you the United Nations either. That one has always been Africa's consolation prize, though now that we are getting into bed with the Chinese it might seem like a prudent moment to reconsider the whole kit and caboodle anyway. Climate change is out; that would just make the life of the Secret Service harder for nothing because this one won't get solved in your lifetime. Middle East peace is a presidential thing; what Tony Blair is doing there remains a mystery only he can answer.

There is something that you can do that would immeasurably improve the world. I am not kidding. Pan-Africanism has been delayed for a century and I think if there is someone who can give it a shot at success it is you. Even WEB Dubois thought it could be done. Kwame Nkrumah started well, but then he became as perfidious as the British he had helped to drive out of Africa. Every other pan-Africanist who became a head of state started out well and ended up robbing his people blind. Except idealists like Thomas Sankara who were murdered and Nelson Mandela who never had enough time.

You could do it. You are already an African so no one would question why a Hawaiian is promoting pan-Africanism in his spare time. You have the charisma and the connections and the youthfulness that can get it done. Look at the map of Africa and you wonder how it even manages to get from year to year without some serious calamity stopping it in its tracks. Imagine if you could ride the train from Johannesburg to Cairo without having to worry about visas or bandits, Mombasa to Accra without having to worry about a restive DRC. Power from the Gibe III or the Inga might power the whole continent without the need to build under-used plants all over the place.

All those goals you have for Africa - all those dreams - are coming true only if pan-Africanism is a reality. If you were looking for a post-presidential career, that's the one I would recommend. And then you can be the President of the World we all believed you could be when you upended the politics of the United States forever.

Samson.

P.S. I have seen those helicopters of yours flitting around in Nairobi. A word of caution, though; don't let them land anywhere in Githurai 45. Those people don't play. The scrap metal business is just too lucrative, iwinjo?

#GES2015 and Choices.

It seems like a simple concept, taking responsibility, but the ones that seem to duck it most are the ones with the most responsibility for decisions that affect us all. In March 2013, 11 million of us were given a choice. For the most part, we made the right choice. In some key areas, we made catastrophically wrong choices. Those choices have continued to haunt us ever since.

Barack Obama is landing in a few hours and the consequences of our choices will not be papered over by the number of pale faces attending the Global Entrepreneurship Summit, the acres of grass that will magically materialise along Nairobi's main thoroughfares, the total number of deals that are struck between Kenyans and "global investors" or the positive spin that Air Force One will force everyone to do.

Kenya is not a rural backwater; it hasn't been for a very long time now. Uhuru Kenyatta is not some tribal king presiding over semi-literate subjects. County governors, by and large, are not tribal satraps with a penchant for nubile village girls. We are a modern economy with close ties to the global economy. We are a modern political power attuned to the winds of realpolitik. Yet these facts do not reveal that large swathes of Kenya remain in the tight grip of colonial history - and I am not talking just about the forgotten Northern Frontier, the restive Coastal Strip or the almost always sozzled Mt Kenya Region.

It was a staple of NGOism to take potential donors through Kibera as proof that, as that idiot on the 700 Club repeated, death and disease stalks the land without mercy. Since Baba Moi removed himself from the driwver's seat, things have improved, but Kibera, Korogocho, Mathare valley, Mukuru Kayaba, Mukuru kwa Njenga, Kiambio and Mukuru kwa Reuben still exist and are still growing.

It is almost a mantra these days that "Kenya is insecure" which is total bullshit. Many Kenyans have been murdered by the Shabaab, but the days when Kenyans were getting mugged in the streets for their kabambes or mulika mwizis are over. I am no fan of the security agents, but only the incorrigible jaundice-eyed will refuse to admit that security and public safety have improved. Mandera, Garissa and Wajir are not simply because Kenya's security is corrupted; inter-clan rivalries play an even greater role in in the encouragement of the Shabaab to target Kenyans.

I think Nairobi elected the most tin-eared politician in Kenya and because of him we are going to miss out on great opportunities to cement Nairobi as the heartland of innovation in Africa for a generation. I thin Mombasa has been sold a bill of goods by its government; the temporary Obama-bounce in tourism numbers will not hide the fact that Mombasa county is filthy, without potable water, overcrowded and overrun with drug kingpins and their victims. I think Kisumu has been gifted the most poisonous county executive. This will almost certainly guarantee that Kisumu's legacy as a manufacturing hub will not be seeing a revision any time soon.

We made choices and now the #GES15 will only find the well-heeled and well-connected ready to grab the opportunities on offer. We can't turn back time. But we can change our fate. When Air Force One takes off for Addis Ababa, we must ask ourselves whether we are going to be held back any longer by the choices we made or whether we are going to overcome those choices to make something of ourselves despite those choices.

Optimism.

Kenya is optimistic, isn't it, and Kenyans are the eternal optimists. If you have had the ill fortune of witnessing Uncle Kidero's government at work, you will have noticed that some roads are getting the City Hall Heimlich while Mumias South Road continues to fall apart. Uncle Kidero's optimism is to be seen with his pavements policy; in his fevered mind is the fervent hope that grass will grow in four days. In the middle of a winter. So that Obama can be impressed. By grass.

Kenyans live in eternal hope that their politicians will stop treating them like idiots while Kenya's politicians live in eternal hope that Kenyans will continue to be docile, pliable and gullible, letting long cons and swindles to pass. If Uncle Kidero is a keen Twitterati, he will have noticed that there are very few Kenyans, very few Nairobians, very few anyone really, who isn't taking the piss out of his attempts to spruce up the Green City in the Sun.

We are neither fools nor blind. It is time that Uncle Kidero and his people, and all the rest of them realised this. Not all of us might have PhDs or "global" entrepreneurship experience, but we know when we are getting conned. We may not be frothing at the mouths, pitchforks and flaming torches to hand, baying for the City Fathers' blood, but be under no illusion that we have accepted the sorry state of municipal affairs we have been compelled to suffer under this government. We have chosen to bide our time; at least I have, I don't know about you.

The internet is not the infallible fount of knowledge, but it has enough information that helps us to see whether or not we are the victims of perfidy. The City Fathers' may have kept a very tight lid on how much they are spending to plant weeds along Uhuru Highway and how much they are spending to temporarily cover potholes in the CBD, but in the fullness of time, when they think that they have swaggered off into the sunset in victory, the truth will come out. It is the Information Age and slowly but surely we are developing a knack for empowering ourselves with the freely available information.

Kenya's Big People are deaf and blind; they will not hear what is being said about their perfidy and they will not see the suffering their perfidy wroughts on innocent Kenyans. They are interested in "development" and "networking"; they are not interested in whether the potholes their contractors have left behind will consume ever more billions to fill in afterwards, setting back their much-vaunted "development." Let Obama come. But let us not pretend that what is happening in the City is something to be proud of or something to praise the City fathers for.

We gon' go big.

There will be winners. There will be losers. And then there will be me: a blogger.

When Air Force One, in its blue-and-white motif picked out by Jackie Kennedy, touches down at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, taxis to the red carpet, idles while the Beast is rolled to the ramp and the President of the United States emerges, waves and bounds down the stairs, Kenya will definitely have won, Kenyan pessimism, which seems on the rise, will have lost, and I will hopefully have a stable internet connection to blog about it shortly afterwards.

Nairobi will be in the spotlight and regardless of the tin-eared City County Government's best efforts at perfidy, the roads will be clean, the lanes will be straight, and, yes Ms Nitpicker, the grass will grow. I don't know about the flowers, though; some Nairobi men of a certain age tend to take their watering responsibilities a little to zealously and now they are about to be joined by some of the female member of Babu Owino's 84,000 furiously intelligent University of Nairobi student body.

Uhuru Kenyatta, too, will be in the spotlight. He has a gift for oratory; Eric Ng'eno and Manoah Esipisu and the gnomes that shuffle along the corridors of Harambee House better strike the right balance. This is not an opportunity to go all I-hate-Raila that seems to make them gleeful like toddlers. This is a moment to remind the President of the United States that fate is a funny old thing and that Kenya was fated to have a Kenyan in the White House. He should point out that while we squabble with our friends, neighbours and among ourselves, we have managed to rub along rather nicely with everyone because we are not the revanchists Boniface Mwangi and John Githongo would have him believe we are.

He should steer well clear of corruption and if he wants to demonstrate that bonds of political fidelity that bind him to William Ruto are strong, he should make it plainly so without being crass. He should plug the African Union, the East African Community and the Community of Eastern and Southern African States as reliable partners in the growing economic bonds being forged by the US in Africa. Then he should invite Barack Obama to Kiambu for a Mugithi Night - keeping the Penis Envy and Simi Guy as far away from the venue as possible. That man is not right in the head.

Kenya's youth will get a special shout out from POTUS. This is incredibly self-affirming. It won't matter what ones background is - rich, poor, educated, semi-literate, employed, tarmacking - Kenya's youth will be exposed to the Great American Gaze and I have no doubt that they are in a position to gaze back - and throw a little fear in the mighty US. Kenya's young people have already demonstrated that they will thrive whether or not they are supported. But a Barack Obama endorsement might be the dollop of goodwill they need to take on the world - and prevail.

Traffic, obviously, will be a mess. I hope Mrs Nzioka doesn't take this the wrong way, but I am unlikely to make to work on Friday at a reasonable hour. Even Uncle Kidero told us that "certain roads will be closed" and I am very sure on that list she will find Mumias South Road, Jogoo Road, Landhies Road, Race Course Road, Temple Road, Ronald Ngala Street, Moi Avenue and City Hall Way. And that is before I have to wade through the wand-waving cohorts of NYS, APs, National Police Service policemen, GSU, US Secret Service and GSU Recce. I will be surprised if I make it in before ten in the morning.

We are going to make a party of it all. When President Obama goes on to Ethiopia and lands far away, he will leave with ringing in his ears because when Kenya parties, we go big. We don't go home.

Imperial USA

Is the United States an empire?

First, the case against. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the United States has been on the winning side of major wars only twice: World War I and World War II. Korea ended in a stalemate when China supported the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, DPRK, and crossed the 38th parallel. The no-man's land between the DPRK and the Republic of Korea remains the most land-mined in the world, rivalled only by Afghanistan.

Vietnam ended humiliatingly. Fifty eight thousand dead US servicemen and the US was compelled to negotiate. The US did not win the Afghanistan war; the Soviet Union lost it. It is the US's adventure in Afghanistan that gave rise to al Qaeda, the Chechen insurrection, and the rise of the hard-to-destroy Taliban.

After decades of sanctions, the US is making a political rapprochement with Cuba and Iran. Russia is newly resurgent. China is set to buy up even more US debt in the coming decade. Even simple police actions seem to flummox the US. Somalia became Blackhawk Down. Libya became "leading from behind." It can't decide whether it hates Syria's Assad enough to side with ISIS or vice versa. By the by, if it hadn't screwed up in Iraq, ISIS would not be the force it is now.

Richard Nixon was in charge when the US abandoned the Gold Standard and 35 years later the Great Recession hit and hit hard. US unemployment skyrocketed. Big banks collapsed. Major manufacturers had to be rescued. The BRICS threatened to rise sooner rather than later. The contagion spread and the seeds planted in the US have reaped a bitter harvest in Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain.

And yet. 

The USA remains a mighty military and economic power. Even when its economy brought it to its knees, it still managed to outspend the ten next pretenders combined. Even when unemployment in the US approached double-digit growth, it still managed to employ more engineers and other professionals than the next five industrialised countries combined.

It remains a cultural powerhouse. The way we speak, talk, walk, act, eat, drink, socialise, educate, innovate, write, pray, love or hate are influenced by the US. There are those still clinging on to the faded dream of Rule Britannia, but they all want greenback and not sterling. We may bitch mightily about ukoloni mambo leo, but like it or not, when we bring out the shiniest silver and give up policing in favour of US Marines' policing us, the US is an empire in all but name.

Think of this way. China may hold the largest chunk of US debt, forgetting the lesson Japan learnt in the lost decade of 1995 to 2005, but the US still commands the greatest chunk of the Special Drawing Rights in the International Monetary Fund. With that alone, never mind the mightiest nuclear arsenal known to history, the US can alter the fortunes of continents. In the past decade alone, it has done so twice. If the hegemon that is the US is not an empire, then what is it?

Only 216 acres?

Hyperbole is not a sound basis for public discourse. Just so you don't think I am unnecessarily unfeeling, I don't care for cruelty, whether it is man against an or man against animal. The reason we subscribe, even with a great deal of hypocrisy, to moral codes to do good and avoid doing bad is so that we are kind to all living beings, whether they "were created in the Image of God" or were created to be our source of food, transport or sport. But at no point does kindness become "the land belongs to animals."

A human being, when it is born, is a helpless weak animal and any number of things could bring its sniveling life to a quick end. Disease, predators, weather, even its parents - all this can cut short the life of a human being at the moment of birth. It cannot communicate except in the most rudimentary manner possible: screaming. It can't walk. It can't use even its nascent instincts to survive - again, except in the most rudimentary form. But because mankind has evolved - a prefrontal cortex, a complex use of symbols and sounds for communication, and a knack for converting nature and things of nature to weapons. It is those weapons that guarantee that we shall always prevail against the beasts of the wild.

The relationship between Kenyans, their government and Kenya's wildlife was always a testy one. Land, quite frequently, had been expropriated from local communities, impoverishing many of their members, and set aside as parks or reserves to which the landless local communities were not welcome and who's benefits were reserve for those who had "invested" in tourism facilities in these parks and reserves. It is no small irony that many of the "investors" were formerly settler communities who had championed the expropriation of the land in the first place. To continue in their perfidy of keeping the "native" population poor, weak and as far away from them as possible, the laws "protecting" wildlife are the most draconian, second only to those on treason.

Now a curious argument is being made, an argument that takes advantage of an apparent disgust with the perfidy that pervades the Standard Gauge Railway project. It is argued that the two hundred and sixteen acres "hived off" from the Nairobi National Park to make way for the railway, and "environmentalists" are livid with the decision. Nairobi National Park is unique for bring in such close proximity to the Central Business District, unheard of in any other country. Twenty years ago when the population of Nairobi, especially that of Kibera, was half of what it is today, that sounded like a good idea. Today, Nairobi is bursting at the seams with over four million residents. A park-in-the-city is an arrogant indulgence.

If it takes the railway project to persuade the government that it is time the wildlife were confined to Amboseli and Tsavo, then so be it. The priority, as mean as it sounds, has always been foreigners. First it was settlers. Then it was their heirs. Now it is investors. The people who have a true claim to that land keep swelling the ranks of the residents of Kibera, the several Mukurus, Korogocho, Mathare Valley, Pipeline, Kangemi, Kawangware, Dandora, Kayole...it is a long list. No tears are being shed for them the way they are being shed for elephants. That is not amoral, but immoral.

Privacy and number plates

I had an exchange with the Rookie Manager yesterday on the nature of privacy and motor vehicle number plates. I think there is a great misunderstanding of what privacy means. Article 31 does much to delineate the line between private and public. The question the Rookie Manager asked was in relation to the information that would be contained on the next-generation number plates, including the owner's name. The Rookie Manager wanted to know whether car owners deserved no privacy?

Privacy is not the right not to be known. Taking the template provided by Article 31, privacy is the right not to be searched, or your home or property searched; it is the right not to have your possessions seized; it is the right not to have information relating to your family or private affairs unnecessarily required or revealed; and it is the right not to have the privacy of your communications infringed.

When you operate a motor vehicle on public roads, it is not a private act. The vehicle might be privately owned, but the act of operating it in a public road is a public act. The public road is not the motorist's private domain; the motorist shares it with other motorists and pedestrians. What one motorist does on the public road affects other road users. It is, of necessity, a public act with private property. It follows, therefore, that if you perform a public act, you cannot hide your identity. However, the manner in which your identity is revealed is intended to protect you from harm too; that, I believe, is why the next-generation number plates will contain bar codes which will contain your identifying information and which will require bar-code readers to divulge that information.

One way to demonstrate that your identity is not a private matter when you operate a motor vehicle on a public road is the manner in which you are facilitated to operate that motor vehicle. To do so, one must comply with various requirements, primarily designed to protect you, the motorist, and other road users. The vehicle must be roadworthy. The vehicle must be insured. The vehicle must be registered. The vehicle must have affixed on it, in the front and the back, number plates. The motorist must possess a valid driving license. 

These requirements are enforced by public institutions such as the National Police Service, the Department of Motor Vehicle Registrations, the Kenya Revenue Authority and the Judiciary. It would be perverse for a policeman to stop a motorist for a suspected traffic offence and the motorist refused to identify himself or refused to confirm whether he owned the motor vehicle in the first place. But unless the policeman suspected that the motor vehicle had been used in the commission of another offence and that there was proof of the offence inside the vehicle, he would have no right to search the vehicle, which remains private property. Therefore, he could not enter the vehicle.

There seems to be a national apprehension that our privacy is being whittled away by the State and its institutions. But for us to debate the matter effectively, we must understand, taking into account Article 31 and Article 24 which limits fundamental freedoms and rights, what privacy is and, crucially, what it is not.

Are you free when you're rich?

Rwanda and Burundi are throwbacks to a bygone era. Pierre Nkurunziza is channeling Robert Mugabe, Hosni Mubarak, Teodore Obiang and the rest of the I-am-here-to-stay Brigade. Paul Kagame is channeling Generalissimo Fransisco Franco, Augusto Pinochet and Lee Kuan Yew and their ilk who were African-style big men with a knack for economic miracles. In their world, a little draconian application of the law, some emasculation of the constitution, limited civil or political rights, were all a small price to pay for money in your pocket and a car in your garage. In Kagame's world, he's offering a little more money - and a cow.

Many Rwandans have bought what Mr Kagame is selling. None seems to have bought whatever it is that Mr Nkurunziza is peddling. It helps that Mr Kagame looks like an ascetic - thin, reedy-voiced, stern visage, forbidding rectitude, personal probity. Mr Nkurunziza, on the other hand, looks like an overgrown playboy with a wandering eye and a taste for the perversely western.

In Africa, there is gaining currency that a Lee Kuan Yew-like discipline is required to get the buses to run on time. In Mr Kagame many have found Mr Lee's spiritual successor; he has enforced a black-and-white interpretation of the rules that has made the Land of Thousand Hills a favoured destination of bring-back-corporal-punishment types. However, just as in Singapore, Rwanda has a near non-existent opposition whose opinions count for little even if principled. So long as those views do not fit within the inspired and disciplined leader's worldview, the are not worth the paper they will be published on.

A consequence of this kind of grip on power is that the people essentially become hostages of the dear leader in a sort of Stockholm Syndrome. They cannot let go of their hostage-taker; after all, he has fed them, clothed them, protected them, and made many of them rich. Some will point out that Rwanda is rapidly making strides in the human development index and a few assassinations here and there are a price we should all be willing to pay for litter-free streets and a cow in the backyard.

That is not the history of mankind. One day, even for tiny Singapore, the bough will break, and the people will not be suppressed for longer. Despite the high standards of living in Singapore, at some point someone will demand an answer for an unanswerable question: why do you believe that being free is the same as being rich? If you think that one day Rwandas will be so rich they won't care they are living in a police state, you have clearly not been paying attention to Rwanda's history. Or the history of man.

Hyperbole is not always bias.

If you think that the entire population of young people in Kenya - The Youth - has been demonised by Anyang' Nyong'o in his anti-NYS tirade or by John Githongo in his anti-NYS-as-Interahamwe tirade, please raise your hand? I mean you, Ms Thorne and you too, Ms Waitherero.

The National Youth Service was established by he enactment of the National Youth Service Act in 1963. The functions of the NYS are set out in section 16 of the Act—

The functions of the Service shall be the training of young citizens to serve the nation, and the employment of its members in tasks of national importance and otherwise in the service of the nation.

Its motto in this current wave of transformation is "True to self, true to country." I am a firm believer in the NYS. I did not go through the NYS; by the time I was being spat out of my high school with a less than creditworthy grade, the NYS had been hollowed out by Nyayoist kleptocracy. But I have relatives who passed through its training and they are a credit to the institution, captains of industry in their own right. I may have been a child, but the swindle perpetrated by the Nyayo Bus Corporation remains a vivid reminder of what Nyayoism could do - and seems poised to do in the Twenty-first Century.

Mr Githongo is being very casual with his language. Kenya is not Rwanda and the scale of the violence of 2007/2008 pales in significance to what happened in Rwanda in July 1994. This is the language of incitement that is being levelled at the abrasive Moses Kuria with such middle-class feeling. While Mr Githongo has gone overboard with his hyperbole, he and Mr Nyong'o are right to question why the NYS is being lavished with so much money, why it's intake is being expanded so much and why it has become necessary to emphasise its paramilitary training.

Few seem to appreciate the significance of this emphasis. It has always been part of the NYS programme, but more people remember the NYS for the trades training it provided to pre-university students. Now, even with the slum-upgrading programmes (which seem to be carried out in opposition strongholds alone) the emphasis is on paramilitary training. Of more twenty thousand young people. Annually. Up from a peak of four thousand recruits annually.

When Chris Murungaru and his successor John Michuki lavished training and equipment on the Administration Police, few saw anything extraordinarily sinister about it. The APs would sill be the same corrupt askaris the people were used to dealing with. No one foresaw the manner in which the APs would be deployed and employed in the massive rigging that took place during the 2007 general election. Once bitten, twice shy and Mr Nyong'o and Mr Githongo are right to wonder whether this largesse that is being lavished on a massively expanded NYS is in preparation for similar electoral perfidy in the next general election.

The role of the APs in the 2007/2008 crisis was largely because of the secrecy that revolved around the financial dealings of the service. It is this same secrecy that seems to swirl around the NYS and the recent attempts to uncover its financial dealings have resulted in obfuscation, spin-doctoring and accusations of political witch-hunting. Meanwhile, the NYS keeps recruiting 20,000 young people, trains them in, among many other things, paramilitary skills, spends billions in secret and generally behaves like a ministerial army. Why wouldn't Mr Githongo see it as a militia? Why wouldn't Mr Nyong'o worry about the overweening secrecy in its affairs?

Trees and forests.

Uhuru Kenyatta need not "break his silence" on Moses Kuria and his legal troubles. That is the job of Johnson Sakaja, Onyango Oloo and the nawabs of The National Alliance. Mr Kuria is their headache, not Mr Kenyatta's. After all, Mr Sakaja is the party's, and Mr Kuria's, chairman, and Mr Oloo is the Secretary-General. If a decision is to be made on how to proceed with TNA's enfant terrible, it is the chairman and secretary-general who carry water.

While we have been distracted by the antics of the Gatundu South representative, Kenya is hosting Matteo Renzi, the Prime Minister of Italy, and a bunch of billionaires who have jetted in ahead of the Global Entrepreneurship Summit scheduled for the end of the month. Mr Renzi will hold talks with Mr Kenyatta on bilateral issues including anti-terrorism and investment, issues that are at the heart of the Kenyan situation. The billionaires are looking for "investment opportunities" in Kenya; whether those opportunities will lead to greater employment, technology transfer, creation of wealth at home and reduction of poverty are matters that should concern us all.

Yet the most important subject of discussion, grounded on the pettiness of the political scene, are the alleged words of incitement uttered by Mr Kuria and broadcast by Kenya's quisling news media. To my knowledge Mr Kuria is not know for promoting anti-terror, investment, employment, wealth-creation of poverty-reduction policies or legislation in parliament. He is renown for his abrasive and combative nature in the mudpit of TNA v Cord bullshit that keeps his name in lights.

We have gone along, by and large, with this state of affairs. We have focused to an overwhelming degree on the flash-bang of the political arena, living under the delusion that political mudslinging is all that matters. Meanwhile, portentous decisions about our natural resources, our safety and our security are being made behind closed doors with foreign powers without us being involved in the decision-making process. When potentially calamitous legislative proposals are debated in parliament, our minds are engaged in whether a politician attempted to strip naked another one or whether a politician's obsessions run to another politician's penis!

Mr Kuria is important if only to remind us that we must focus our attention on political questions that matter. For instance, no one should object to additional resources being allocated to the National Youth Service as it implements its Five Point Transformation Agenda. The NYS was once a valuable institution in inculcating marketable skills to scores of Kenya's young people. Even with the kleptomania that defined Kenya's second government, it somehow still managed to produce many tradespeople whose skills have been sought after as far afield as South Sudan, Tanzania, Botswana and Malawi.

But just because it was great once, and this government claims that it intends to make it great again, could the additional resources allocated to the NYS have been allocated somewhere else more deserving? The cash transfer programmes initiated by James Nyikal when he was a permanent secretary have proven to have a great positive economic and social impact than the Economic Stimulus Programme of 2008-2011. More elderly persons over the age of sixty have become self-sufficient because of the cash transfers than under ESP.  Could an expansion of that programme have been more beneficial than the allocation of the additional twenty five billion shillings made to the NYS? I don't know. But it would have been an important national debate to have if we hadn't been distracted by Moses Kuria and his pangas. Unless you know the difference between the two, you will never see the forest for the trees.