Has he lost the war?:

Donald J. Trump, the forty-fifth president of the United States of America, is a showman of incomparable repute. He has undone two hundred and fifty years of received wisdom regarding the most powerful office in the world. In a span of a year and a half, he has demonstrated that the Shiny City on the Hill, in Caliph Ronald Reagan's immortal words, is no different from Kinshasa, Harare, Lagos, Kampala or Nairobi. The United States Capitol, and the White House down the street, have bared their faces, revealing graft and nepotism on a scale previously unknown. And with its unmasking, the USA is leading the rest of the western democracies to unmask themselves to reveal their base and corrupted systems.

However, despite the revelation that Western Democracy is but a euphemism for camouflage, more and more African men and women wish to emigrate to the West, because, even if they are hated and persecuted because of the colours of their skins, their chances of living decently appear greater over there than over here. It is why, on balance, if Uhuru Kenyatta and his African Union peers fail to improve the lives of their peoples, the rickety boats killing Africans in droves in the Mediterranean will keep on sailing.

Uhuru Kenyatta has decided to be the public face of the latest battle in the War on Corruption, an endeavour that has seen an ex-police sharpshooter (known as "Boss"), an ex-judge (brilliant jurist; terrible at everything else), an ex-law lecturer (a pompous windbag whose tenure was mercifully short), an ex-accountant (who tried to pretend that he did not understand what "conflict of interest" means and was shoved aside for his trouble) and now, an ex-church leader (a doddery old man with the naivete of a teenager), lead the combined armies of anti-corruption soldiers to humiliating defeats. In this war, battles have been fought and lost on numerous battlefields whose names have sounded the death knell of trust in the integrity of the State itself: Goldenberg, Triton, Kazi kwa Vijana, Anglo-Leasing, NYS...the list is long and its devastation almost total. Uhuru Kenyatta is waging the war with florid rhetoric and performative anger. But he appears not to have a war-fighting strategy. If this is true, all it will take is for one humiliating battle defeat for him to withdraw from the field and pursue less legacy-building disasters.

We have long known, even without the benefit of Donald Trump's revealing behaviour, that graft can only be fought on multiple fronts. The law is not the only weapon in the arsenal. Yet we have done precious little to bring the other weapons to bear. As a result, those weapons have been co-opted by the forces of corruption, wearing down their utility in this war, and eroding the public trust in political, cultural, academic, social and economic institutions. If the fiasco that is Bad Sugar is anything to go by, the heart of the State, the Cabinet, can't be trusted to shoot straight in this war, and this undermines almost completely the president's stated ambitions.

The president is waging a losing war if he cannot even acknowledge that his Cabinet can't be trusted, his police chiefs can't be trusted, his army commanders can't be trusted, and the public prosecutor and judges have axes to grind that have nothing to do with his war. All it will take for his rhetoric to be ineffective is another multibillion shilling NYS heist, not counting all the other multibillion shilling heists that have already taken place on his watch. Perhaps, he lost the war long ago. Only that he doesn't realise it.

The solution is not simply mass killings

Wishful thinking is now gaining adherents in Kenya if the rhetoric surrounding the War Against Corruption: Uhuru Edition is anything to go by. The most popular wish among the people seems to be a China-style death penalty for all public officials accused of graft. It isn't just a wish among the noisiest windbags sitting in the national legislature, but it pervades the firmament of the editorial classes of Kenya's tabloid media, including the nation's most popular tabloid. I was also a little shocked to see that senior leaders of Kenya's faith-based communities were of one mind when it came to graft in high places: death! (I shouldn't have been though; religious zealots tend to be particularly blood-thirsty.)

I have never understood the bloodlust that accompanies public discourse regarding knotty public policy problems and failures. It is as if death is a magic wand that you can wave and solve the nation's problem. The logic is dangerously simple: some people are bad; bad people should not live; any person who does something wrong is a bad person; all bad persons must be killed to save the country. There is little to no discourse about what allows "bad" people to thrive in the first place, though, every now and then an Op-Ed will slip through the net and demonstrate that sometimes the system encourages "bad" behaviour.

In recent months a familiar swindle has taken place and the public has been ribbed of billions in broad daylight. Also, despite reams of reports regarding the gaps in the public health surveillance system, contaminated food items have been smuggled into the country and dumped in the market. The death-penalty jihadists have insisted that every crook connected to NYS II and contaminated sugar must be executed to preserve the nation. Almost none has seen to fit to ask why, after everything that happened with NYS I, the loopholes associated with the tendering process at the National Youth Service were not closed. Or why the perennially dysfunctional sugar industry has not attracted the pro-reform zealots in the privatisation department.

Corruption, and its negative outcomes, is not just about corrupt people. It is also about systems that can be manipulated to corrupt ends. Of course I know that there are no perfect systems; but refusing to acknowledge that our plethora of anti-corruption laws, rules and regulations, institutions and strategic plans have failed in this war is to acknowledge that we are more enamoured of the rhetoric of anti-corruption as opposed to any actual anti-corruption campaign. The substance of the thing is sometimes more important than its form.

The solution is not simply mass killings.

Who stole from Shujaa Pride?

One of the funniest things I read today was about how mad the President's Chief of Staff and the headboy of the Kenya Rugby Union were because the members of Kenya's Sevens' team covered over the sponsor's name on their team jerseys when they absolutely flattened Fiji in France last night. Apparently, team Kenya covered the words "Make it Kenya", for which they were paid by Brand Kenya to wear, because their allowances from the sponsorship monies hadn't been paid by KRU. What was amusing is that it is the men who sweated it out on the pitch that were wrong - not the men who collected money on their behalf and refused to pay our athletes what they were rightfully owed.

In Kenya it is of vital importance that Government and its various sclerotic appendages are not embarassed, no matter how badly their officers act or how crooked their dealings are. It is the patriotic duty of every Kenya to ensure that Government always saves face - or at least it seems as if it is expected to be our patriotic duty. If the emperor has no clothes on then Godammit, it's you patriotic duty to pretend that he is wearing the finest three-piece suit from a Saville Row tailor.

It is why our rugby heroes will face the sharp end of the stick when they jet back into the country. How dare they show up the feckless penny-ante thievery of the men appointed to look after their welfare? How dare they show such disrespect to Brand Kenya and, by extension, Government by showing it up for failing or refusing to pay them their allowances? How dare they tell the whole rugby world that Government doesn't pay its dues? How dare they?!

If there is one thing that has allowed the war on corruption to seem like a lost cause, it is this instinct to protect public officers and the institutions they manage. It is why cover-ups are so easy in Kenya: don't embarass the boss has been elevated to a cardinal truth. It takes years and a brave whistleblower before the truth is ever known, by which time billions have been pilfered, frittered, and, all in all, remain unaccounted for. If the brave Sevens' team hadn't highlighted the fact that public funds, expended ostensibly on their behalf, had gone missing, would Kenyans have ever found out? I doubt it. Instead of Messrs Waita and Omwela losing their rags over the minor rebellion by the athletes, they must ask themselves what were the circumstances that prevented our hard-working and quite talented athletes from receiving their dues.  In short, who stole from Shujaa Pride?

The functional illiteracy of the nawabs

The most corrupt people are the ones who vote for us. When you go to the village they ask you, “Sasa utatuacha aje?”

The Woman Representative of Murang'a County in the National Assembly is an interesting person. When she accuses her electors of being the most corrupt merely because they ask for cash handouts from elected officials or candidates seeking political office, she betrays a staggering contempt for her constituents and a glaring self-delusion about her own culpability in the machinery of political corruption. She, and her fellow elected colleagues, have consistently been incapable of  articulating political messages that inspire and have always relied on campaign war-chests to buy votes from desperately poor voters.

The Woman Representative and her colleagues have reduced political activity to attending funerals and other social events that offer them an opportunity to "offer something small" at which they spend very little time speaking to how their constituents can play more constructive roles in the development of their constituencies but, instead, engaging in the worst forms of Kenyan politicking including sledging their rivals, defending the indefensible, and making false promises with an ease that sociopaths would appreciate.

She has engaged in most, if not all, the activities politicians in Kenya engage in when seeking votes or fighting to retain their seats and it is amazing that she would not only accuse her constituents of encouraging the graft that many of her colleagues routinely but that, somehow, this is sufficient grounds for insinuating that the people have endorsed political graft of all forms. It is a simple thought experiment: the next time she is asked for handouts while performing her political act, she should say no and let the chips fall where they may. If she is half the politician she thinks that she is, then she should persuade her constituents that despite her tight-fisted ways, she truly has their interests in mind and that they should re-elect her (and not elect her rivals).

The Murang'a politician is member of an assembly that has singularly failed to protect the welfare of the people by allowing the national executive to load up the public service with such a heavy debt burden that, regardless of the mellifluous songs about the "Big Four Agenda", it is almost certain that the personal circumstances of her constituents will not improve for a considerable period to come. When her personal circumstances have been affected, she has not hesitated to personally intervene with high government officials to seek redress. She doesn't seem to have translated that zeal for problem-solving to assist the constituents of Murang'a to ameliorate their straitened circumstances. Instead she chooses to insultingly accuse them of great corruption.

In any decent republic, the people make demands of their representatives. It is what representative government is all about. The Murang'a politician seems incapable of making the connection between her incredible capacity for not doing her job to the demands for cash handouts from her constituents. If she and her colleagues did their jobs properly, the number of beggars in Murang'a (as in the rest of the republic) would dwindle to only the most needy because the Government in which she serves would see to it that public policies encouraged wealth creation for all, thereby doing away with the need for the political classes to grace funerals with baskets of cash for the bereaved. She is an example of the functional illiterates we have sitting in the national legislature who continually refuse to acknowledge the depths of their ignorance and, thereby, fall to making wildly unreasoned accusations.

Discipline and disaster risk management

The "discipline" in disciplined forces has several implications. Members of police and military forces undergo training in a programmatic way so that when they are engaged in active combat, each member of the force reacts according to their  training, to perform their specific task without panicking, and therefore achieve a common objective. The sequence of events is programmed - drilled - into them such that from the moment the first shot is fired to the moment the operation is halted, each member of the force will follow the same sequence he or she was trained to follow, at the same speed that was drilled into them, without skipping a step, and thereby minimise errors and promote greater chances of victory or success.

This is the essence of disaster preparedness training, which it is increasingly becoming clear that many residential schools do not undertake. Disaster preparedness acknowledges the resources available, the environmental constraints, and the level of discipline of relevant stakeholders, and guides those in leadership to design a plan that will promote greater safety. An effective plan can save lives and minimise injuries. So too can a poor plan. But in the absence of any plan, more lives are at risk, more people are likely to be injured. An effective plan demonstrates that an organisation has the safety of its people as a priority.

Everything we now about residential schools these days points to one or two overriding priorities: high KCSE grades and a "good reputation". Very few residential schools seem to care that their students are safe. very few schools seem to have prioritised the safety of their students beyond the supply of fire extinguishers, the removal of window grills and the installation of outward-opening dormitory doors. Few, if any, residential schools drill their students on how to react to fires, stranger-invasions, medical emergencies, or any of a half dozen common disasters.

You don't need a law to prepare for disaster. Senator Mutula Kilonzo Jr's and Senator Johnson Sakaja's Bill is all well and good but it will be meaningless if the outcome is merely to create new bureaucracies that will do everything in their power to expand their procurement capabilities as opposed to establishing a pro-safety disaster-preparedness framework, especially for our institutions of learning where hundreds of thousands of children spend the vast majority of their time. If school principals and headmasters are waiting for a disaster risk management law, then the battle is already lost.

It is vital that school heads undertake to design plans and systems that account for the youthfulness of their charges and their propensity to panic as well as the capabilities of teaching and non-teaching staff. These plans and systems must foster trust between the school staff and the students so that early warning mechanisms can be employed without victimising or shaming the students. But at the heart of any plan or system is training and drilling: everyone must train to do their part as regularly as possible so that panicked reactions are minimised as much as possible.

For this to work, how schools are resourced and managed must change. The old model of relying on prefects and captains to provide the bulk of leadership of students must cease. Even in a school with a low number of teaching and non-teaching staff, primary leadership must be provided by the adults in charge. They have greater life experiences and are more mature when it comes to evaluating potential risks than the child-cum-student leaders. 

 

In the two recent disasters at Moi Girls Secondary School, Nairobi, it is apparent that neither the school's administration nor its teaching and non-teaching staff were prepared for any disaster and that their lack of leadership condemned 1,200 children to face disasters on their own. Part of the reason why the disasters occurred is because the teaching staff have a terrible relationship with the children, especially the principal, who have been described as high-handed, aloof and dictatorial, and unwilling to consider any of the suggestions made by their most vulnerable stakeholders. The captains and prefects, hell-bent on preserving the privileges they enjoy in the school, are an extension of the dysfunction in the leadership of the school and too immature to consider the implications of their sometimes harsh actions. If the school doesn't prepare a disaster risk management policy, a disaster preparedness plan and a disaster response plan, then it is just a matter of time before disaster strikes again.

Children are not part of the disciplined forces; however, our understanding of "discipline" has to evolve beyond using "discipline" as a catchall term for behaviour correction or modification of incorrigible children. We must start teaching children how to take action to protect themselves and others when they are faced with risks such as fire or stranger attacks. This must start by changing the violence-based teacher-student relationships that seem to prevail in our schools today.

Do you care about the girls?

How does a public sector manager keep her job after children die while under her charge? How does she even justify her continuing to hold office when children under her charge are attacked in the dead of night, assaulted and raped? Why are her subordinates so keen to protect the "good reputation" of the school, going to the [admittedly alleged] extent of directing children not to "talk about it" or offering the victim "scholarships" for her silence? Why would the policeman investigating the latest outrage go out of his way to speculate that the victims made things up so that "they didn't have to sit for exams"?

There are many things that are wrong with the way residential schools are managed these days, and all of them are epitomised by the callous, cold-hearted manner in which Moi Girls Secondary School, Nairobi is managed. Ten students died in September because the dormitory in which they were asleep wasn't designed with their safety in mind. Their principal had done nothing to improve the conditions in which these girls slept. Instead, her efforts have been channelled to the construction of a chapel!

The fire exposed the lies about the school's safety. The latest outrage only confirms that the principal hasn't learnt any lessons from tragedy. It is alleged that the school has a night complement of three guards: two men and a woman. They are buttressed by a matron, CCTV cameras and a perimeter fence. This is the reported sum total of all the features responsible for the safety of one thousand and two hundred girls. And on the night of the latest outrage, the matron sleep through it ll despite the screams of the victims. Did she sleep through the fire as well?

It is tempting to blame parents for not insisting that things had to change after the fire, but things are never that cut and dried, are they? In Kenya, where you go to secondary school is almost as important as what grade you get after your final exams. Quabbz has a solid reputation and many of its alumni have gone on to glittering careers. many parents are determined to secure bright futures for their daughters and if it means that their daughters will sleep six to a cubicle for them to have half a chance in life, then so be it. Parents will put up with mercurial principals if it means that their daughters will score As and Bs and they will endure irrational rules if these rules are a sign of the commitment of the principal to guide their children to academic success.

It is time to rethink things. Jael Muriithi has presided over two disasters. It is unconscionable that she still has a job. The board of management has supervised Ms Muriithi's disastrous leadership over the past year. It is unconscionable that its members are still in office. The least that Amina Mohammed can do is to relieve these people of their duties and send them packing. The most she could do is to make sure that they are never placed in charge of any institution of learning ever again and co-operate as fully as possible with the relevant authorities to see that they are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law for their acts of negligence. If she won't, then the parents must. It is the least they can do to ensure that if they send their daughters back to Quabbz in a week that their children will not be under the charge of the women and men who have let them down so terribly in the past.

It is alleged that one of the assailants is a teacher at the school. This is not the first teacher that has taken advantage of his position and authority over the girls to such sadistic ends when Ms Muriithi has been in charge. That alone disqualifies Ms Muriithi from being in charge of any school in future. How hands-off is her leadership style that she was unable to identify a sexual predator under her supervision? How mercurial is her leadership that vulnerable children are afraid to report to her that they are being preyed on by their teacher? Whatever else happens, she can't go back to Quabbz. If she does, if she is allowed to go back, then you will know that this world doesn't care a whit for its girls.

Forty years and a Governor, Mr Bindra

If leaders are your problem, where do they come from? Are they invaders imposed on you? Do they inherit their powers? Don’t you people go to the polls, and don’t you have the power to bring in people who know what they’re doing, who care about the public, who will play it right and not steal from the public purse? Don’t those people offer themselves for election, and what do you voters do when they appear? - Sunny Bindra, Water everywhere but none to drink! Where do Kenyans go wrong?

My introversion kept me from doing many things as a child, so much so that I was labelled "shy" by everyone. What it afforded me, though, was an opportunity to hone one of life's important skills: observation. Many introverts spend great amounts of time observing their world and those who occupy it, because it helps us navigate the noise and emotion that make up human affairs. I dedicated great time observing the most popular boys and girls and the ones among them that became rulers and those that became leaders. I applied these observations to politicians and there were minor differences here and there but, all in all, pretty much the same.

I also observed the children who followed the rulers and leaders. There were many factors that prevented them from becoming rulers or leaders, and left them, for the most part, content to be ruled or led. But the most important, I think, was the long term effect of losing battles, one after the other, especially to the rulers, while adults refused to intervene to forestall the creation of juvenile monsters, aka, bullies. There were two possible outcomes: apathy or resentment, neither of which tended to end well.

The same is the case with our political rulers. Almost all of them have bullied their way to the top, using monies they may have acquired, erm, creatively, to buy the loyalty of those whose loyalty is up for purchase, and using that loyalty as a blunt instrument in their ascent to the upper echelons of the political classes. In the early 'nineties, just as the gap between the national poverty and national ambition widened explosively, budding neo-Hitlers bought and paid for militias that became the principle weapons in winning political power. And the more innocent Kenyans became innocent victims of the violence, the more they withdrew from the political process, retreated to ethnic or familial cocoons, and allowed monsters to occupy all the ground that was available.

As Kenyans withdrew from political engagement, everything they took for granted fell apart: roads, schools, dispensaries, playgrounds, places of worship, cinemas, discotheques, football stadiums, social halls, markets, bus companies, universities, polytechnics, police stations, the railways, the national airline, the East African Industries, and so on and so forth. Nothing was spared. As more Kenyans withdrew and retreated, more bullies emerged until we find ourselves ruled by more bullies than leaders.

Nairobi City County is the harbinger of what awaits the rest of the country if all people of goodwill leave the ground open for the thieves, liars, murderers, pederasts and henchmen that have occupied the ground in Nairobi: dry taps, potholed roads, vanishing playgrounds, sewerage-soaked primary schools and a governor whose refrain is, "It was my predecessor's fault."

Mr Bindra, "these people" didn't emerge overnight, and we didn't willingly cede ground to them. For twenty-eight years, violence has been visited on the good and innocent among us. We have been abandoned by every official power. We have been fed a steady stream of lies: that family is everything; that the tribe is our protector; that when "our own" is up there, then we will be safe; that the other tribe is always out to get us; that the State will never help so long as it is not in "our" hands; that one can get away with anything so long as he has a big enough "army" standing with him. It used to be that when it came to the public purse, you knew who the crooks were. But after waiting for forty years for the crooks to be jailed and nothing happening...well, the effects are everywhere to see, aren't they.

The Board will eventually lose

The official Twitter handle of the Kenya Films and Classifications Board quotes its corporate communications manager as declaring that "Creativity has to be guided by the law". This is in relation to the protection of children from harm because of the media that they may be exposed to. This is after she retweeted what the Secretary to the KFCB had tweeted regarding the Hamilton statue standing outside the Supreme Court Building in Nairobi, "We must begin to ask hard questions and shape our future through media and art instead of opening up the space and becoming passive recipients of foreign dogma!"

"Foreign dogma" for those joining the show at this hour, is a tame euphemism for anything that the Board, its officers and employees have deemed as "aberrant" and, therefore, harmful to children.

When Uhuru Kenyatta, while attending the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in London in April, sat for a televised interview with a CNN anchor in which he made it as plain as he could without having to come out and say it explicitly that homosexuals could not expect special protections from his Government because, in his words, the "subject is of no major importance to the people and the Republic of Kenya." He would not come out and declare that homosexuals would be protected from harassment and abuse from organs of the State.

The officers of the Kenya Film Classification Board have never hidden their animus against homosexuals, never mind that they have sometimes stated that even qualified homosexuals are fit to work for the Board. On several occasions, they have declared these humans to have committed offences simply for being homosexuals and have accused them of spreading their agenda through the media including through film, music and children's animated TV shows. According to these public officers, being a homosexual is a crime and "glorifying homosexuality" is a crime. They have taken every opportunity to truck in some of the worst tropes about homosexuals, including paedophilia and sexual crimes. And because of their aversion to homosexuals, they have made it their mission to purge cinema, the airwaves and the internet of any message, no matter how benign, that they have deemed to be a glorification of homosexuality or the promotion of the homosexual agenda.

It doesn't occur to them that they have been passed by time. Many Kenyans, out of misinformation and misunderstanding, will react with disgust if someone reveals themselves to be a homosexual, but that is a shrinking number these days. More Kenyans are more exposed to new ideas about morality and ethics because of the internet and the ease with which they can travel abroad. They are more accepting of people who are different from them. And they have greater and greater appreciation for notions of individual rights such as privacy. Fewer and fewer Kenyans, outside the realms of gossip, are truly interested in the goings on in other Kenyans' bedrooms. Only the State, in the guise of the Kenya Film Classification, still has what sometimes feels like a prurient fascination with the affairs of not just homosexuals, but the entire LGBTQI+ community. This prurience is reflected in the sometimes violent language used by the chief executive officers and his director of communications.

The Board, therefore, though out of time and out of touch, will continue to argue for the criminalisation of free expression and the punishment of those who dare to say the un-sayable in film. And while the Board leads the charge to purify the nation's films, airwaves and internet, the world will come out to celebrate the filmmakers, thinkers, writers, musicians, poets, actors, dancers and artistes who dare to show us what we never even knew we had. The Board will eventually lose. I just hoe it won't be before it ruins many lives.

The end times

For the next six months or so, regardless of the political situation in the country, or the state of Government, and intended to ensure that Kenyans don't pay attention to the goings on in their own Government, or the number of new scandals that shall mushroom in the moist and dampened darkness of the bowels of the State, one phrase shall, in all its iterations, be repeated: "It's too early to campaign for 2022."

If there is one lesson we have been taught it is that "politics" and "politicking" are for an elite few. In recent weeks, as a taunt against elite members of that class in the Opposition, a Cabinet Secretary has asked those who don't have at least two hundred billion shillings to sit out the 2022 presidential race. Billion, not million. Clearly he did not get the memo.

The memo, though, is intended for the hoi polloi, the Great Unwashed. Our utility in the grand political scheme of things is reduced to two things: to act as a, usually, ethnic vote bank and for our youth, mostly, to act as cannon fodder in the when political chieftains have to measure their strength against their rivals in bloody street combat. We aren't needed in the great debates of the day nor is our input necessary for arriving at just decisions concerning inter- and intra-generational tax justice. We are to be seen, we are to vote, and we are to die for the elite if need be; but we are not to participate fully and vigorously in the making of crucial decisions about our present, past or future. In short, we have no say on who qualifies and who doesn't to be a presidential candidate in 2022, two-hundred-billion-shillings war chests notwithstanding.

And to make sure we know our place, the law of the land is being rewritten to ensure that should anyone of us step out of line, should anyone if us get the uppity sense that our opinions are important in any way, and should we then set down our opinions in writing, in newspapers, news magazines, social media accounts or online journals, we shall do so at the risk of being hauled off before pet magistrates and suffer millions of shillings in fines and years of incarceration for our temerity.

 

There are many things that they can and shall do to silence the Unwashed Masses from thinking or speaking. All of them, as history has consistently shown, will fail. Whether or not we have the right to discuss 2022 isn't up to the men making decisions about war chests. It is up to us, the rabble that we are. Soon enough this message will get through to us because if the Computer and Cybercrimes Act, 2018 is any indication, the elite already know this to be true.

A dance 22 years in the making

It used to be that no matter your station in life, rules and regulations guided most of your public acts, if not your private ones, because it was always assumed that at the very least, paying lip service to the tenets of the rule of law was a good thing. Scofflaws, even among the rich and powerful, did their best to hide their antisocial habits. It wasn't because they were ashamed but because it would simply make them a visible target for when things went awry in their affairs. As a result of this tacit compact among the people, it was easy for us all and our betters to keep up appearances - the fiction that we were in this together, that hard work always paid, that evildoers would be punished.

The lesson of the past twenty-five years, if not thirty, is that we no longer hew to this fiction. Brazen defiance of rules and regulations doesn't attract the opprobrium of right-thinking members of society because, and I can't believe I am saying this, if you can find a right-thinking member of society, you must have turned over every single rock in Kenya.

Nothing demonstrates how much we have erased the norms that made life tolerable than the predictable cases of Kenyans being killed by the dozen every time the floodgates of the heavens open and catastrophes follow, whether it is collapsing building, rivers that burst their banks or dams that collapse. The most recent, of course, is the ongoing tragedy in Nakuru County where Patel Dam on the Solai farm, failed and released millions of tonnes of water that have so far killed 40 Kenyans and displaced hundreds more.

 

The eponymous Mr Patel is said to have been a farmer in the area for at least two decades, and has built 8 other dams, one of which was the subject of Government "investigations", with an official from the Water Resources Management Authority saying that not one of Mr Patel's dams was licensed and that he had rebuffed all demands that he regularise his developments. Mr Patel is the latest in a long line of "private investors" who defied safety measures imposed on them by our laws and, more or less, did as they pleased, going back to the ill-fated Sunbeam Supermarket that collapsed and killed 35 Kenyans in 1996. Mr Patel has gotten away with his actions because in Kenya, led by the rich and powerful, it is no longer enough to defy the law: you are a hero to many when you do it brazenly and with great impunity.

It has been reduced to a fine dance, the events that are about to unfold over the Solai tragedy. Numerous Government officers will issue statements, some of remorse and some of condemnation. The media will attempt to parse what everyone is saying, without success, instead making the survivors and the families of the dead feel even worse. The Director of Public Prosecutions will direct he National Police to investigate. In a few days, certainly not more than two weeks, we will have forgotten and moved on to the next tragedy. We have perfected this dance for twenty-two years.

Tweeting Bandit is right

Stories from all over Kenya, in politics, academia, agriculture, religious, and corporate sector stories of exploitation, patronage, factionalism and outright suppression of talent paints the picture of elites who can't stand dealing with those smarter/more inventive than them. @TweetingBandit

We have witnessed many events in Kenya, some uplifting, but many dispiriting beyond compare. Despite what many of us undergo, we tend to soldier on in the hopes that hard work, luck, and access to connections, will bear out and we will lives lives of fantasy. Not many of us will succeed in our dreams, but many of us will make do. It isn't much to look forward to, but it is something and more often than not, it is something we have made for our ourselves.

It was reported in online versions of some of Kenya's dailies that Watu Wote, a Kenyan film nominated for an Oscar, was exhibited without the permission of its makers, Germany's Hamburg Media School, in Las Vegas by the Secretary and Chief Executive of the Kenya Film Classification Board. He, of course, denies everything and welcomes the aggrieved parties to sue him in order to prove their case. 

In late 2017, Sauti Sol released a video for their song, Melanin, and the KFCB head honcho thought that Kenyans did not deserve to be exposed to its contents. In recent weeks, after praising a talented Kenyan filmmaker (even though he hedged his praise with the mealy-mouthed "we still have some things to sort out"), he was very happy to announce that the Board had refused to grant Wanuri Kahiu a certificate of approval for her film, Rafiki, which was successfully exhibited at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival in France.

Having listened to him speak on several occasions, it is difficult not to see what Tweeting Bandit means when he says that our elite can't stand dealing with those who are smarter or more inventive than them. So far as we can tell, beginning with his tenure at the Nation Media Group, there is nothing lasting to his name, other than career advancement. His sojourn at the Kenya Union of Journalists wasn't marked with great achievements on behalf of the members of the Fourth Estate either, other than, of course, the one-note reminders about the role of journalists in promoting "national values". This is a trend that saw him swiftly move up the ranks in the Ministry of Information before he ended up in his current cushy sinecure.

At every step, it is hard to discern what he has built other than his sterling reputation for Christian fundamentalist thought-policing about sex and sexuality. Had he enforced the laws he was meant to enforce without inventing moralist reasons for his zealotry, we would have shrugged our shoulders and waited him out. But he often exceeds his jurisdiction, inventing constitutional fig-leafs for some of his extreme views, and daring the aggrieved (who often have done something that wouldn't receive much public support though remains lawful) to sue him and prove him wrong. In all this, one gets the impression that he is as described by Tweeting Bandit.

Kenya, in its infinite wisdom, denied Rafiki a certificate of approval. The French academy is reaping where we have sown. The Kenya Film Classification Board, its moralising religious zealot in charge, is the reason why. This is a lesson foreign filmmakers will take to heart and persuade them to carry one filming "Kenyan" locations in Johannesburg.

Throat-slitting godmen

Some of the most evil acts ever done were done by ministers of faith. Kenya has had its fair share of false prophets but it seems that ever since we asked Baba Moi aende retire, ministers of faith have picked up more bad habits than we had even imagined. It isn't enough that faith-based organisations happen to rival Government and one or two prominent families in land ownership, but that their leaders have become the epitome of greed, murder and mayhem that the political classes once were.

We are a snobbish people and classify faith-based organisatiosn based almost entirely on their antecedents. If their forebears were Western European or North American, then they are kosher. If their forebears are Black Kenyans, then they are to be distrusted on sight - unless they can persuade a North American caucasian evangelist* or a Western European canon* to sanctify their existence with an endorsement. It is why mainstream* churches such as the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Church are treated as respectable and one-pastor* churches like the Salvation Healing Ministry are seen as no more than the fly-by-night operations designed to separate the faithful from the contents of their wallets.

In recent years, though, the mainstream* churches and the fly-by-night ones have been losing out to another church altogether, helmed, if that be the right word, by charismatic ministers of faith who have taken the prosperity gospel to its logical extreme end. These ministers of faith are flashy and, despite one or two gauche flourishes, have a devoted following. They can do no wrong, not even when they live in the lap of luxury while their congregants make do with the squalor of day-to-day survival in this Kenya of the twenty-first century. They can get away with murder.

It is quite an astonishing thing to see a minister of faith with a police bodyguard and a police escort whenever he or she travels long distances. The police sweep the road ahead of the man or woman of the cloth, ensuring that the road is clear of the hoi polloi and their livestock, so that the messenger of Christ is safe and untroubled. It is less astonishing if one pays attention to how ministers of faith have infiltrated political circles, promising captive vote banks for politicians and asking for material accommodations in return, including unofficial police bodyguards and outriders.

So it comes as no surprise that even when things go tragically wrong and innocent Kenyans are killed because of the acts of these godmen, this web of patronage and influence that they are a part of swings into action, smoothening the path to judicial sanctification. It may be a few months but sometimes that is all it takes for witnesses to recant their testimony, for evidence to disappear, for prosecutors to inexplicably make catastrophic errors and, finally, for judicial officers and to make the right determination given the peculiar circumstances of the case. More often than not, though, tragic events are never investigated or prosecuted.

The inherent hypocrisies of systems founded on myths that make no sense are almost always exposed when ministers of faith behave badly. In Kenya, they have parlayed their notoriety into political power and untold wealth. And it matters not that they are mainstream*, fly-by-night or charismatic evangelists: all of them will slit your throat in a second if it meant more money, more power or both.

*It is interesting how titles conceal so much bad ish, isn't it?

Dr* Mutua's intellectual shell-game

Dr. @EAukot encouraged us not to relent on our efforts to promote moral values in Kenya through stringent content regulations. Yet, on Sunday another distinguished Kenyan lawyer Prof. Makau Mutua wrote some not so flattering piece in the Sunday Standard. @makaumutua referred to our actions as an ignominy, saying that our banning of gay content has caused Kenya international ridicule. If one was to choose between the two, whose view would you uphold in respect to the KFCB work.

 The functions of the Kenya Film Classification Board are set out in section 15 of the Films and Stage Plays Act. It states,

(1) The functions of the Board shall be to—

(a) regulate the creation, broadcasting, possession, distribution and exhibition of films by—

(i) examining every film and every poster submitted under this Act for purposes of classification;
(ii) imposing age restriction on viewership;
(iii) giving consumer advice, having due regard to the protection of women and children against sexual exploitation or degradation in cinematograph films and on the internet;

(b) license and issue certificate to distributors and exhibitors of films.

(2) The Board may from time to time prescribe—

(a) the procedure for application for licensing as a distributor or exhibitor of films; and
(b) guidelines to be applied in the classification of films.

Dr* Mutua has expressed himself on numerous occasions on the need to protect children from harmful content, using this argument as the basis for some of the classification board's edicts against music videos, insurer's billboard ads and animated shows on TV. It is also one of the arguments both he and the Board have advanced in refusing to grant a certificate for a film by a Kenyan filmmaker who has been invited to exhibit her film at the Cannes Film Festival. In Dr* Mutua's and the Board's mind, the "promotion of lesbianism" is an unlawful act and should not be portrayed on film, or if it has been portrayed on film, the film should not be exhibited because it is against Kenya's "national moral values".

The protection of Kenya's "national moral values" is not one of the statutory functions of the Kenya Film Classification Board. And when it comes to the protection of children, as set out in section 15 (1) (a) (iii) of the Act, the Board's function is to give consumer advice for the express purpose of protecting [women and] children from sexual exploitation or degradation in films or on the internet. No reasonable interpretation of this function could lead any reasonable person to conclude that the Board has the power to deny a filmmaker a certificate on the basis of the content of her film.

In fact, section 17 of the Act explicitly provides for the certification of films that are not suitable for children. If Dr* Mutua insists that children, because of their vulnerability, should not be exposed to "lesbianism", he and the Board have authority under section 17 of the Act to classify the film as "unsuitable for children" and to direct that no child should be allowed into any place where the film is being exhibited. That, in my estimation, is the correct interpretation of the Act.

Dr* Mutua has not persuaded us that his interpretation of the powers and functions of the Board under the Films and Stage Plays Act or the Kenya Information and Communications Act, 1998 is the correct one. One way of doing so would have been to prosecute persons he believes have contravened the provisions of law. There is a possible explanation why neither Dr* Mutua nor the Board have asked the Director of Public Prosecutions to do so: Dr* Mutua and his officers know that what they are doing is outside the powers or functions of the Board and they would be exposed to serious legal jeopardy if they ever appeared as witnesses against alleged offenders. So, in order to camouflage their weak stance, Dr* Mutua pits two supposedly opposed views of the Board from two respected jurists and declares that the view from the jurist who supports him is the right one. Sooner or later, Dr* Mutua's intellectual shell-game will be exposed.

*Titles, in Kenya, hide so much, don't they?

On the right side

Dr @EzekielMutua has met Dr @EAukot and @fokango of @Thirdwaykenya where discussions on partnership in pushing for media content that promotes development, equity, culture and moral values were held.

Once upon a time, it was the duty of every patriotic and right-thinking Kenyan to sing songs of praise for the President*. Indeed, Kenya had a national mass choir, art of whose job was to compose and perform songs of praise for both the President* and the ruling party, KANU. These patriotic songs epitomised the role that Government, personified in the President*, had arrogated to itself: of national moral guardian.

Back then it was routine for Government, executing the President*'s divine will, to ban songs, books, magazines, films, posters, or TV shows and stage plays, if they were suspected of being subversive. A thing was subversive because the President* deemed it so. Civil servants contorted themselves into Gordian knots when attempting to discern what was and what wasn't subversive. It mattered little what the law said; what mattered was whether or not the President* would be offended. The Kenya Film Censorship Board, the demon-seed progenitor of the Kenya Film Classification Board, was the apotheosis of this system: it lived for the opportunity to show the President* that it was the most loyal follower of the moral message of the President*. It caused many people a great deal of misery.

The constitutional order may have been upended in 2010, but the innate instincts of the factotums who divined the President*'s will have refused to die. These illiberal instincts that drive public officers to decree what is and what isn't morally wholesome and, thereby, what we can or can't read, hear, watch, listen to or experience, are alive in institutions such as the Kenya Film Classification Board and in the likes of Dr* Mutua, its eponymous Secretary and Chief Executive Officer. You can witness Dr* Mutua seeking a return to the glory days of moral uprightness by how he sometimes hysterically cavils against Coca-Cola advertisements, Cartoon Network animated shows, YouTube music videos, insurers' billboard advertisements and films submitted to the Board for classification.

Dr* Mutua, ostensibly, does all this in the name of the vulnerable and children. Dr* Mutua believes very strongly that he is called upon to act by God Himself to protect the vulnerable and children using the tools available to him, that is, the Kenya Film Classification Board and the Films an Stage Plays Act, chapter 222 of the laws of Kenya. Dr* Mutua is a zealot and he will wear our snide comments about his motives, methods and moustache like badges of honour. In his zeal to protect the vulnerable and children, Dr* Mutua will ban what he must ban and campaign for the erasing from public view of every single unwholesome billboard, video, poster, private party, debate, and film that threatens the moral safety of the vulnerable and children.

Dr* Mutua claims he is doing what he is doing for the sake of the vulnerable and the children because he knows that he cannot openly claim to be doing it for the President*. The days of civil servants swearing and demonstrating fealty to the President* are long gone. Now public officers - including the likes of Dr* Mutua - must at least pay lip service to the constitutional obligations of leadership and integrity, that is, that they are doing their thing for the people. If Dr* Mutua truly believed that he was doing what he is doing for the people, then he would listen to the people and not just a section of his choir. He would take into account that in the twenty-first century, censorship is unlikely to lead to the generation of wholesome moral content because if he had even read his history, he would know that censorship has always, painfully failed. The history of the Christian church is a history of failed attempts at censorship.

Dr* Mutua, just like his predecessors at the censorship agency, criminalise the very act of thinking, the very fact of being. They do so shamelessly. While in the past they did it violently, today they are more insidious. They use the law as a cudgel, stripping you of your dignity and, quite often, liberty and property. And it is striking that unelected politicians and their political parties re joining hands with Dr* Mutua or his Board. We Kenyans frequently get many things very wrong, but in even the most nascent opposition to Dr* Mutua and his enablers, history will judge us as having stood on the right side of things.

*Titles, in Kenya, hide so very much, don't you think?

Searching for our next Don Quixote

When Mike Sonko won the Makadara by election in 2010, he brought a style of politics to Eastlands that had never been seen before. Reuben Ndolo and Dick Wathika were cookie-cutter city politicians who had done what their predecessors had done going back to the 1960s. Mr Sonko upset their tidy little plans with his exotic motor vehicle fleet and a passionate following among the denizens of the various Mukurus that make up Makadara constituency. He had a fat campaign war chest - rumoured at around one hundred and fifty million shillings - and he wasn't afraid to deploy it in billboards, posters, flyers and a passionate - and sometimes violent - horde of unemployed youth, mostly men, who sang his praises until they were hoarse.

His tenure as the member for Makadara in the National Assembly wasn't marked with significant social developments but by his colourful personality. He thumbed his nose at political decorum in the way he spoke, behaved, and dressed. He developed an unhealthy habit of intervening in muscular ways in how Nairobi was managed by the City Council, suing it on several occasions over the management of the public transport sector or on-street parking charges. He almost always prevailed. Having established a name for himself, he took his show to the rest of the City and in 2013, he was elected as Nairobi's senator. Political seniority did not seem to temper his personality or his behaviour. In one notorious episode, he demonstrated just how far he had gotten by calling the President on the phone in the full glare of the media to ask him to intervene over a property dispute between a public institution - the Kenya Veterinary Vaccines Production Institute - and a private real estate developer. The real estate developer got a presidential stay of execution as a result of Mr Sonko's intervention.

Mr Sonko parlayed his notoriety into the governorship of Nairobi. As predicted, it has been a total disaster. It is now as plain as the nose on your face that Mr Sonko is utterly unsuited to the office of a governor of a somewhat thriving city. He has proven woefully incapable of managing the public transport sector - the very same one he had fought valiantly for merely a decade ago. He can't seem to manage a solid waste management system as shown by the ever-growing mountains of garbage in all of Nairobi's residential zones. The roads under his jurisdiction are potholed obstacle courses that remain dangerously unmarked with missing road signs or road furniture. That he he has found scapegoats for his ineptitude should surprise no one. First it was his deputy and now it is former Nairobi Central Business District Association nawabs who have become enemies of his regime.

What Mr Sonko's ardent defenders did to Mr Muriuki is unconscionable. Mr Sonko's silence over the violent abrogation of Mr Muriuki's rights speaks louder than words. The men who accosted and assaulted Mr Muriuki - over his desire to give a press conference in favour of Mr Sonko's regime - more or less received the endorsement of Mr Sonko when he failed to denounce their violent acts in his name. Mr Sonko is, for better or for worse, Nairobi City County's eternal shame. And just as we turfed out Evans Kidero from city leadership, Mr Sonko's Ides of March will soon enough be upon him and in typical Nairobi fashion, we shall heave a sigh of relief and find another Don Quixote to take on the nigh on impossible task of salvaging the reputation of the Green City in the Sun.

Fear, misunderstanding and lies

Christian Amanpour: One of the major issues...and it's a sort of holdover from colonial-Victorian...is the issue of  sexual preference in many African countries. In Kenya, to be gay, the LGBT community, is illegal. They just want to have equal rights, the same privacy and equality as all other Kenyans do. Is that something that you aspire to for your country?

Uhuru Kenyatta: I want to be very clear, uh, Christian. I will not engage in a subject that is of no...it's of no major importance to the people and the Republic of Kenya. This is not an issue as you would want to put it of human rights. This is an issue of society, of our own base as a culture, as a people, irregardless of which community you come from. This is not acceptable, this is not agreeable, this is not about Uhuru Kenyatta saying "yes" or "no". This is an issue the people of Kenya themselves, who have bestowed upon themselves a constitution, right, after several years, have clearly stated that this is not a subject that they are willing to engage in, yeah, at this time and moment. In years to come, possibly long after I am president, who knows? maybe our society will have reached the stage where those are issues that people are willing, freely and openly, to discuss, I have to be honest with you. And that is the position we have always maintained, those are the laws that we have, and those are the laws that are 100% supported by 99% of the Kenyan people, irregardless of where they come from.

It is amazing how difficult it is to discuss this subject without it getting lost in the tall weeds of Victorian-era laws, constitutional freedoms, cultural shibboleths, accusations of foreign aka USA cultural wars, and the catchall phrase, "Kenya is a Christian nation." This "subject", for those late to the party, is about whether the men and women who identify as LGBT enjoy the same rights and fundamental freedoms as those who identify as heterosexual.

From Kenya's mainstream media, you'd think that the subject isn't raging in the nation. But the unregulated interwebs have opened a space for debate on this subject, something that the President and his Government would prefer not to be happening at all because their constituency, made up of powerful faith-based organisations, powerful political leaders, and powerful foreign powers, have yet to allow equality to define public policy despite their oft-claimed "tolerance".

Kenya's Penal Code provides for the punishment for "unnatural offences" and "indecent practices between males". These provisions have long been used to invade the privacy of many individuals on the pretext of protecting the "cultural and moral values" of the country. Belying the total media blackout by the news media, an organisation called the National Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission has challenged the constitutionality of these provisions in the High Court. If its petition is successful, the organisation hopes that members of the LGBT community will stop being targeted for their sexual acts, and will access medical services without being discriminated against (and, hopefully, without being stigmatised).

Since 2010 when Kenya promulgated another constitution, the LGBT community has advanced its cause by challenging the validity of received wisdom, but it faces great challenges in reversing a century of ingrained religious, cultural and government prejudices. The President's equivocation is typical of the official Government attitude towards the LGBT community.

Many Kenyans have an almost pre-programmed visceral reaction to being informed that someone they know is gay. More often than not, it is disgust that characterises their response and colours any future dealings. Often, violence is visited on the one coming out, whether or not they had provoked violence (assuming their coming out is not provocation enough). This violence comes from many quarters: family members, intimate friends, policemen, teachers and even ministers of faith. Even today, when we know and understand so much about humans and human sexuality, it is dangerous to come out about ones sexuality.

Yet, it does not diminish us in any way to admit that regardless of our personal revulsion, LGBTs are humans and that they also deserve the full protection and benefits of our constitutional rights and freedoms. It is not an offence to be LGBT and it should not be an offence for adults to engage in consensual sexual acts. It is wrong to set aside public resources for the express purpose of hounding adults engaged in consensual sexual acts simply because they go against an arbitrary moral code that is founded on fear, misunderstanding and lies.

Social media planning

The Governor of Nairobi City County is a failure. His predecessor was a failure. Their predecessors in the City Council of Nairobi were failures. Their failures are reflected in the impossible-to-manage mountains of garbage, the impossible-to-repair potholes, the death-dealing public transport sector, and the rising homelessness that leads to the expansion of the now-permanent "informal settlements". Nairobi's governments have been failing for as long as we can remember. The current Governor, promises and social media campaigns notwithstanding, is not its saviour. He is just another politician with a slick tongue, fate wallets and the imagination of a stone.

It wouldn't be so bad if the Governor at least understood what governing was about. He does not. His social media accounts are a snapshot of the capriciousness of his management style and the total lack of an understanding of planning as a tool of effective management. His government's executive committee is made up of insider-dealers and well-connected civil society activists whose understanding of planning is limited to private for-profit business affairs or limited social welfare campaigns financed from foreign sources. None of them has experience managing an unruly city like Nairobi is, with a deficit-plagued budget, an ungrateful population, and structural problems that have metastacised over decades.

Niairobi's City Fathers are led by the Governor. In order for his leadership to bear fruit for the residents of the city, he must pay close attention to the fundamentals of planning. It isn't enough for him to hire the right people to undertake the planning function for him, he must understand what the planning is intended to do, how it will do it, how much it will cost, and how long it will take. He must understand the need to prioritise specific planning needs over others, and how to ameliorate the suffering of millions of his residents while keeping costs down, improving revenue collection, attracting investors (both large and small), providing better social services and all this while improving the safety of his residents. Gimmicks like pothole-repairing equipment or militias masquerading as "free" water providers are not it.

So long as the Governor has a badly-resourced, badly-managed, badly-led planning department, his failures will continue to exacerbate our suffering. Potholes will mushroom. Flooded roads will continue to plague even "international standard" highways. Sewers will continue to block and drains will continue to overflow. I am afraid, though, that this Governor is not smart enough to know that he doesn't know how to govern. I am afraid that so long as he is a social media champion poster, he never will.

Raising #IfikieWazazi kids

Growing up in the Social Media Age is fraught with risk. The cost of electronic devices has fallen dramatically since 2002, but it is the cost of accessing the internet and, with it, social media platforms that has fallen the farthest. Children and adolescents today have access to powerful devices and a plethora of platforms with which to access those platforms. We are all coming to terms with what this means for privacy and safety.

Facebook and the SCL Group have rammed home that nothing is ever truly private on the internet - and that deleting anything on the internet doesn't mean that it truly goes away. For this reason, individuals must learn how to manage the information they post online. The most vulnerable among us are children and adolescents who, in the cocoons of their families, homes, schools or faith-based communities, rarely have the maturity to appreciate the implications of sharing personal information on online platforms or with online communities.

One of the fastest growing and insidious communities is that which trades and traffics in child pornography. It takes advantage of the relative anonymity of online communities or platforms to infiltrate those which are populated by children and adolescents and takes advantage of the usually lax supervision of these communities and platforms to groom children for terrible things. 

In Kenya, over the past day or so, the hashtag #IfikieWazazi has trended on Twitter. It is one of the starkest reminders that we must do more to not only understand what social media is capable of doing but also how to assist and guide our children in this environment. It used to be that children and adolescents learnt about trust and risk in the company of other children and adolescents by interacting in real life while playing or attending school or performing religious activities. This was done out in the open under the watchful eyes of parents, teachers or ministers of faith. The adage, "It takes a village to raise a child" was apposite as your local community, in one way or the other, played a role in your upbringing -- but only because it was relatively small and we knew most of the people in it.

The situation in online communities is not the same. Predators can and do hide among the majority of generally passive members of online communities, and they continually get more sophisticated in using these communities and online tools to groom children for insidious ends, or take advantage of children's naivete when they share more than is safe for them to share. The moralists pushing the #IfikieWazazi hashtag have almost certainly been infiltrated by child pornographers whose only mission is to spread far and wide sexualised images of children and adolescents. Those children's and adolescents' reputations are at risk as are their physical and mental well-being.

It has always been the role of parents to teach their children how to live in the world and how to protect themselves from risk. #IfikieWazazi shows how much more important this role is today. Parents and their children must have honest discussions about the freedoms children enjoy online and the risks they face because of those freedoms. We must not condemn children for making mistakes; we must teach them that no matter how benign an error might seem, it will always bear consequences. Some may be mild while other might harm them physically, emotionally, mentally and socially. We must show them how to live in a world where you can see and meet other people - and one where the people you interact with may not actually be people at all. It is time for parenting to take into account that the internet is one more environment that must be managed in order to raise string, intelligent and capable children.

No free lunch

There are no free lunches. 

Unless you own them, construction material must be paid for in one form or another: building stones, sand, cement, steel bars, lumber, corrugated iron sheets, interior fixtures, door and window frames, windows and doors, floor tiles, ceiling boards, plumbing, electrical conduits, and the bric-a-brac that go into the construction of a house. Even when you own a piece of land and have managed to accumulate these things, you will spend a goodly sum to build a house. 

It is not free.

Kenya has a large population of homeless people. They can neither afford to own nor rent a house. For a majority of the homeless, their homelessness is involuntary. In order for Government to house them, the housing will be paid for out of the national revenue. Should Government take responsibility for housing the homeless? Should Government take the responsibility of housing Kenyans generally?

A Kenyan politician

Individual parliamentarians have served their constituents well. Peter Kenneth led the Gatanga CDF committee to great heights in the 9th Parliament, so much so that he parlayed his CDF record into a damp squib of a presidential run. Ken Okoth has inspired the Kibra CDF committee to build the schools that Matiangi's and Amina Mohammed's education ministry isn't interested in building. Otiende Amollo has taken the plight of widows in his rural Rarieda so much to heart that he has successfully rallied friends and well-wishers to come together to build modest homes for some of them and to organise a few extra funds or the widows to start businesses with. This has earned him praise in some quarters, scorn in others, and confusion in different ones.

Kenyan commentators tend to obsess with labels and what those labels mean. For elected representatives, they insist that parliamentarians should only do what the Constitution says that they should: represent the interests of their constituents in Parliament; make legislation; and oversee the executive and judicial branches. Kenya is impossible to so neatly pigeonhole.

The broad outlines of public policies are to be seen in the laws that Parliament and county assemblies pass each year but that is not how policies are implemented, if they are implemented at all. Take affordable housing as a policy objective of Government and the Housing Act, Chapter 117 of the Laws of Kenya, is one of the instruments for the achievement of that policy goals, especially sections 6 and 7 dealing with the Housing Fund. Obviously, what the law intended and what the law has achieved have a great deal of light between them. 

 

Mr Amollo's efforts for the widows in his constituency is a harsh admission that he may perform his three official roles with great energy, but there are no guarantees that he or his colleagues will not be called to intervene directly on behalf of their constituents. This is to say that Mr Amollo is not necessarily wrong for doing what he is doing in Rarieda even if sometimes it may appear that he is less that 110% committed to parliamentary business.

Kenya's parliamentary tradition, though founded on those of the British system, are singular in their qualities. The majority party and the opposition only work in concert when it is an issue that affects the personal welfare of their members: salaries and remunerations, medical benefits, committee memberships, domestic aka Mombasa and foreign junkets. But hen it comes to major political and policy decisions, the ruling party rules alone while he opposition stares from the sidelines because, in this day and age, major political or policy decisions are code words for tender opportunities in which the interests of the people rarely form a major part of the ration for the decisions. Mr Amollo may or may not wish to reverse this odious trend; but in taking an active role in ameliorating the suffering of widows in Rarieda, I don't think he can be faulted for his charitable works at the expense of parliamentary business.

Since his appointment as a member of the Committee of Experts, Mr Amollo's public service has been largely flawless. He has thoughtfully considered what is best for the peoples of Kenya and shared his views with us in a language that was free from the usual histrionics of some of his more excitable colleagues. He may not have sponsored any legislative proposals yet but since law-making is not an individual sport, this is not a black mark on his record. Mr Amollo is a Kenyan politician in a Kenyan parliamentary tradition. He is doing the best he can in those circumstances. If the good people of Rarieda decide that his do-gooding is not for them, they can either recall him before the end of his term or elect someone else come the next general election.