RE: A LEISURELY TREK THROUGH .KE'S DOMESTICS

[Mfangano]

AWAY WITH THAT SCUMBAG OF A SONKO!


''Larry Flint versus the people: 'if the law can protect a scumbag like me, it will surely
protect all thee goodly people!' –--If you remember his parting shot in that movie.


‘First They Came’ by Pastor  Martin Neimöller is a powerful poem that explores the nature of responsibility in times of war and persecution. But natural born fence sitters need not worry. They have no faculty for a guilt complex.

FIRST THEY CAME

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—  Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not  speak out — Because I was not a trade
unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out —  Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.


German Lutheran  pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984).

Of them all, one can say Mike  Sonko is the genuine Hustler. He hustled his way up from Matatu tout,  matatu owner, up to the Nairobi governorship. He didn't loot public funds on his way up. He hasn't sold Kenyans poisonous sugar,  poisonous maize nor substandard and laced drugs like the ones certified by the National Lab and bureau of standards. Yake ilikuwa KAUNGA SAFI, better quality than his Kiambu counterpart's  ! If Sonko is charged with terrorism, those who imported, sold and distributed cancerous sugar and contaminated maize, should and will be –--if the hustlers win the presidency---- charged with attempted mass murder, say, conspiracy to visit genocide upon the Kenyan people in  toto.


Sonko's victimisation and  political liquidation by the establishment, is therefore a validation of the thesis of Dr. William Ruto, that the Dynasties are out to  destroy the Hustlers, or put another way, there is a life and death struggle between the two opposing camps.


Mike Sonko, a thing from the  sewer, tressapssed to the high table of the nobility. He gate crushed the party of the aristocracy and dynasties. He has to be shown his  place with singular ruthlessness. He has to be confined to the  cellars, like the twin to the King of France, the alleged author of  the legend of the man in the iron mask.

In cutting down Sonko and continuing to chop him to bits, the dynasts ferociously profess their social superiority. They uphold not their class solidarity, but lineage exclusivity therein. It is the fallacy of all inbreeding. They are bred to rule, the rest are chaff; they are bred to monopolise
state power, they are bred to abuse power and get away with it. Any lowly mortal, thing of inferior birth who stands in their way, like Mbuvi Sonko who CHEWED both their blue-eyed boys, Peter Kenneth and Patrick Igathe, to dust, must face the wrath of injured royalty. It is the socio pathological ruthlessness of a restoration and, in part, a bloody warning at William Ruto, The pretender Hustler King and challenger It is also meant to intimidate  and disperse his hustler entourage; ultimately to isolate him and politically make it easier to destroy him.

 This, Ruto would, as a warrior, instinctively recognise.


When the laws of the land are  mobilised in a one-sided show like has befallen the likes of Mbuvi Sonko and Miguna Miguna, it raises a fearsome prospect. That arbitrariness can be returned in kind. If the Hustlers win, then in a  winner takes all euphoria, it could easily be payback day at the address of the dynasts. Pretexts galore.

A question of vindu  vichenjanga. Booms can boomerang.

NO WAY BACK

It is for this reason that the fearful dynasties can leave nothing to chance, much less in the hands of the swaysome people, aka the electorate. The next election, if
Ruto makes it to the ballot box, must be rigged to his disadvantage. A vengeful Ruto holding the levers of power, will surely cut down the dynasties with a touch of delighted malice. We, thinking of that poem, who are unmoved by Sonko's tears today, will in the same way be unmoved by the tears of the dynasts tomorrow as they face the one-sided music. I told you so, we will fence-sit with amused hearts.

The last way for the dynasties to avert that possibility is to rig the next election, so to be absolutely sure Ruto looses.  And, farce, the repetition of history! let the Hustlers crown their Hustler president at Uhuru Park –---if they dare!

Muiga's legacy, is as  shambolic as his overfat gait!

[audacityofhope]

AWAY WITH THAT SCUMBAG OF A SONKO!


''Larry Flint versus the people: 'if the law can protect a scumbag like me, it will surely
protect all thee goodly people!' –--If you remember his parting shot in that movie.


‘First They Came’ by Pastor  Martin Neimöller is a powerful poem that explores the nature of responsibility in times of war and persecution. But natural born fence sitters need not worry. They have no faculty for a guilt complex.

FIRST THEY CAME

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—  Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not  speak out — Because I was not a trade
unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out —  Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.


German Lutheran  pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984).

Of them all, one can say Mike  Sonko is the genuine Hustler. He hustled his way up from Matatu tout,  matatu owner, up to the Nairobi governorship. He didn't loot public funds on his way up. He hasn't sold Kenyans poisonous sugar,  poisonous maize nor substandard and laced drugs like the ones certified by the National Lab and bureau of standards. Yake ilikuwa KAUNGA SAFI, better quality than his Kiambu counterpart's  ! If Sonko is charged with terrorism, those who imported, sold and distributed cancerous sugar and contaminated maize, should and will be –--if the hustlers win the presidency---- charged with attempted mass murder, say, conspiracy to visit genocide upon the Kenyan people in  toto.


Sonko's victimisation and  political liquidation by the establishment, is therefore a validation of the thesis of Dr. William Ruto, that the Dynasties are out to  destroy the Hustlers, or put another way, there is a life and death struggle between the two opposing camps.


Mike Sonko, a thing from the  sewer, tressapssed to the high table of the nobility. He gate crushed the party of the aristocracy and dynasties. He has to be shown his  place with singular ruthlessness. He has to be confined to the  cellars, like the twin to the King of France, the alleged author of  the legend of the man in the iron mask.

In cutting down Sonko and continuing to chop him to bits, the dynasts ferociously profess their social superiority. They uphold not their class solidarity, but lineage exclusivity therein. It is the fallacy of all inbreeding. They are bred to rule, the rest are chaff; they are bred to monopolise
state power, they are bred to abuse power and get away with it. Any lowly mortal, thing of inferior birth who stands in their way, like Mbuvi Sonko who CHEWED both their blue-eyed boys, Peter Kenneth and Patrick Igathe, to dust, must face the wrath of injured royalty. It is the socio pathological ruthlessness of a restoration and, in part, a bloody warning at William Ruto, The pretender Hustler King and challenger It is also meant to intimidate  and disperse his hustler entourage; ultimately to isolate him and politically make it easier to destroy him.

 This, Ruto would, as a warrior, instinctively recognise.


When the laws of the land are  mobilised in a one-sided show like has befallen the likes of Mbuvi Sonko and Miguna Miguna, it raises a fearsome prospect. That arbitrariness can be returned in kind. If the Hustlers win, then in a  winner takes all euphoria, it could easily be payback day at the address of the dynasts. Pretexts galore.

A question of vindu  vichenjanga. Booms can boomerang.

NO WAY BACK

It is for this reason that the fearful dynasties can leave nothing to chance, much less in the hands of the swaysome people, aka the electorate. The next election, if
Ruto makes it to the ballot box, must be rigged to his disadvantage. A vengeful Ruto holding the levers of power, will surely cut down the dynasties with a touch of delighted malice. We, thinking of that poem, who are unmoved by Sonko's tears today, will in the same way be unmoved by the tears of the dynasts tomorrow as they face the one-sided music. I told you so, we will fence-sit with amused hearts.

The last way for the dynasties to avert that possibility is to rig the next election, so to be absolutely sure Ruto looses.  And, farce, the repetition of history! let the Hustlers crown their Hustler president at Uhuru Park –---if they dare!

Muiga's legacy, is as  shambolic as his overfat gait!

I stopped reading where, without bating an eyelid and shamelessly highlighting in red you typed "He didn't loot public funds on his way up". In Kenyan politics the default is all politicians are thieves until proved innocent. Not even a Governor's salary can buy all this gold

[Nowayhaha]

Seem you didnt get the peotic play of words by mfangano, he started by calling Sonko a " real hustler" to the "yake ilikuwa kaUnga Safi"
In U.S. this was a word which transformed from hassle in the true meaning to hustler  a person who uses all means to try and make it or get it. In the ghettos of 80s during the crack epidemic a hustler mean a crack dealer.

In Mombasa Drugs are called Unga. What he is try to drive is that Sonko made it by dealing in drugs probably due to The American ambasadoe report tabled in parliament which mentioned Kabogo, Joho, Mwau as dealers. However fact is Sonko made his money by selling beach plots in Kwale, the drug dealer from coast is well known.

AWAY WITH THAT SCUMBAG OF A SONKO!


''Larry Flint versus the people: 'if the law can protect a scumbag like me, it will surely
protect all thee goodly people!' –--If you remember his parting shot in that movie.


‘First They Came’ by Pastor  Martin Neimöller is a powerful poem that explores the nature of responsibility in times of war and persecution. But natural born fence sitters need not worry. They have no faculty for a guilt complex.

FIRST THEY CAME

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—  Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not  speak out — Because I was not a trade
unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out —  Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.


German Lutheran  pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984).

Of them all, one can say Mike  Sonko is the genuine Hustler. He hustled his way up from Matatu tout,  matatu owner, up to the Nairobi governorship. He didn't loot public funds on his way up. He hasn't sold Kenyans poisonous sugar,  poisonous maize nor substandard and laced drugs like the ones certified by the National Lab and bureau of standards. Yake ilikuwa KAUNGA SAFI, better quality than his Kiambu counterpart's  ! If Sonko is charged with terrorism, those who imported, sold and distributed cancerous sugar and contaminated maize, should and will be –--if the hustlers win the presidency---- charged with attempted mass murder, say, conspiracy to visit genocide upon the Kenyan people in  toto.


Sonko's victimisation and  political liquidation by the establishment, is therefore a validation of the thesis of Dr. William Ruto, that the Dynasties are out to  destroy the Hustlers, or put another way, there is a life and death struggle between the two opposing camps.


Mike Sonko, a thing from the  sewer, tressapssed to the high table of the nobility. He gate crushed the party of the aristocracy and dynasties. He has to be shown his  place with singular ruthlessness. He has to be confined to the  cellars, like the twin to the King of France, the alleged author of  the legend of the man in the iron mask.

In cutting down Sonko and continuing to chop him to bits, the dynasts ferociously profess their social superiority. They uphold not their class solidarity, but lineage exclusivity therein. It is the fallacy of all inbreeding. They are bred to rule, the rest are chaff; they are bred to monopolise
state power, they are bred to abuse power and get away with it. Any lowly mortal, thing of inferior birth who stands in their way, like Mbuvi Sonko who CHEWED both their blue-eyed boys, Peter Kenneth and Patrick Igathe, to dust, must face the wrath of injured royalty. It is the socio pathological ruthlessness of a restoration and, in part, a bloody warning at William Ruto, The pretender Hustler King and challenger It is also meant to intimidate  and disperse his hustler entourage; ultimately to isolate him and politically make it easier to destroy him.

 This, Ruto would, as a warrior, instinctively recognise.


When the laws of the land are  mobilised in a one-sided show like has befallen the likes of Mbuvi Sonko and Miguna Miguna, it raises a fearsome prospect. That arbitrariness can be returned in kind. If the Hustlers win, then in a  winner takes all euphoria, it could easily be payback day at the address of the dynasts. Pretexts galore.

A question of vindu  vichenjanga. Booms can boomerang.

NO WAY BACK

It is for this reason that the fearful dynasties can leave nothing to chance, much less in the hands of the swaysome people, aka the electorate. The next election, if
Ruto makes it to the ballot box, must be rigged to his disadvantage. A vengeful Ruto holding the levers of power, will surely cut down the dynasties with a touch of delighted malice. We, thinking of that poem, who are unmoved by Sonko's tears today, will in the same way be unmoved by the tears of the dynasts tomorrow as they face the one-sided music. I told you so, we will fence-sit with amused hearts.

The last way for the dynasties to avert that possibility is to rig the next election, so to be absolutely sure Ruto looses.  And, farce, the repetition of history! let the Hustlers crown their Hustler president at Uhuru Park –---if they dare!

Muiga's legacy, is as  shambolic as his overfat gait!

I stopped reading where, without bating an eyelid and shamelessly highlighting in red you typed "He didn't loot public funds on his way up". In Kenyan politics the default is all politicians are thieves until proved innocent. Not even a Governor's salary can buy all this gold

[Mfangano]

OF FALSE STARTS AND DECORATED TOY BOYS!


It is always instructive to read, understand and deconstruct the colonial play-book. Colonialism defrauds the people of their say in public afffairs; colonialism defrauds the people of their wealth and fair fruits of their labour, but worst, colonialism defrauds the people of their full potential, of productivity. Colonialism is therefore a very minimalistic definition of the human condition, yeah, the narrowest of horizons.

Such systems are easily doomed. But soldier on, they will give it their best shots.

At every venture, as the tide of African nationalism steadily rose in the British holding called Kenya (and the affiliated East African colony in total), the English Home Office and her appendage, the local white settler class, engaged in a series of gimmicks and stratagem's to hoodwink and outwit the increasingly impatient aspirations of the natives.

Hold this in mind as we proceed. Do file it in the category of proverbial African sayings, like: when you see toads jump in broad daylight, know thee ....

JUDE NJOMO RINGS A BELL!

NAIROBI, Kenya Feb. 20 2021 - The Parliamentary Caucus on Economy and Business has proposed a raft of radical reforms to inject fiscal discipline into the national budgeting process and to ensure the national debt remains at sustainable levels.
Speaking during the a two-day stakeholders' engagement forum in Mombasa County, the Parliamentary Caucus which is chaired by Kiambu Town MP Jude Njomo emphasised on the need to enhance the independence of the National Debt Office and the strengthening of budget implementation monitoring and evaluation framework. 

There is one sum one never hears from the top: push down graft to less than two percent, from the current 30-35%. Hmmm

To stay in business, the colonists tried it all; divide and rule they did; religion and art they did; and what have you they did too, all to maintain their grip on the African majority population, subjugated. Recent declassifications of secret strategy's reveal even a more absurd if sinister preparedness. But they are all symptomatic of the ever desperate nature of institutionalised oppression, in the face of a looming rebellion by the majority.
The colonial authorities contracted many rogue anthropologists; they investigated the use of rituals and witchcraft to scare off demands for black self-rule! They used prepared Waganga's as INFLUENCERS. In a particularly comical session, Shaman's were induced to proclaim the ancestors had spoken to them, instructing them the future of the African was best left in the hands of the --godsent-- Whiteman, wherefore Obedience to the will of the Colonist was both the word of God and the will of the Ancestors. The establishment churches had of course, long from the beginning, been co-opted to inculcating surrender to the (white) master race. --This ideological dispensation was at the base of the development of the African Inland Churches. These were the first to reclaim spiritual autonomy.

Another key canon in the colonial play-book of dominance, was keeping Africans ignorant and unskilled. This was done by denial of schooling except for a select few sons of collaborator chiefs. The rest and hordes was being groomed for menial tasks, dare I say hassling, which desired no noteworthy intellectual exertion nor any particularly sophisticated artisanship. In apartheid South Africa, this became known as Bantustan education. Functional illiteracy. Products would be good for the domestics ... well  (like that bad labour joke in Kenya about what the goodly people of Ingoo like Atwoli, Weta, Mudavadi, Oparanya, Kituyi, Khalwale ... are good for!)

TOWARD AN EDUCATIONAL REFORM?

If one compares the achievement of the recently risen Asian tigers ---Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia etc, one will notice the primacy of the educational reform. For Taiwan to emerge as the smart-microchip epicentre of the computer world, for Samsung to emerge as the smartest company of the world's consumer electronics, for North Korea to gatecrush into the nuclear club in isolation, for Malaysia to declass IMF and World Bank economists into functional illiterates, and for Singapore to chart its meteoric path, the first rule in classical economics was obeyed. Labour was invested with massive relevant skills to sky-rocket its abilities and productivity. Technical education was popularised, made available to all, all talents harnest and deployed to the best and yes, common sense prevailed. (Common sense is the limitation of graft, and where found, ruthless punishment. The likes of Ruto would hang for Weston Landgrab, Weta for Turkana oil blocks, and for the SGR land inflated rates, half the Mpigs would be beheaded!)

Taiwan manufacturer TSMC now controls 51% of global chip market

TSMC is one of only two companies in the world that can produce chips with the 5nm architecture


Over the past year, [url-https://asiatimes.com/2020/08/why-taiwan-is-at-the-heart-of-a-microchip-struggle/]Taiwan has taken[/url] a lead in the race to build thinner, faster and more powerful chips, or semiconductors. Its fastest chips are the critical building blocks of rapidly evolving digital industries like artificial intelligence and high-speed computing. The thinnest chips will be powering the coming "Internet of things," in which homes, cars, appliances and even clothes will connect to smartphones and voice-activated speakers over 5G networks.

As of now, any country looking to dominate the digital future has to buy these superfast, ultrathin chips from either Taiwan or South Korea. And Taiwan has the edge in both technology and market power. It is a small island of just 24 million people, but it is at the center of the battle for global technological supremacy.

If you have not been to the neighbouring village, you will be excused for the delusion the best cooks and the most beautiful ladies are all found in your village.

I am thinking of stellar inaptitude of the likes of Bi Amina, Fred Matiang'i and now Goerge Magoha, as excusable infatilism. These are some of the names lately ---- as bureaucratic or politico-technocratic heads----- found wandering like headless chicken at the Kenyan department of education. One with the sharps recognises instinctively the BANTUSTAN MODEL in place here. That is why our children are burning them schools.  They are unreformed Bantustan sh!t pits, they are sharpening skills no one going places needs. Kenya is going nowhere, anytime soon. It is a stagnant pool. We are yet to go back to basics: a roaring educational system, turbo-charged skills for road masters to run double-digit economic paces. Such a system will mobilise the mass talents of labour power in our people and, charge and organised, unleash their all the process of grabbing the future for the nation, and the coming generations.

The cornered colonial system, in a last ditch attempt, settled on the bribery of the anointed, thoroughly corrupted elite. They backed them up by state machinery, military firepower and some economic subsidy. It was outright dictatorship ---the type inevitable also after one rigs elections! As for Kenya (unlike the Rhodesians and South African whites), the settlers went bankrupt and into recievership by the colonial office in London. London took over the running of the economy (debt) but soon realised it was a bottomless pit and thus began the preparation for more native participation, independence so called.

The issue of money and debt, must therefore take place of pride in any political analysis. Independence can be a word, DEBT isn't. Debt is like hunger or thirst; when they strike, even the toughest mental discipline can't ignore the pangs thereof in the belly or throat.

Ukur Yattani is tanking, and sinking, like a Kenyan white settler in the 1950's. But he smiles like an innocent baby, totally innocent of the ways, and evils of the worlds of them teary-eyed, sympathetic crocodiles

HALF YEAR DEBT RELIEF FOR KENYA

NAIROBI, Kenya, Jan 20- China has offered Kenya a debt break of Sh27 billion that was due for payment between January and June 2021.
National Treasury Cabinet Secretary Ukur Yattani said following talks with authorities in Beijing, Kenya will be required to pay the debt later.

China in Talks With Kenya for Debt Relief After Paris Club Deal

China is in talks with Kenya on a debt-service suspension deal, its embassy in Nairobi said, days after the Paris Club agreed to delay $300 million in payments by the East African nation.


Paris Club Delays $300 Million of Kenya Debt-Service Dues

China Lenders Freeze $2.1 Billion Debt Payments for Poor Nations

Kenya applied for waivers under the DSSI framework for about 40.6 billion shillings ($368.7 million) due in the first half of this year.
Chinese loans comprised 21% of Kenya's external debt, compared with the World Bank's 25% at the end of June 2020, according to a National Treasury report.

Sovereign bondholders held another 19%, commercial banks 11% and the African Development Bank 7.5%.

That is the mess our educational system is not producing the financial engineers to arrest. --KEEP!

ENTER THE BBI

The magic wand in town is of course the Building Bridges Initiative. The wishful thinking embeded therein is stupendous. With one year to go, Uhuru Kenyatta, a totally failed president, imagines he has, at long last, found statement of mission and legacy definition. What a sorry backhole. On the other side of the handshake is his elder brother, Amollo Tinga, the old soldier fading fast but incapable of graceful retirement. With the vicious young bull calling their bluff with every crow in the arena, the two princess from the leading Gikuyu and Luo royal houses have opted to spend the limited cash on bribery and the chicanery of short-term political fixes. MCA's and Parliamentarians have been bribed with the so-called car-loans, and god knows who else with the massive loots that plague the treasury and Tendersland.

Remember, even as Yattani finds the billions to bribe overrated and overpaid politicians, the health system all but collapsed in the pandemic period, with health workers on strike all over the place ---going for months without salaries. Not to mention the unavailability of protective gear, with fatal results.

Kenya loses senior surgeon Daniel Alushula to COVID-19

By Citizen Reporter For Citizen Digital

The Kenyan medical fraternity has lost another doctor Daniel Alushula to COVID-19.

Also Read: Doreen Lugaliki becomes first Kenyan doctor to succumb to COVID-19

According to the Kenya Medical Practitioners and Dentists Union (KMPDU), Dr. Alushula  worked as a senior surgeon in Busia County.
"The medical profession is mourning the death of a Senior Orthopedic Surgeon Dr Daniel Alushula due to COVID-19 complications. The deceased was working at Busia County Referral Hospital," KMPDU said on Twitter.

Also Read: Homa Bay nurse dies of COVID-19 complications a week after giving birth

Kenya lost its first doctor to COVID-19 in July; Dr. Doreen Adisa Lugaliki died four days after being admitted to hospital.
Another doctor, Dr. Yussuf Abdi who worked as a senior public health officer in Wajir County succumbed to COVID-19 during the same month.
In early August, a nurse in Homabay also passed away after battling coronavirus in an Intensive Care Unit.
Dr. Ndambuki Mboloi, a senior pulmonologist, passed away on August 13.

Dr. Stephen Mogusu succumbs to COVID-19 complications

By Citizen Reporter For Citizen Digital

 Published on:  December 7, 2020

Doctors also complain about not receiving adequate personal protective gear. The union says all their requests are met with silence.

As of November 4, Kenya had lost 32 medical workers to COVID-19, with 10 of them succumbing to the disease within two weeks.
Medics who died from coronavirus in November include Dr. Hudson Alumera (periodontal surgeon); Prof. A J O Were (nephrologist) and Dr. Nira Patel (dental surgeon).

 AND, ORDERS ARE ORDERS!


SRC chairperson Lyn Cherop Mengich during a press conference on MPs' house allowances on May 15, 2019.

THE BBI BRIBE?

Public outcry has greeted the move by the Salaries and Remuneration Commission to approve car grants for MCAs.
On Tuesday, SRC chairperson Lynn Mengich, in a memo to Council of Governors chairman Martin Wambora, gave counties the greenlight to process Sh4.5 billion for the MCAs and assembly speakers.

But opinion leaders criticised the SRC for giving in to President Uhuru Kenyatta's order to approve the cash as part of the goodies lined up for MCAs to pass the Constitution of Kenya (Amendment) Bill, 2020.

The move will see each of the 2,237 MCAs get Sh2 million. It is seen as a slap in the face of taxpayers.

Former Mandera Senator Billow Kerrow said the SRC is now under state capture and is being used to facilitate the passage of the bill in the 47 assemblies.

It is a false start, whatever the BBI is meant to achieve. It gets into play by an act of political fraud and financial bribery to a select group of mercenary, would-be public representatives. If that is the way to bring a new age of enlightenment to your country, be sure you are headed for more dark. And light will always call the bluff of darkness. We are at a sorry place. But luckily, we are infants with minders who wont let us hurt ourselves too badly.

That is one of the benefits of being a neo-colony located at a strategic place! You can't always be left to your own stupid self to be a nuisance to everybody. And so SANTA CLAUS always comes with the aforementioned DEBT RELIEFS!

Ukur Yattani, David Rotich, Patrick Njoroge or whoever on the Kenya shilling: you thought they were anything more than toy boys?

[Mfangano]

THE VIRTUES OF DIFFUSED POWER

Who is the most powerful man in Kenya?

That this question can not be answered without a doubt in a second, illustrates just how fluid power is in this republic of ours. A plus if I have to confess.

Officially, we know who the commander in chief is. We know the sworn man, upon whose hands, legally, the most power is invested. His name is probably Ouru Kenyatta; but we all remember how in the thick of the fight  against corruption, a war he himself had declared, he broke down in public wailing inconsolable: 'MNATAKA NIFANYE NINI, JAMEMI! Sina uwezo yee!'

He was not joking of course. Honest baby. Neither was he cashing time, being a drama queen like an unhinged Nero of a burning Rome.

Nay, the son of Jomo was telling it as it was, and still is: he is in office but not in power.

Again, recently, in a transparent warning to his deputy who has gone rogue, Muigai warned us against being fooled to mistake a rain-beaten lion for an  emasculated pussycat; alas, his bluff was immediately called by the ambitious and decided.

Consequently we muddle on as before. The president of the hidden lion traits has been forced to parade a wasted crew as  his public face of BBI marshals. The Super Seven!

It is a noteworthy photo, a tell-all. The aces!

President Uhuru Kenyatta with party leaders Gideon Moi (Kanu), Musalia Mudavadi (ANC), Kalonzo Musyoka (Wiper), Raila Odinga (ODM), Charity Ngilu (Narc) and Moses Wetang'ula (Ford Kenya) during a joint press briefing at State House, Nairobi, on Thursday. [PSCU] [/i]

Intense pressure is mounting on the 'Super Seven' to strike a delicate balance in facilitating passage of the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) while also maintaining a united front good enough to form a post-referendum government.

They do not look like the future. These Super Marshalls of the field are all late. They are fatigued crap. Even for foreign masters that be, they are too limpy horses.

And even if the (BBI) boat have to rowed with the available oars, the bickering cowardly trio of Weta, Kalo and Mudavadi, cut more a picture of a Quixotic high command than that of a doer-gang. They are a scarecrow everybody immediately recognises to be below, far below the fear threshold of The Hustler captain. Win or loose by-elections in their countryside wards, everyone recognises in them the cowards of the country. In deed, the country didn't need Raila to remind her, though the fading ODM captain did, with his depressed body language. --When you are going to battle against William the Conqueror and you are parading known cowards in your corner, you have reason to be forlorn.

The fabled deep state, and the accompanying most powerful person in Kenya if ever there can be one, can not be that desperate, nor ridiculous enough to offer the sordid past as the bright future. That would be the farce before the national tragedy.

Thus, meseems, every boy and girl understands there has to be a deeper plan, from the deep state. It can't be the comedy of fronting Gideon Moi to read the riot order to Ruto, with Madam Ngilu being charitable beside him, with the gender thing. The picture above is correctly said, dregs of lost futures. They are (political) corpses stirring in a satirical dance of death. You wonder what their going rates are, Yuan or Dollar auction.

Just to underscore once again how far from power Uhuru Kenyatta is, we visit the KEMSA scandals. Interesting details of how rotten the deep state itself is, were revealed by a lacklustre questioning in parliament. Before the relevant committee were some of the lead actors in the ... scandal of the imported poisonous sugar? ...  Arror and Kimwarer dam scandals? Eurobond or KEMSA covid heists? And talking of the relevant committee, remember (the former Mulembe star) Ababu Namwamba was here, during the NYS series of heists presided over by Anne Waimumbi, decades ago in another life!

UNEARTHING SCANDAL

Kemsa scandal: Companies registrar declines to name bosses of firm linked to Murathe

Public Investments Committee to summon the registrar for setting aside request for identities of Kilig directors
In Summary

• PIC chairman Abdulswamad Nassir (Mvita MP) said Parliament wrote to the registrar for details of all the companies mentioned in the probe.
• The committee sought the details, specifically their ownership as of April when most of the firms were given a commitment letter to supply PPEs to Kemsa.
-------------------
Economy

Ex-EACC boss entangled in Kemsa scandal

Thursday February 18 2021

Former anti-graft agency boss Halakhe Waqo has been summoned by Parliament to explain his links with a company that was awarded a Sh347 million State contract for Covid-19 emergency equipment despite its limited financial capacity and no experience in medical supply.

Mr Wago, formerly the chief executive of the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC), stood as guarantor for Assure Commercial Services Limited in the deal which involved the supply of face masks to the State-run Kenya Medical Supplies Agency (Kemsa).

He assisted the firm to secure funds from First Community Bank to finance a local purchase order (LPO) for the supply of 50,000 boxes of face masks, each containing 10 packs of KN-95 respiratory protectors that were each sold to Kemsa at Sh690.

Though Mr Waqo is not listed as a director or shareholder of Assure Commercial Services, he was a signatory of the firm's Kemsa transaction account at First Community Bank.
The National Assembly's Public Investments Committee (PIC) now wants the former EACC boss to explain his links with the company as well his role in helping it to secure funding from First Community Bank instead of its regular banker, KCB Bank.

"We want Mr Waqo summoned to appear before this committee. We want to know how he was a signatory to an account of a company that he is not a shareholder," Paul Katana, the MP for Kaloleni, said.

We are in a labyrinth of corruption, surrendered as sacrifices to the Minotauruses of Theft. Hey, any Iason out there! Daring courage and sure sword in hand!

To the rescue

As the deep state continues to mock every concept of the fight against corruption, once billed as the brief of Hadji and Kinoti, one must fear equally for the cluelessness of the deep state, when it comes to securing the future of both the state and the people. The two would-be heroes of the anti-corruption war, Hadji and Kinoti, are now as irrelevant as the forgotten Ababu Namwamba's tenure at the Pic and PAC.

And that is the way I think Weta and Muda and Kalo are going. Unless Ruto and Raila are removed from the equation, permanently. By murder or some intervention of fate. ----Funny, the president yesterday banned rallies coz of covid surges. Nobody bought that logic. Explanation all round the country is they are scared of William Ruto mobilising the land into a Hustler loyalty.

The onus is on Ruto to manage his succession without collapsing the nation. He has become the new Raila: the man to watch. But does he have the superiority grandeur --Agwambo's Messiah Complex, to forego his ambition for national peace? Or, failing that, does Sir William harbour the greed to be, for the right price, bought off his one ambition? Left to an infantile elite, this is the stuff of national tragedy.

[Mfangano]

THE NECROCRACY AT OUT SHORES AND FUTURES FIXED BY DEBT

Sometimes the non story is the real deal, the story which tells it all. This week in Kenya, there has been such a non story. At a first read you would think it belonged to the realms of April 1 pranks.

Here is one version EDUIN KIAMA ARRESTED.

Kiama was presented in court facing charges of contravening various provisions of the Computer Misuse and Cybercrime Act, including false publication. However, Kenya's high Court dismissed the case made by the state prosecution, and declined to grant 14 days to gather evidence. Despite the absence of any cause to retain him, the court ordered the release of Kiama on a cash bail of $5000USD. 

CHEEK AS OFFENCE!

Activist arrested for slurring President Uhuru over IMF loan freed on Sh500,000 cash bail

NAIROBI, Kenya, Apr 8 - A human rights activist arrested over a viral poster petitioning lenders not to engage President Uhuru Kenyatta on loans on the nation's behalf was on Thursday freed by a magistrate court in Nairobi after spending two nights in police cells.
Edwin Kiama who was arrested on Tuesday was freed on a Sh500,000 cash bail after a spirited defense by his lawyers who included former Constitutional Affairs Minister Martha Karua and city lawyer Harun Ndubi.
Senior Resident Magistrate Jane Kamau declined to grant the State fourteen to conclude an ongoing investigation, instead asking Kiama to report to investigators daily for the next ten days.
She pointed out that since police have taken his phone, laptops and other electronic gadgets, they can carry out the investigation without the suspect being detained.  

Kiama of the #Wanjikurevolt handle had posted a satire of the Wild West poster, now mostly used by any organisation seeking to distance itself from those earlier authorised to conduct business on their behalf. Such disclaimers are periodic features in our daily papers, world wide. And so it came to pass, that the IMF or any other credit institution was being informed to desist from conducting business with Kenyatta and Ruto if the two purport to be doing it on behalf of Kenyans.

It was a hit which went wildfire, resulting in a vastly popular petition aimed at the IMF. The IMF, true to its historical mandate, much documented in stellar books like the economic hitman, will only to too glad to ramrod Kenya into an updated  version of the Strategic Adjustment Program of yonder. That was when the Breton woods twins took total control of many African economies, totally running them aground. Yes, it was like the economic policy of Military Rome, enforcing slavery as it run provinces aground, and sometimes, scorch earth. It was the rise of China as an alternative credit supplier, and a predator with better eating manners, that yanked Africa up from the pit of oblivion, say the economic underworld.

After bankrupting Kenya which Kibaki bequeathed in ... relative health ..... Uhuruto's surge back to the IMF (or is it now the Handshake brothers surging back),  therefore,  touches a raw nerve in the subconscious of (thinking) Kenyans. There is intellectual memory of SAP. Live wires to this historical trauma are barely concealed by the passage time over the past two decades of the Kibaki LOOK EAST reforms. It is easy to trip over them. Kenyatta and his two minions, Njoroge at the CBK and Ukur Yattani at the treasury, just did. Beggar bowl to IMF comes at a steep: loss of autonomy in government policy. It is essentially Kenya under a receivership regime. Uhuru and his cabinet thus become nothing but puppet heads. When a people loose the economic policy over their own country, what do they become!?

Dead mind missed that historical parallel.

That the jubilee regime has been a fest of graft is indisputable. It goes without saying that Uhuru and Ruto are politically responsible; but a deeper dig would reveal the criminal culpability of their associates, henchmen and straw men. Were the officers of the DPP Haji and DCI Kinoti to be worth their spit, they would unearth bucks which would be passed all the way to the top dogs. And that is the very top. It is for this reason that they, the police and law, bark at everywhere else except at the criminal culpability of the lords of graft.

DESPERATE TIMES IN DEED

So what has happened to us, free citizens of the republic, that in a domestic, financial as it were, it is to the CREDITOR and DEBT COLLECTOR  that we make an appeal to stop! What do we know about the creditor's business which he doesn't himself? Perhaps plunging us ever deeper into debt servitude is the IMF's mission, sole purpose of existence! And here we are ....

Tongue in cheek or not, the viral petition therefore diagnoses a terrifying intellectual crisis in Twitterland Kenya. That the police use stupid laws to intimidate activists is normal. That is the same old autocratic Kenya. Think of Miguna and his adventures with his claims that he was born at the banks of Nyando (those sides of Ahero in Kano near Kisumu.) --Wrong.

That Kenyan prosecutors unscrew their brains and leave them outside the court so as not to be encumbered by difficult tasks like making sense, leave alone legal sense, is also usual. That politicians perpetrate graft in scales of large is also local habit. No petitions against, may be even more votes next round! However, what has not been usual, however desperate the situation, is a human being appealing to the morality and good senses of a predator, by petition, to change its feeding habits.

How teary eyed the crocodile will be, listening to the petition!

The Kenyan petition to the IMF is therefore a historical first. It is a dangerous symptom of a total deficit in resistance intellect. Even the basic instinct of reflective survival mechanisms seem to have been neutralised. There is no autonomy, even in thought, we are as it were a perfectly enslaved mind. This is why the petition made me shudder. It confirms a vacuum which will definitely be filled by Non-Boko people.

But the activist on a 500K bond has hit a bull's eye in the dark. He has raised the question of interpreting the concept of ODIOUS DEBT. ---More about this later.

2nd: the Wild West poster-like redux is a good jest or satire. Wanted dead or alive is the subtext. Men of firm resolve and high patriotic credentials can arrest the president and the his deputy and present them to the Kenyan people, dead or alive, buried or jailed. This step, as an alternative to petitioning the IMF, is of course the unthinkable, but which satire and caricature easily catalyse. And there you have the cheek of culture in relation to art. ----Everything is thinkable. The arrest and summary execution of the president and his deputy for economic crimes too.

I checked the history books first. No guarantees.

[Mfangano]

DESPERATE TIMES, WHEN THE TWO DOCS –-RUTO AND NDII-- MET

Necessity is the mother of parleys. And it is a historical parley, that Kenya's most avowed pro-peoples, most eloquent pro-reform public economist, the popular Dr. David Ndii, has been canvassed into the net of the most pure-bred reactionary of his political peers, Dr. William Ruto.

It is no meeting of minds for one. For there is neither class suicide on Ndii's part, neither on Ruto's part. But the forces operative on Kenya's present dictate it. The dynamics of the economic and political crisis, are such that the strangest of fellows will share beds.

The political crisis has been caused by one single event. Raila Odinga has collapsed the broad progressive Front and demobilised his strategic commanders. This 'Peoples President Movement' was where the motley crew of Young Turks –----from Miguna Miguna to David Ndii---- found sanctuary, or at least  a worthwhile semblance of progressive purpose to do.  Howbeit the furtive nature of the Handshake owners and the secretiveness of their handpicked secretariat, coupled to the subsequent disorientation of Agwambo the Tinga, put paid to that pretence.

In the wake of all this has been left many a widowed man and woman.

Then, the ruthlessness with which the Handshake has continued to malign Miguna Miguna, warrants as clear proof of its shallow depths. In deed the whole BBI, having run course as a stop Ruto shenanigan, has now coalesced into an argument about the constitutionality of an additional 70 constituencies. A cheap distraction from the needed economic reforms.

But problems do not just disappear because effective distraction has been found elsewhere. Problems need to be tackled in real time, or they fester, they widen and the crisis becomes deeper. Economic magic of course can happen, and has happened in recent human history, but for that one needs a Deng Hsiao Ping or a Conrad Adenauer. (these are calibers who doubled their GDP's in a decade, and then again in half a decade).

But in Kenya for now, cold-bloodedly put, the Deng or Adenauer options (of wirtschaftswunders) is a dead, no-go end. And that is a heart-breaking sh!tload deep our insides.

It is in the absence of such options that  mercurial charlatans like Ruto rise to the top and pick-up the progressive orphans cast asunder by pretenders like Agwambo. Ruto is no less a false prophet than Raila ---his track record of epitome reactionary graft does not lie, but because his fearful classmates have turned on him now for the kill, he has to make alliances where he can, take his chances where they be. He has to call the bluff of his classmates bent on bullying him to oblivion. His predicament has left him with only one effective bluff ---arousing the popular frustration which is palpable; marshalling it toward his bullies.

This is the Hustler card.

But again, while his intent can only be to use The Hustler narrative as a scarecrow to force a seat at the high table, no one man can control the historical forces of his land, more so during a crisis, and an escalating one at that. The lockdown implemented by the Covid-Sars commissariat has been, in effect, a harsh economic downturn for the masses. David Ndii can therefore, if he stays true to his intellect and full-throttle diagnostics, not propose a less radical economic platform than he did under Raila Odinga. Ndii's mellowing in the bed of the Hustler King or not, will be the proof of who has eaten who up. A Prof. Njuguna Ndung'u thesis for national salvation wont do. WE know the first thing Kibaki did in his mild reforms, was to ask David Mwiraria and Ambassador Muthaura to ignore that goat at the CBK. Njuguna was a total Breton Woods stooge and kept on throwing sabotage tantrums at Kibaki's LOOK-EAST turns.

But then, the old dog could have learnt new tricks in old age, or, alternatively, the young Turk Ndii could have 'sensibilised' into a homeboy mercenary. No, Ruto is not going to commit economic suicide; is not going to reject graft nor banish his entourage of looters. It is for the others to U-turn. Ndii therefore runs the risk of the Miguna precedent. An ever accumulation of frustrations as his intellect has to continuously function as the mind of a prostitute in full swing strardom.

(Loyal with body and words, gulping shots, but mind autonomous and fuming the poisons of humiliation and swallowed prides.)

But what wouldn't a true patriot do for his country!? (forgetting the vile-mouthed Oscar Wilde for a second!)

[Mfangano]

THE PURGE

As the two leading dynasts of the Odinga and Kenyatta axes endeavour to eternalise the primacy of their respective families as the national interest of Kenya (and her restive peoples), Raila and Ouru face the same age-old problem which has bedevilled all; all in the question of power and transition.

As the sun set on on the British empire, many a shenanigan, hair-brained scheme and spinned yarn of a solution was brought forth in into play. In every colony did the receding aristocracy try their best to fix the future to their benefit. All of these agenda's had one fundamental purpose, and it inevitably brought them at variance with the general trend of history. The reforms were all about the maintenance of the ancien regime by other means. Specifically in that era, it was the issuance  (or evolution) of classical colonialism into neo-colonialism. It involved the purging, in most instances by murder, of budding radicals and revolutionaries. This paved the way for a meek, compromised and owned fake fathers of independence to own the state and her notorious monopolies (like of violence). This is a well documented chapter in the history of all pre- and post-colonial entities throughout the world a-large.

A POWER PLAY IN THE LUO HEARTLAND

The ruthless- and swiftness with which the King, or specifically his court, has moved to cut down the two constitutional luminaries from Siaya, Orengo Jim and Otiende Amollo, hints at a pathology of fear.

So what is the elephant in the room?


It can't be the BBI. That one would be passed because the combined state-backed power of The Gikuyu Muthamaki and the Luo Mahia ---both official and peoples' president, would easily steamroll one of the most corrupt parliaments ever. A hint of how state power operates in dire, was seen recently in the --erratic-- behaviour of the ex professor Njugunah Ndung'u. The former chair of the Central Bank became a high feather addition to the crown of The Hustler King one day, only for him to publicly retract the next. According to my favourite blogger Chris Kumekucha, the Kenyan Deep State has a foolproof tradition of waving certain files at errant public figures. This promptly makes them see a certain point they were overlooking. After this wave of files, usually a 100% rate of mind change and obedience is registered.

Njugunah Ndung'u has no skeletons in the cupboard. They are all in the public domain. Just like Mwai Kibaki's historical contempt for him as CBK governor too, is. His compliance to the wishes of seasoned blackmailers is a foolproof certainty therefore. Too full of himself as to forget his earlier  soils of the self, this patriotically challenged character occasionally needs to be slapped back to reality. This was done the other day. Talk about the tragedy of deluded intellectuals in public office.

BBI JUU! JUU!

Anyway, these parliamentarians and politicians whose countless front companies have swindled the people in unfinished (CDF and county projects), imported sub-standard mechandise and foodstuffs to poison Kenyans, rigged state tenders, rigged elections, frauded with parliamentary allowances, jumped tax and made false claims ... etc etc ... would have no backbones to stiffen, faced with bunches of files being waved with polite but fanged smiles.

The honourable members can easily be panel-beaten into rubberstamps. In which case the BBI was a guaranteed sail. The official president of Kenya, H.E Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta, and The Peoples' President, The Right Hon Amollo Odinga, even if both are lame duckish in their respective portfolios, own the political space in parliament and senate. The Hustler King was banished a show of sulk. But it remains a viper's nest. There has never been honour amongst thieves, of whatever creed.

WHERE THE MEN ARE OWNED

Where I come from they sing a mocking jig:
 
Agwambo nigi Ruedhi, Agwambo nigi Guogi!
Gueyo! Kuombo! To mana in ndak lwete riat!


Agwambo keeps bulls, Agwambo keeps dogs!
O how they bark! Oh how they bellow
Howbeit all at the tug of his leash in chorus!


I don't know about the ownership of women. Eva of the garden of Eden was a woman and even God himself couldn't hold her on a leash. She rather ruined paradise than be forbidden her fornication rights. So I wouldn't want to dare opt whether there are any owned women in politics. But when it comes to men, I know it for a fact. Nearly all men who bark about in public, ever full of bullying confidence like Magoha and Matiang'i, are the private b!tches of breeds of men hardier bred. For instance, bar governor Okoth Obado in Migori, there is no holder of public office in Luo Nyanza who is his own man. For all their formidable and undoubted intellect, Otiende Amollo and James Orengo are, in politics, dogs or bulls interchangeably kept at Tinga's kernel or kraal. In fact, like a Sultan with a vast harem would indulge his daily whims with this or that trained inmate, so too must these owned men bide their time to showcase their skilled prowess. And of course sycophancy can sometimes demand total self degradation as proof of loyalty among others. It was a fit too uncomfortable for Miguna Miguna and his lot became political Siberia, so to speak.

It has been a treat in the theater of snuff, bestial dung movies, to watch a man of the devastating intellect of Otiende Amollo, re-eat his own punctured  big intestines in public. What a meal, he entreated us at twitter.

So why did the two dogs bark off course? Or why did the two bulls stray off the designed grazing ground? And why was the retribution so prompt and harsh, not to say so total?

1. I think Raila is too heavily invested in the BBI. It became Upende usipende. It is like a last desperate assault by a bleeding commander. Blind fury.
2. Most importantly, it is the succession question. The double succession.

There is only one political question in Luoland. On to your marks, get set G....; the Go is when the undisputed champion retires somehow. Looking at age, we can talk of a knocking biological retirement, as in death. I would trust it is human prudence rather than ill-intent to prepare obituaries in advace as the vultures circle a going horse, however ace.

The (seemingly) Luo national obsession with the ascendancy of Raila to the presidency is therefore in effect, a variation on the political thematic the Algerian's recently teased the the world with. This was when they described the last years of Abdellaziz Bouteflika as a THANATOCRACY. Their great leader Boutaflika was physically impaired and to all practical purposes a mental vegetable, but he was still head of state and would run again and win, his will supreme. In truth, stipulations of his will by a curia were merely an alibi for the looting cartel controlling his virtual corpse. They were bent on using the aura of his prestige and auspice to maintain their grip on the national purse and organise the succession. Only his family members, and even at that, only two including his brother, could interpret and convey to the outside world what the will of the ailing-to-half-dead  president was. Then the army had enough of The Interpreters. The top soldiers, increasingly out of the informational loop from the interpreters, put an end to the long-running necrotic show. They opened the democratic space so said, for the civilian elite to showcase their incompetence and chaotic impulses.

In Kenya we are lucky the military has in ingrained inferiority complex. Of course they have been putting therapeutic works into it. The dumb Uhuruto regime with its pathological dispensation toward graft left the army with no option but to tentatively step forward. So  we witnessed the emergence of such characters as Noordin Haji, Cyrus Oguna, General Mbadi to hitherto civilian monopolies. There was so much low-lying fruit to be picked in the fiesta of governmental corruption the military couldnt stay their whetted appetites to go public.

But outright power is still beyond them to stake a claim. It is funny, but Kenya needs orators, silver tongues like Ruto and Raila; so long the lies have to be spoken with a straight face, and public service a sham. It is when we have to walk the talk of national performance that it wont matter the heaviness of the tongue nor the miaw of the cat so long it catches the mice.

Meanwhile Orengo and Otiende have to judge how long they think Raila still has the grip on reality. Okoth Obado has already put a marker in the post Raila playing field. He reckons the fates of Shem Ochuodho, Dalmas Otieno and the rest who the known rebels, he can survive. One thing is for sure, nobody is saying Okoth Obado is a Ruto puppet nor a Tangatanga mole. The homeground knows this former school teacher has something most men don't have: independent balls. That is why he doesn't get the same treatement meted out to the constitutional gurus, Otiende Amollo and Orengo Ajimmy.

There are dogs and bulls, and then there are men whose yards they prowl and decorate. Ruto for all his faults, has grown into a man: not another's dog, not another's bull. And a man must have his balls kicked in life. The cringe is in the calibre of steel therein.  As for women, that is a subject beyond my mental competence.

[Mfangano]

MAY THE GEM AMONG MEN RISE, TO SAY HE IS RUNNING, FOR PRESIDENT

There is debris over there in Somalia, to collect and bring home for honour. Position of commander in chief, yawning for a fill. Let us not burry our dead alive. A good thought for the eve of Madaraka-2021.

Perhaps it is not far-fetched to think there will be no elections next year. That, between them, Raila Odinga and Ouru Kenyatta reckon they can get away with the explosive issue of illegitimacy. That is, that they own and can win enough souls in the land to call the bluff of constitutionalists, Ruto-cloned opposants, critics and all those who count as would-be defenders of the peoples' cause. Many a pretender of course.

It would be a terrible risk, but given the systematic (moral) collapse of key institutes of the order, among others due to rampant corruption and the in-depth complicity of the whole elite in the rot and self-aggrandisement, no one from the selfsame elite of patriotic charlatans can successfully mount a challenge. Nay, they be better off closing ranks against Wanjiku. They can be blackmailed to speedy submission. They can be intimidated by the threat of total dispossession. The prospect of actual banishment  to the ranks of real Hustlers would kill them looters and fake patriots.

On the main on the Kenyan beats, real Hustlers don't know where the next meal will come from. This is the class of the precariat, old term lumpen (proletariat). Hustler is an obscurantist and confusionist term. Howbeit our politicians who have patented the self-description HUSTLER, are a high-income category. But most are just errand boys for the cartel of looters monopolising the treasury of Kenya. They are, because of culpable fiduciary infidelity, easy to tone down into tame, coiled tails; and even easier to set barking as bribed. And in the hardest case, as ordered.


On elections anyway, Chebukati has, in all his earlier attempts at the national cup, delivered a horror. Statistically analysed, the probability is, his next effort will be true to form. Thus more of the same. There is nothing on the ground to suggest otherwise. It means to a large extent, the nation is already subconsciously prepared for another Chebukati arzhole show. It is a serial rendition with the possibilities of a dangerous climax.

But how has Kenya survived the previous horrors delivered by Chebukati and the many others before him --like Kivuitu? (One need not be a keen observer of our history to recognise this basic fact: Free and Fair is a passmark which only two presidential elections (1963 and 2000; end of colonialism and end of the Moi era respectively, can unequivocally lay claim to). Yet Kenya is still here, doing not so bad if you compare us to the neighbouring Uselessnesses.

We thus have a secret weapon. Or so far, we have had apt and effective mediation processes. We have of course sailed very close to the abyss ---think how (1) Koffi Annan camped in Nairobi to panelbeat the recalcitrant idiots into the nation-saving GCG; and (2) think how The Handshake was 'rabbited out of a hat' by the two royal protagonists-cum-presidents to prevent the emergence of two republics from the vifaranga stalemate. From the above examples, our secret may be Luck. Luck which is still holding.

It is obvious our political toplayer is not possessed of the tenacity to resolve it before it happens; nay, they are a last-minute gang. This recklessness is all very well if a country is important enough for others  geopolitically POWERFUL, those awesome states whose interests wont be served by the disintegration of  (to put it like Donald Trump) a sh!thole republic. Yes, worthless countries can easily be left to implode. Howbeit, even disappear into chaos to their fill of barbarism. (I am pondering Yemen and Somalia, and earlier on Rwanda, Uganda, CAR and Sudan. These were temporarily lost to civilisation).

Meseems the source of our luck is not be heaven after all. Nay, it is geopolitics. This, is the other side of our tragedy. It means a pampered elite has developed and prospered, void of any responsibility, accustomed to quick bail-outs, guaranteed endless credit lines even if showing total illiteracy in accounting. And it is feted at the highest tables even if totally infantile at home .... And of course it is militarily insured.

Well.

On the last, an important point need must be unearthed. This ending week, select videos appeared online of Kenyan servicemen still held captive by Al-shabaabus. Most of these KDF poor souls are from the El-Adde fiasco, easily our Dien Bien Phu. But the High command of Kenya has never gone official.
---How many are missing in Action?
----How many are presumed dead (otherwise)
---What is the official call??( [1] We don't negotiate with terrorists?
 Thus the Al-Shabaab captives are lost forever (ii) We ... Our Deep State....  is on it .... which may be part of the reason an American Somali businessman was 'Musandod'  around Nairobi and the FBI just looks the other way
 [C] No call whatsoever (in which case their return is the headache of their various families. Harambee's to pay ransom if they wish?)

OF HIDDEN NATIONAL NIGHTMARES

For dead or alive, men left behind in deluded military adventures in foreign battlefields have a habit of haunting the subconscious of a land. Some may remember one episode in the notorious Rambo films; or MIA starring Chuck Norris.

The short of them is this. The top of the army and the national politicians have moved on from the defeat in Vietnam. But the file of the army and local politicians haven't. These know the individual families who have dug graves but are still hesitant about the  ultimate rituals of goodbye. They also know the tales of the ... should we say ... half widows. Some, like within my distant family, are on to their third child. In this case she has not completely turned her back on the lost one of El-Adde. She's marking time, waiting for him, but not idling around. She's producing offspring to bear his name, even if genetically inauthentic. Some, in shame, would rather die than come back to this situation. Others come back only to commit murder in such situations. It is a mixed bag of coping tragedies. Goldmines for future artistic dives to our dark hearts.

Obviously the top of the Kenya Army have moved on; and Al-Shabaab, realising the captives have no bargain value, have been nonplussed. The callousness of the  CURRENT   Kenyan military creed has shocked the outlaw warriors of Islam.

It is important to recognise why such callousness tends to disturb most, the consciousness of the relevant land, in this case Kenya. It is a blacked-out topic on our many TV stations, but I rest assured this is because it is a gaping wound no one wants to tap in the open. But the point is, the tale of the forgotten men of El-Adde, abandoned servicemen, is the tale of a lost moral code of the men with the command of death over their fellow citizens. This is a shame no nation can sleep on without nightmares, many nightmares.

I am sure, just as no-one bothered about this topic on the farcical national prayer day yesterday, no one will bother with it @MadarakaDay21 at Kisumu tomorrow, as the His Excellency the official President and His Guardianship The Peoples' President, flog their dying horse in the arena with false tones, to kickstart the BBI.

Where do we go from here? And by here I mean this constitutional stalemate.

I think the Judiciary will be called upon to make a spate of compromise rulings.
--No impeachment of Uhuru Kenyatta as the earlier ruling opened
--Giving the nullified BBI a way out, a panya road to take
--Fiddling around with the referendum and electoral dates
---Conjuring up a ruling which opens for a grand coalition (with everybody including Ruto)
--Rule a shambolic and corrupted electoral exercise as a pass (This allows the deployment of the security forces to effect it; in deed, like Uhuru's second win with its less than 30% turn-out of yonder was.)

It will be upon the Judiciary to prevent excesses or even chaos. The politicians as usual, will only see light before the eleventh hour.

But let us hope Uhuru and Raila have the sense to launch the projects in Kisumu with the official vice president, William Ruto, in tow. These are state projects, not personal whims, and it will be good common sense prevailing to include the VP. The only man who is his own man and has declared himself running. (If no other real man rises up to challenge him and be counted tall, the rest is a rigging exercise. Mukhisa Kituyi, Peter Kenneth, Gideon Moi, Kibutha Kibwana, Musalia Mudavadi ... these featured compromise candidates have an unscalable problem facing William Ruto. They are too  obviously inferior. It can not even be a David against Goliath scenario, coz those rats are hollow of the nerve and courage of a David to tune that sling and take dead aim. Even with the mobilised power of Dynasties backing them, those compromised men remain the rats they are before the Big cat Ruto. That spells rigging to go through.

Raila is surely not too senile to recognise such an obvious fact. And the BBI is no anecdote against rigging. We watched the super state thug Matiang'i trash that notion openly in Kissii (by-election). The search for a safe landing intensifies.

We may need to fish wider for solutions.

[Mfangano]

THE DAY AFTER

I have to salute the propaganda department of the Handshake Team. They pulled off quite a PR coup in Kisumu yesterday. They equally did so in the days immediately before the big Day. It was a frolicky national party, a progression unto a euphoria which managed to capture what can be in a diverse nation, if and when the politics are good.

Yeah, tell that to the Israeli's and Palestinian's.

Over here, the Kisumu, majorly fishmongerous crowd was at its Roman best. They cheered to the heavens, the emperor who only a few years ago was persona non grata in their hearts. A rebellious province of Rome, its heroic leader having survived everything Rome could throw at him after a treasonable self coronation, celebrated their return to the fold with dangerous recklessness. Masks were few in between, social distance unheard of, yet Kisumu registers second after Nairobi in the last statistics of Corona rates. There was a repeated lesson in power in Kisumu. Kenyatta told the nation Agwambo had put aside his personal pain for the national gain. And Raila, after Kenyatta smuggled him to the microphone sans protocol, earlier recalled in the same vein how his father Jaramogi had done the same in 1963: Uhuru na Kenyatta. No government would be formed while Jomo (and his Kapenguria six comrades) was still in jail.

It was a mesmerising show of camaraderie with a careful select of Washujaa mentioned. I say the ruling class closed ranks. Tales of murder (JM, Mboya, Ouko, Pinto) and the why's, were not allowed to cloud the creamy soup served to the soundtrax of the guitar whizz and benga maestro, Dr. Osito Kalle. There was no hint of the double-edged tradition of the late Benga prophet and social critic, Killi Owino Misiani. All the crop of artistes hired for the occasion were moulded in the sycophantic label. And Yes, they excelled with zombified gusto. It was the furaha which is the catharsis of a lot of dhiki.

There are sure other opiums of the people than the famous ones.

The estranged VP and Jubilee rebel Dr. William Ruto was cosseted enough to refer to his rival and possible nemesis in courteous, ceremonial terms. His customary Mgangah, yule mtu wa kitendawili, the lord of poverty et al, all morphed into the right honourable former prime minister, aka B.A.B.A. But Ruto wouldn't be Ruto if he didn't fire a shot in the dark, in the direction of some unidentified bright eyes caught in the flashlight: He saluted the crowd: ONJELO JANAM HOYEE! (And yes, check the response!)

Onjelo Janam! (you would be excused if you thought it was a slip of the tongue). The people of Kondele were game. They thundered him back with a hustler roar he has never heard anywhere in his roamings at large throughout the land. The Roman crowd has savvy instincts, spreading risks, wary of all eggs in one basket ...



County governor and chief host, Professor Anyang' Nyong'o, flew higher than Icarus without a melt. It was party time, and party time is no time for a hangover yet. There were important visitors in the home. Some came from afar .... like the Burundi head of state and his missus; or the South African Minister of Human Settlements, Water & Sanitation, Shemeji Nonceba Lindiwe Ajulu Sisulu. (She is the one whose several slips of the tongue were very amusing, referring to Odinga as President).

But it is always the economy stupid. Paying lip service to this adage even as they repeatedly mouth it may be habitual for a lazy elite like ours, yet these days something has to be shown to be really going on. Popular politics stays the same through the ages: the mantra is economic advancement for the populace. It is development. Of late, and repeated in Kisumu too, have been desperado incidences where economically down-beaten Kenyans have sought to attract the personal attention of the president.

Man who stopped Uhuru's convoy helped to take daughter back to school


"I did not fear being run over by his cars, as it is I am at the end of the road since I cannot provide for my family," he said.

Kepher Nyambane learnt of the President's tour through friends and neighbours in the estate on the morning of the said day. The married man had long wished to meet Uhuru and quickly devised a way that put his life in danger.

His idea was to share his plight with the President and ask for a job to make ends meet.
"I was desperate to talk to him about my problems. I wanted to ask him to assist me to secure a job. I have three children, whom I'm unable to comfortably fend for.
"My sister took in one of my children. The other one was at home after being sent for school fees," he lamented adding that he did not fear being run over by the President's motorcade.
The 30-year-old does menial jobs like working at construction sites. His wife, Lydia Bosibori is a house wife and stays at home breastfeeding their one-year-old daughter. 

So what is really happening, economic wise, on the ground? Has the covid downturn broken down the last vestiges of resilience on the streets? And beggars a new economic deal too radical to fathom so long one thinks within the box? (so long one thinks the rate of corruption and debt accumulation to fund that corruption continues as before). Mr Kenyatta seemed much more concerned about the economic loss accounted for by botched elections than the massive puncture permanently perpetrated by looter cartels. (KEMSA on COVID we just saw)

At one glance, the president's concern for lost billions during post-election chaos appears blind stupidity while right under his nose in Handshake peace time, greater loot is lost by design by his people. Obviously Mr. Kenyatta hasn't spent much thinking on this front of cash seepage.

Kenyans lost Sh2.3 billion in Kemsa scandal - Auditor General

Kemsa management indicted for violating various laws leading to loss of public money.

In Summary 30 September 2020
 

FARCE

Once upon a time, the dynamic duo of Ruto and Uhuru, then referred to charmingly as Uhuruto, criss-crossed the whole land opening projects, launching developments every week. When the tempo slowed down, Kenyans on Twitter turned mockery into an art. Ouru and Ruto were pictured )photoshopped) opening the Ocean at Mombasa. The next day they opened the day for Kenya by drawing aside the curtains from the path of the sunrays. And in flooded the golden sunlight. They were also cartooned opening the vaults at the treasury for their friends to chota their fill. At last there was nothing to open anymore in Kenya, except a fight between the once inseparable duo.

Now, as Ouru and Raila hellicoptered in to open the Siaya-Bondo water project, the Nyawara-Wagasi-Akala road and mention many more goodies on the way, some market women around my old school, St Mary's Yala, were bitten by the humour bag. 'These are small things better left to the councillor and governor. It is a shame to have the god Agwambo and the deity Kenyatta stoop so low to open nothing.

Some will know by the time Omollo Okero was being beaten by Otieno Ambala, the Gem water project -Sidindi Yala-- was already running decades and there was a blue print for the integration to Rarieda, Bondo and Seme. In deed Odongo Omamo launched a successful water project in Rarieda before it was left to rot after his defeat. He was seen as anti-Odinga, much the same way Raphael Tuju's projects would later lie widowed due to the same reason. But well, the Chinese are now here to take care of business. Like the Siaya-Bondo-Seme water thrusts. Besides the roads.

WHEN THE VISITORS COME

That is by protocol, not a day to air the home's dirty linen in public. They the elders and their women rolled like hogs out of their fattening pens. Obese and primed for covid weakness, they trudged like dinos on a wasteland, slowly breathing their last as the the habitat changes forever.

It is upon their young lieutenants to white wash reality for the nation to repeat its past mistakes, or plot a successful break, and take-off. The BBI document is a worthy challenge for the young Turks.

[Mfangano]

THE POWER GAME IS IN THE SHADOWS

For President Uhuru to treat the judiciary with such manifest contempt, he must hide an ace up his sleeve; otherwise his arrogance would be the foolhardiness bordering on self-destruction. That ace can not be legalistic arguments.

Heavens say, what is it about the Judiciary which makes this particular head of the executive ever so ready to call their bluff? and what is it about the gathering of the learned friends at large, that they count such a nuisance to the executive? (Here I must think of King Henry the 8th of England. He dethroned Catholicism from its seat of official religion in his Kingdom because the Pope and his eunach's bureaucracy wouldn't allow His Majesty to indulge Polygamy officially. The biological authoring of a male heir, crown prince, was more important to Henry than the scriptural orthodoxies of God's committee on Earth, seated at far-away Rome).

Howbeit the son of Jomo could have a powerful, deep psychological need not yet common knowledge, a condition which leads him to habitually and serially trash the edicts of the constitutional courts.

Let us assume it is not an overwhelming death wish that drives him so.

Taking two years to swear-in the JSC recommendations, then doing it partially ---exposing himself to another possibility of impeachment! Aaah, His Excellency is on an imperial high; and tuta-do!? his bloodshot eyes seem to challenge us, good Wanjiku souls, with cruel humour. Will we kill the BBI? Try! Stop the reggae? Try! The man is continuing a line of constitutional bashing from an era we mistook for gone. There is no real consequence he reckons can come his way. (The days of the legendary eel of an AG, Amos Wako)

As an aside, intellectually speaking, the coterie of learned friends who amalgamate as the Judiciary, totally failed in their historic role to distil and offer a binding opinion on the operationalisation of Chapter six, specifically the integrity clause. This clause was of course a firebomb, given a country where graft is so deeply embedded in both the political and administrative system. This intellectual failure of the Judiciary ---even as the case was brought before their mention as early as during the tenure of Dr. Wily Mutunga as the CJ, rendered effectively naught, the fight against graft in the courts. Ethics was removed from the operationalisation of the 2010 Constitution. Corruption and the corrupt could stay in public office. Parliament could thus be infested with a choice breed of immoral scum and barbarian hogs. (Mpigs went the apt nickname)

Having, in the first hour, so spectacularly failed to defend, arguably, the holiest verses in the 2010 constitution, later-day claims and howls at the executive from a supposed moral high ground of fidelity to the constitutional order would not else but ring hollow. (King Henry VIII may have had Intel the Borgia Pope had, a generation earlier, run the Vatican as one huge brothel!).

But I doubt H.E Kenyatta is so high minded. Nor is he so conceited in megalomania as to warrant himself a god, infallible before mortal men and Koome-like women. I think his reasons are much more earthen and practical. It is not even the old sore of having had his election nullified in 2017. He would be aware it was rigged after all and that was quick karma. I rather think his despicable attitude toward the learned friends is rooted in truths gleaned from intelligence briefings. This (know-your-enemy) stuff is afforded him by the likes of Hadji, Kinoti and of course Kameru. ---These are detailed trails of the business connections of the men of the Judiciary. Not specifically about the six Judges he failed to swear-in. (Those included the best in the lot, so it is a stare-down moment).

The incestuous web of how cliques of Judges and lawyers operate is street knowledge in Nairobi. Elephant Maatiang'i, irritated by an Omtahtah rat in his trunk, waved a variant of it in parliament before the Justice and whatever commission. Talk is how they favour and keep away from harm, their business partners; visible too are the rings which, in their versed routine, they ran around rookie coppers like DCI Kinoti. Wanjiku has of course always been wary of the Judiciary, and this was why there was such a hopeful swell of grassroots pressure for a radical surgery thereat ---which, if I remember correctly was, taking place as a vetting board. But this was  immediately rendered dead by  Judge Warsame in a famous arrest/ruling).

NAIROBI, Kenya, Oct 1 2012 - The Judges and Magistrates Vetting Board (JMVB) Suspended

The Judges and Magistrates Vetting Board (JMVB) Chairman Sharad Rao told a news conference that the board is not bowed by decisions of the Judiciary but provisions of the Constitution that has mandated it to vet judges.

"The board wishes to emphasise that it does not accept the Judiciary had jurisdiction to sit in judgement over its work. We have been given a mandate by the people of Kenya, through the Constitution, to see the vetting process through to speedy conclusion," he said.
He went on further to clarify that the Constitution insulated the board from such interferences, "the clear provisions of the Constitution were designed to prevent precisely the situation which has arisen, namely, that members of the Judiciary would seek to obstruct the very process in terms of which they were themselves to be vetted."

While the court order suspended the vetting process for 14 days, Rao regretted that Judge Mohammed Warsame issued the ruling ignoring a request to establish whether it was within the jurisdiction of the court or not.

According to Rao, Mohammed who is scheduled to appear before the board for vetting on October 16 also issued the ruling without giving counsel present the right to be heard.
"This order was issued despite a request that the judge rescue himself and that the Court first determine the issue of whether it has jurisdiction to hear the matter at all. The order purporting to stay the work of the Board was accordingly issued without argument being heard from counsels who were present in court, and despite the manifest conflict of interest of one of the judges in the 2: 1 majority," he said.
Rao however clarified that Chief Justice Willy Mutunga was in support of the board to continue with its work without interruptions

And of course the fresh CJ, Martha Koome herself, is on record on a so-called unethical midnight ruling as she sat at the court of appeal. She, together with EM Githinji and Fatuma Sichale, in that infamous midnight constitutional infidelity,  turned a high court ruling which had only been made that morning.

Justice Koome lifts lid on events in 2017 IEBC night ruling

Judge says she was in Nairobi, sat in court physically after NASA lawyers skipped session

21 May 2021

Among other concerns by the petitioner was how the judge who was based in Mombasa found her way to sit in Nairobi within the short notice.
But Koome in her account of the events of October 26, 2017, told MPs that she was on duty in Nairobi at that time when she, together with Justices Fatuma Sichale and Erastus Githinji, made the decision.
She said this was in accordance with the Court of Appeal practice that judges stationed out of Nairobi are required to serve in the capital for at least one week per month 'to help reduce backlog of cases.'
Koome, in her affidavit, further averred that on the said date, she was notified by the Appeals court registrar that a matter had been certified as urgent by then head of the court Paul Kihara - now Attorney General.

 Now then as chief justice, Martha can yell integrity to the president and his lacklustre AG Kihara, but it wont be a convincing ring even if right.  When was your road to Damascus moment, they might inquire first. It is a bit like the office of the anti corruption Czar in Kenya since John Githong'o. It has had many an occupant in the interim, but always remained vacant. Lost virginities can be surgical repaired for the occasion, but well, the loss of innocence not. (And even as I write this, the Law Society of Kenya, the mother of all learned friends, is in a terrible mess. Perhaps they the college of learned friends could remove the speck in their eyes before they do executive's?)

The Judiciary is a soot-covered kettle hissing mad at a very black president. The scornful mask fixed on the face of H.E becomes easy to understand. It is blackmail season. Then a parley.

[Mfangano]

POLITICAL BUREAUCRACY BECOMES DIGRICRACY

So parliament has all but decided you need a degree to be an MCA or parliamentarian. Aah, by a stroke of the pen, or should I say simple majority in parliament, the best paying jobs have been reserved for a breed who, thinking of the 2010 constitution and the economic scandals bedevilling the land at their behest, have been a total failure at their brief!

The value-added of academic papers possessed by politicians in Kenya is not beyond debate. That is asking for trouble. They are trying to imbue a superiority which is neither here nor there. The stuff of apartheid mythology.

For this reason of exclusion, a determined, ambitious and ruthless man possessed of a national purpose to impact but no academic grade, would simply must suspend that article of law; thereupon embark on a bloody purge of the deluded parasites. The parasites are licensing themselves into eternal parasitism. That is what all nobility have tried to do since the dawn of a social surplus which could be usurped.

Some have blue blood, so they are born to rule.
Some are high born, so they have a right to rule.
Some are appointed by God, so they have mandate of heaven.
Some are born of the Sun (Japan) so they have the mandate of eternity.
It is all an attempt to create a natural dynasty and its bureaucracy of nobles.
It is a  formula for a small clique to stay at the top, and stave off competition.

Perform --wirtschaftswunder-- beyond doubt and get away with it, mesays!

THE REPUBLICAN PROBLEM

A republic has a duty to pay (at least lip service) to the concept of meritocracy. Therefore a degree, surely an insignia of relative academic prowess, is good yardstick for ON MERIT! .... it is also, on the face of it, a sensible and basic prerequisite to understand the complex matters of politics and public affairs!

I ---power being power and a corrupter of men---- heard that in the colonial times when the Whiteman claimed HE, because of his inbred sophistication, godly colour and Bibllic mandate, possessed a natural superiority which gave him governance and the power to patronise at will, the lesser native of black colour. He was the keeper of their future, forever under him!

Nothing doing ---semi illiterate to illiterate patriots like Dedan Kimathi would bring this point home in what to date, still proves to be one of the most profound historical experiences of our infant land, Kenya. That is our Mau Mau.

When a minority group feels itself select, god- or college-ordained to amass all power, loot the collective wealth and wallow in cream while maligning the labouring ones confined to camps of impoverishment, e.g slums or rural reserves, we rest assured a social storm is brewing and a political crisis looming.

That is the lesson of history.

So how do other countries do who arrived here before?

There is something called equivalence. Skills which are not academic can be compared and equated for the purposes of say, remuneration or granting of honour.

An illiterate but master welder, skilled to the level of Hephaistos, gets the title MAESTRO. The academic equivalent of that is Professor Doctor. Or Herr Doctor Engineer. No, the artisan maestro can't do trigonometric 5th dimension simultaneous differential calculus equations, but only a god will beat him in welding, and he can teach a new generation the finest details of the skill to the point of art. His knowledge is extreme.

His other compared academic would be a master brain surgeon. A good piki-piki mechanic, self-taught equates a certified college bachelor.

This kind of thing may be lost on those who are only aware of the Anglo-Saxon grammar civilisation. Awarding practical knowledge due respect.

2. One of the most terrifying facts of history, is that the best ideas for social change and national advancement, is not the monopoly of academics. Academics can discuss them theoretically, but not necessarily author them. It is a faculty of conceptualisation, a faculty of imagination that produces new ideas. It may surprise some, that an illiterate man in Turkana can conceptualise better, how the mammoth funds from the discovered oil can develop Turkana, more than Mukhisa Kituyi, Henry Rotich, Kamau Thugge and the rest of the triple doctorates from Nairobi.

Because the academics have only one agenda in heir hearts: PLUNDER! The same agenda highly-educated colonists had: loot the colony!

But what I fear is not the idle chat of overweight men and hyper obese women wet-farting seats at Nairobi's parliament; what I fear is the grin of history behind a mask of steel. Constitutions can be suspended ----in_fact soldiers just did that in Mali and Myanmar the other day, not to mention Chad where Idris Debby succeeded Idris Debby. When Debby 1 died at the battlefield or elsewhere, the constitutional and legal order impeached the dynastic succession. It was the constitution, and its forbidding article, which got suspended, pending amendment later. But Debby one went to Debby two.

That is the grin behind the iron mask when the time is ripe.

If ---we of the degree classes continue to mismanage the public affairs of Kenya, let no one cheat himself some lowly colonels but fired with patriotism and nationalist vigour can not rise up and arrest the feisty Mpigs and drive them to the slaughter. A grin barely discernible behind the iron mask.

If degrees are to rule without fear, then the skill of degrees must be visible on the street. You walk into a public hospital and you see it. Any government service must ooze degree --code for high skill and performance.

NB: When Professor Omar el Shaban hits any tone on solo on any Wanyika school rendition of song, both your heart and ear instantly inform that is a genuine maestro. No doubt. But when your Professor Magoha's and Dr. Matiang'is and Dr. Ruto's open their mouths to talk public policy .... then their words, to quote an African poet, not even a parrot can remember!

Watch the mask, mind the grin as we change laws to install a 'degreecracy'. Democracy will fight back. By all means available in history.

[Mfangano]

THE OPINION WHICH WASN'T JUST ANOTHER MEAT WRAP

We all know since that sarcastic squirt of Clint Callaghan in Dirty Harry, Opinions are like Arz Holes. Everyone's got one. And of course in one of his lucid moments did the president of Kenya himself declare our newspapers to be at their best wrapping meat. So when a mere opinion mocked back like a cartoon across the pages of a meat-wrap and provoked reactions akin to panic and anger, it is worth to take a pause and gasp!

WOLOLOLO!

The writer, a radio Africa presenter and star columnist named Henry Makori, opined thus: The president has turned into a dictator. He now relies on the support of the military and the Luo nation to stay in power, He should quit or be constrained through civil disobedience!

Suddenly the customary dismissive line ----every arz-hole is entitled to its burst of air and has the democratic wright to express it, died. Instead, there was hullabaloo from a section of the Handshake twitterati and, we have since learnt, a bolt of fear through the upper echelons of the same bureaucracy. The disturbed powermen, their bowels hyperactive with ominous thoughts, called the star people and intimidated them into instant withdrawal. The article was pulled down, but not before Kenyans had ran away with it.

Some opinions are better not aired in the open in Kenya. Our sensitivities cannot handle pin-pricks no more than the heel of Achilles could. If some tigers are paper and have zero tigritude in them, our nation too is likewise a paper nation easy to blow away with bursts of strong opinions. Or, come to think of it, the elite is so self-consciously fake and mandate-less, a chilly opinion brings them down with a cold, and diaorhea.

How I wish the injured parties would demolish Makori's opinion. Showing him how wrong he is; how democratic a ruler Uhuru is; how how far from a military puppet he is, and how Luo's have nothing to do with his longevity in power!

Otherwise what remains are puppies barking at themselves, hysterically infected by the noise after some dog barked at its own shadow. You know how that sort of thing goes. (Now it is like Makori's opinion was a statement of fact! and his recommendation a sensible course of action)

The dictator is facing a hustlers revolt led by his estranged deputy. In his own MK backyard, I doubt the dictator could pull a crowd such as he pulled in his visit to the Lake region. The dictator and his narrow clique continues their unabated loot, they are throwing the nation under the bus of debt.

Common sense would say the dictator has to go. Reports from the courts indicate there is no court order the dictator heard he didn't disobey. So his understanding of the constitution and law of the land, is a tyrant's.

So what, dear people, is the usefulness the dictator continues to serve? Happy be the land whose dictator goes I say!

[Mfangano]

FOOLING ALL THE PEOPLE ALL THE TIME?

It is the genius of the current political elite (and her attendant bureaucracy), that, while they have driven the nation a_ground, proved themselves managerially incompetent, proved themselves pathological thieves, they have yet enough clout to successfully mobilise a majority to believe, or at least publicly pretend, that it is from one of them --- and the most corrupted ones at that----- that the choice (for President) must inevitably fall.

In other words they are indispensable! they are locked-in as in divinely mandated.

They deposit themselves a manifest destiny to all practical purposes. So much so that It is the Joe-Biden-senile-like Tinga, aka Baaba; or the vigorous kleptocrat, Arap Mashambah Singh, aka The Hustler King, who, akin to a pre-ordained succession, must be recruited to warm the top political office of Land Kenya. Of course lying in the wings, hoping for the oddity of being a compromise candidate is the array of decomposed none-entities: MDVD, WaterMelon Wiper, Mukhisa Kituyi and Weta. (Garbage too far gone to be recycled to any useful purpose and, if you ask me, best suited for farmyard manure!)

There is a tragic ring to it which beggars a furtive look over the shoulder. Surely, such mediocrity can not serve Kenya's future with any other purpose than doom. Neither can it be the only historical option of a futures as a nation dreams of. ---Many may have heard of the duplicituous roar of the Roman crowd. Well versed in its scripted roll, these crowds cheered the intrigues of the ruling nobles the way they cheered as they rioted or applauded the bloody gladiator games. There was all the semblance of ideological conformity.

It is a national tragedy playing out in the open.  But it is still cushioned by the ready availability of credit. Either from the new master from the East, or the old ones from the West. The economy is afloat, well, relatively. But for those with eyes, it is an ubearable sore. It is like a superior army invading your territory and imposing upon you the realisation, henceforth, you are a vassal state, conquered until otherwise. Those opposed openly are doomed to instant death or worse; the rest to long-term resistance and struggle under the boot of occupation.

Happy thought: nothing new in history there. Precedents galore. The colonial Brits did wave aside our chiefs and their feudal traditional structures, proceeding full speed to erect their bloody empire. We are still reeling from the kick of that British boot against our skull. But we are staggering on, dazed but in the general direction of ... say progress.

But damn... so many backturns aint it a meandering road!?

It is important to note that the sun would never set on the British empire. At least that was the supremacist brag; same as the 1000 century NaziReich planned by the UberMensch myth, Adolf Hitler. So it is a lesson we never learn: once in the driving seat of history, one must constantly look over ones shoulder.

Thieving goons rule the land. But I don't dare say it is a comfortable sleep. Kenya is a merciless land for thieves, once powerless. Therefore whatever happens, the (2022) elections if they take place at all, must keep a thief in power.

I think Ruto wins this one, and then he is rigged out. Ruto wins it on the tidal wave of a change in generation.  Taught to be cynical, ruthless and heartless, the new generation has no room for the hypocrisy and fakery which Agwambo oozes. The opposition ---Raila, Ouru, Kalonzo, Atwoli, have too much of a grave odor around them. They are paralysed in their hypocrisy, faced with the option of a real fight against corruption. They call Ruto a thief with the baboon laugh which so amuses us humans. That is the baboon laughing hysterically at the red hinds of the one in-front. Unaware it is a replica of its own hinds. THE NASA principles, even as NASA died long ago after the open show of cowardice by the other chickens that January day, are still playing the games they played in the Kibaki days. Kalonzo was bribed to run away with the ODM certificate (leaving Raila high and dry), Then ODM-K went nowhere. Kibaki VP Kalonzo and Kibaki PM Odinga spent the whole GCG time squabbling like rival wives only to --uniting at the last moment as a ticket-- find out Ruto and Ouru had taken the insider track.

Naive Mudavadi defected from Raila at the last moment in the Kibaki succession. He was gullible enough to be seduced by the possibility of a Kibaki endorsement; and Raila today, like he destroyed the opposition with his LDP when he joined Arap Moi (in the hope of endorsement), is Handshaking with Uhuru Kenyatta.

It is a re-do. A  rehash of old tricks by old dogs who wont learn any new. They are confident they have put the political evolution of  Kenya in the freezer. There no need for political innovation, no need for new thinking, no need for new ways to approach old problems. BBI is nothing but anti-Ruto Sh!t. It is no longer farce or comedy. It is tragedy. It is like time never moved on for them. They are stunted and stuck in old ruts even as the situation is different. That is what I call the cloud of political death stalking them. Time passed by their tricks.

Ruto exudes vigour. He is the first of his generation, ie the initiator of a dynasty. He has stolen more than all of them combined. His theft can only be compared to Kenyatta I and Moi I. He and Ouru had to literally rip Chris Musando to pieces to vifaranga themselves to power. So there is no doubt about the score and calibre.

Mudavadi, Kalonzo and Moi are no match for him. And they know it. And Raila must feel it in his bones that he is not up to it. Which is why he clings like a tick to Ouru's fat dewlap. In the Kibaki succession, Ouru's mind had already collapsed and given up the presidency when Ruto single-handedly re-invigorated him and panel-beat him into purpose. Raila has no money to match him and this time around, no health to match him on the campaign trail. This is why Raila can not even announce straightforward his is running. And is held up trying to form a broad coalition of the useless and the dead, NASA.

And so, the only option to beat Ruto is to rig. Which can also be by having the IEBC make a mess and elongate the rule of Kenyatta.

The way Kenyans are relaxed! We must have prepared doors out of the cave. To me it does not look like resignation to fate. It is more the unshakable faith in a colonial master. From afar!

Deus ex machina!?

[Mfangano]

BURNIN'AND LOOTIN' THIS WEEK IN AZANIA

You know this Bob Marley song. I haven't caught it given much playtime this week. How many rivers do we have to cross before we get to the boss, the rastaman asks. It sounds like ... how many decades do we have to wait .... for the trickle-down to reach us at the bottom?

Some suspect that would be the forever wait. And so the wait is a seething impatience.

I made sure to check what the best heads say about the elite first. Has the word LOOTING ever been used to describe the behaviour at the top, in the way they manage the South African economy?I found out, the concept STATE CAPTURE is institutionalised in South African critical analysis,  department political economy.
They agree their country is corruption on a grand scale. This phenomenon at the top can adequately be described in a scientifically credible paper as LOOTING or plunder. In fact the Zuma regime was a coalition of two looting wings within the ANC. One loyal to the Mbeki clan, the other the Zuma clique. Cyril Ramaphosa was a party compromise between the two looter factions.

Cyril's mandate would be to try make lacklustre amends fighting corruption. He would reform the economy some, this to contain the rising tide of Julius Malema's EFF; but he would leave past looters alone to enjoy their ill-gotten gains, lest they revive the spectacle of the Mariakana mines. There is a massacre Cyril allegedly oversaw there. Former star labour Unionist against apartheid he be. Best, shiniest gem of post apartheid black empowerment diamonds he be. This spectacular personal magic for himself, he failed to work it for the workers he used to represent in the post-apartheid framework.

Ramaphosa, looking so ill fitting he must have been both consciously and subconsciously aware he was convincing nobody with his huge lie, declared the looters of the shopping malls were attacking nothing less than South African democracy. And it is a conspiracy. It is uncannily reminiscent of what Joe Biden and co said of the Trump supporters who gate-crushed the peoples house, congress, and sent senators scurrying like rats before a miaw.

NB: Once president, Ramaphosa found himself where Raila and Kibaki found themselves in the Moi succession. Popular pressure was demanding a reckoning with looters, top of them Daniel Arap Moi, the ex president and KANU supremo. This sentiment was strong enough to dictate a Mr. Clean, John Githong'o, be the unavoidable pick for anti-corruption Czar. But Raila and Kibaki and their whole entourage, were the (KANU orphaned) children of Moi, and they had fed well and long at the Arap's table ----even if their feeding manners so disgusted a British diplomat he described them as Table Pukers and living-room Shitters. Conflicted thus, they had no option but to let Moi go with his loot unscathed. Lest it be the start of a domino which would end with their own fall, too.

So, as a matter of necessary deliberation: between the cartels who have captured the state and are running the politicians in a looting spree of African economies, and the impoverished miserable seething out of their squalid slums for a piece of pie, and rioting for more, who, do you say with your head, is your prime looter? Who is best better primed for a primed gunshot?

That there is more outrage in the media over the looting of a shopping mall by the impoverished than over the looting of a whole country and its mineral wealth by the elite, is what, in classical political economy, we could call CLASS POWER!

If you do what I do, you will wish you were never born. Me, I am untouchable, I go scot free. That is the difference in power, social power, economic power, political power. In the old bad days in the South, any white man could grab any black female, even juvenile, and, as he wished to please himself, proceed forth any way therewith. That was his privilege to exercise; what is more, it was even a birthright sanctioned by God. But a Blackman who as much as had eye-contact with a ripe white female, he would soon be one of the strange fruits Southern trees bore so often.

So is the structure of power.

For the black ANC president of south Africa to lie like that; and, for Cyril Ramaphosa in person to be so wildly bankrupt in the head that he sounded like an apartheid prime minister addressing parliament on the Soweto riots (Sharpaville) ----[instigated by conspiratorial communists intent on destroying the only working democracy in Africa, to reduce it to the nightmarish (tribal?) barbarism so prevalent in subsaharan Africa], is to illuminate the depths of the crisis in South Africa. A social bomb with the lid barely holding.

Ethnic mobilisation, the great Cyril coded.

But the propaganda mobilisation by the propertied classes who also own the mass media and their opinion leaders, to condemn in wholesale terms, the looting by the poor without batting an eyelid about the looting by the powerful, will not mask the deep truth revealed raw in a few days. There is a desperate horde out there; they are hungry and yearning for a better deal. It requires a military deployment to keep them down. It is a warzone, occupying army role for a local defence force deployed locally.

This [stagnation] crisis without end sets the stage for messianic populists like JP Magufuli or Bonapartists like Juan Peron or Moamar Khadaffi. ---That is toward a massive and forceful redistribution of chances, resources and of course SOCIAL POWER.

I have been checking the form one entree 'school bills' even as Professor George Magoha claims he has a tight fee structure to be adhered to. Methinks smart kids from poor families are in for exclusion from the best schools. Wont admit can't pay. Les miserables recycling themselves.

Whose future is here told?

Elections are already farce, damn expensive farce here.

[Mfangano]

DOMESTIC TRIVIA  AT DOTKE

How trivial it all looks when one maps out the biggest agenda facing the Kenyan elite as they see it. Let us personificate that elite in the obese body of the president, H.E The Stink Uhuru Kenyatta. What headaches if any, disturb the nights of this our first man, our commander in chief!?

Would it be ---BBI deadened by the cumbersome courts?
---- Implications of loosing Kiambaa by-elections to Ruto's UDA?
---His now forgotten big four agenda?
----The threatening emptiness of his legacy?
---Bottoms up versus Trickle down shilling wars?
---Ruto's circle of international friends?
----Whatever the needs and obligations of the matrimonial bed?

No, if the son of Jomo looses any peace at night, it really isn't on account of Kenya's future, nor is it anything in the neighbourhood of  the historical purpose of Afro-Kenyan nationalism. No, he has no headaches; he has never had one apart from those that accrue after over indulgence with certain non-neutral contents of certain bottles. Watch his gait and weight. He lumbers around like a walrus basking the sun at a fat sea-shore. The man is retired from mental exertions. And so Kenya drifts. The lion is out of roars.


But one of the coming men for the vacant presidency has been making an effort. The dark national comedian who dubbed Odinga's oath a Kalongolongo event, was in top form the other day in Murang'a, to ridicule Ruto's effort as Matako-juu. And no sooner did the national laughter garner even more decibels as the likes of Ms Kandara Wahome tried to explain this economic theory on national TV.

This is where hot and big tears must stream down our faces, O citizens.  We must weep for ourselves. A party with a serious economic theory would have produced a document of elucidation. One which could even be dubbed a blueprint for economic regeneration. Such seriousness would also delegate somebody called  an economic spokesman or chief economic strategist --(Raila once had one named David Ndii).  And it would be this man or woman who, all throttles blazing lucidity, would be tasked to enthral the masses with his economic vision, statistical projections, magic at numbers and, if need be, Goebellian presentations of wishes as facts. The opposing party, to show it could do better and the people better vote her in, too would have her chief economist and strategist deconstructing the opponent. How to create and manage the wealth of a nation is no monkey business. It is no afterthought in a silly propaganda war. It is an intellectual battle royal. Not in dotke.

Seriousness would dectate it would be left to the professional comedians (and to the peoples general creativity) to ridicule the busy minds at the top, blowing hot air.

A story is told of Jomo Kenyatta addressing a large gathering. That was early 70's after the OPEC skyrocketted oil prices. This sent the world economy downwards. Coffee price also tanked, and that was Kenya's gold. Kenyatta 1 (Jomo) liked to finish off his speeches with a national rallying cry:

HARAAMBEE!? Kenya yetu iko wapi?
---On cue the people would respond JUU!
NA UCHUMI WETU IKO WAPI?
But on this shilling-crash day the people responded in unison: CHINI!

That was later edited, but it had been live on radio and the spontaneous wit of the people, telling their truth, had shocked the elite enough to, henceforth, have the president wade only the safer waters when soliciting the people's unscripted responses:
 (NA WAMAMA WOTE WAKO WAPI!!?
 and the people and president would laugh, savouring the innuendoes of responding JUU!)


''Haya, msiue mabwana zenu na matako!'' (the official translation should be, please ladies don't kill your men with your infinite needs. But the extended laughter suggested otherwise, more like big and insatiable bottoms unleashed on top could break a man's back and will.)


There is therefore a lot of room for cheeky national comedy, but only to subsume a darker, more pressing reality. There is need to respond adequately to an unfolding economic crisis. That time it was the price of oil and coffee related down turn. Today it is the Covid-Lockdown maneno's and corruption orchestrated stagnation. This has further disenfranchised the youth.

I am afraid Bottom Up or Trickle Down must be cast as fictitious solutions to this real crisis. Unrealistic solutions is always a tragic bell tolling on a nation. It is like those days when an elite, stooped in magic and superstition, faced with a permanent drought, an agricultural crisis and a famine, conclude the gods were angry and desired more human (blood) sacrifices. And so the bloodletting becomes a cult instead of canals, irrigation damns and other drought-beating solutions. That civilisation then drowns in its own blood-soak. Or just disintegrates away. There is widespread economic unease and social pessimism.

To me, when Doctors Rotich and Thugge (former treasury men) steal the money for damns (like Kimwarer and Arror) meant for arid Kerio; and KEMSA under Mutahi Kagwe loots billions meant to contain the pandemic of COVID, and the running men focus on the BBI and 2022 Presidential elections as chief priorities of government expenditure, offering bottoms up or down trickles, it is more of a sinking than rising state of events.

But this is where the hardiness of a people comes in. The British perfected the divide and rule politics to enlenthen their colonial grip over Kenya. To plunder her resources forever at their leisure. Enter KANU under a young Turk group of African nationalists, purposed. Colonialism had to upgrade its act to neo-colonialism. Today we watch another rotten aristocracy and political oligarchy dance their funeral dirges, mistaken they are the future. In fact it is like 2022 has been pre-rigged. That the people have no say in it, but merely as scripted zombies, decorating a director's cut on the set. That the current, rotting dispensation at the top have no die-by-date, just as the British Empire, the story once went, had no date the sun would set on it. --How futile it must have seemed, O people, to resist the eternal empire! --TINDA.


LUNGS UNDER A CARPET OF WEEDS

No longer can the people breathe. The land's fallen under vile weed
They killed the constitution. R'busy at large spreading destitution
Now they choose the excuse of 19-Covid, To contemplate extending their rule of evil

Away with them O people! To the dustbin of history
Hearken to them winds .. O people!
Do thee cherish the sounds of the future
Take care for the rocks of Gyrae are short on mercy


Offload this brain-dead breed. To the deeps of the bottomless sea!
Trash overboard! Let the ballast go! The Asian tigers are rounding us!
Lean and mean must the ship swift ahead! For the rocks of Gyrae are what they are.


THE FREEZING DIFFICULT SMILE

It has been having trouble keeping its appearances. That fanged smile of Ruto's. Ever since the Handshake and the elevation of Maatiang'i to his cost, playing humbled loyalty while seething within has been a hell's trial for the DP. So it has been a Jekyll and Hide perverted ride for him; an internal tragedy, a national comedy.

Then, Miguna Miguna was here, came the Wilson Airport stinging jab of this week. Ruto all but went berserk on Inooro FM. There was no hiding the hurt. The rage shone through as the humiliation gritted too deep for a diplomatic camouflage. The body language was decisive in eloquence. It also made him clarify categorically, that there is no way he can work with the unnamed ODM leader, Raila Odinga. The differences in priorities are too deep, he claimed. --(That of course is a lie: they are both comprador chieftains whose business is to parasite on state resources. Their class interests are thus identical, and supersede their lip-service loyalties to the Kenyan people. They will close ranks if push comes to shove. No rope for class suicide in sight for either.)

OF UNSACKABLE MEN

President Kenyatta can not sack his Siamese twin Ruto. The political risks are too high. He is unsure of his MK backyard. And should he think of the backdoor method of impeachment, Ruto moved quickly to assemble his UDA colours in Karen. It was a show of numbers that would warn any political operative worth his salt to reconsider. And both sides are too weak to dare calling the bluff of the other. The battle then will only intensify in the shadows. Pin pricks as successive layers of defence are tested will continue, until combatants run out of subterfuge moves. Karanja Kibicho's confused interview hinted that moment is not that far off. Fre Mataing'is unclarity too is significant, not to mention Joseph Kinyua who was called by the DP from Wilson and denied any part in the hold-up. In other words, this was Ouru versus Ruto. No senior official in government is ready to hold the buck. And Ouru is still too scared to admit the buck stops by him.

As they say, he can run but he can't hide now.

NB: it was hilarious to have it on record, that the Kenyan political class, both in-and-out of government, so massively support Yoweri Museveni. They campaigned for him, he is their personal friend and business partner. They are heavily invested in the M7 regime. Now that is problematic, since the impartiality impacts hugely on the Ugandan opposition who seek to oust the Kaguta family regime. Common sense is to be neutral in the domestic affairs of the neighbour, lest, in a change of power, those whom you betrayed in their hour of need, come out on top and go for their pound of flesh. The way m7's state goons have treated Bobby Wine's entourage, it is shameful for the Kenyan institutional politicians to be so deep in bed with the incumbent. That is visionless greed.

2nd is of course Migingo. This is occupied by Uganda. Kenya's top politicians, DP Ruto confessing on Inooro live, go all out to befriend and campaign for the ruler of a country who has annexed part of Kenya's territory! Huh!?

I tell you words have no meaning here. That is pure treason. But why is this pure treason meaningless to these people? It is simply because our consciousness is still a work in progress. It is infantile so to speak. Patriotism is a very complex emotion. It is an acquitted trait, like literacy. A lot of Kenyans can easily say: it got nothing to do with me, Migingo is in Luoland. Just like when the KDF was massacred in El Adde, Somalia, most Kenyans shrugged: got nothing to do with me, they signed for the job, RIP anywhere, O lost soldiers! But I am happy to note there is no such cynicism about 2022. National consensus, betraying a deeper consciousness, seems to be, that 2022 has got everything to do with all Kenya, both at the national and individual level. There could be massive displacement of populations if botched, and that causes breaths to be held. I see many prayers around for peace in advance. But here again, the elite disappoints. Their parochial class consensus seems to be they can get away with another rigged or chaotic election in 2022. Wanjiku ata do!? They are thus all out bent on mismanaging the 2022 key event. I think they should revisit their risk analysis. Because during an economic crisis things tend to be more brittle, and tensions more inflammatory.

From the way they are economically theorising ---the comedy of bottoms up or trickle down, they reflect they think everybody is having it as fat as they are there at the top, wallowing in the cream of tax-payers' sweat. A banquet without end. But check the hungry faces outside the palace, gasping for bread on the streets. An accommodation would be prudent. Too many les miserables I say.

[Mfangano]

A SERIES INTERREGNUM CHATS

One day, far away in the land of puberty, I really had to dig deep and screw up my guts to make a pass at the then Queen of my heart and occupier of my dreams. I remember the trauma of the mental turmoil as I squared up, and the later delights as I celebrated having taken the risk and acted. Amen!

So take a risk, a walk on the wild side.

INTERR-----

This is a period of chaos and elitist bubbling as the substantial majority, falsely in apparent apathy, await the real thing. It is the period between a dead order and a rising order. The carcass is birthing a baby, but its rigor mortis can yet asphyxiate the niewling. These are very dangerous and delicate times therefore.


But now if one lets their imagination inflate, the parallels are infinite. As the classical colonial order dies in Africa (in late fifties and early sixties), the 'real thing' the people yearn for is 'true independence'. But what they get is the 'flag thing'. This is an impostor whose true skeleton is neo-colonialism. There has been a change, but it is superficial. For the moment in euphoria, the people are defrauded of their dreams. And the historical fraud is perpetrated by none other than our own indigenous, collaborationist, traitorous, clientele and quisling leadership. That deferral of the peoples dreams sets the stage for quite a conflict.

The fake independence has had quite a run in Africa. Both in terms of pillage and mass murder. (That is war, civil or otherwise). The price of imposing a fake independence upon a people is dear. This is because the first nature of the human is struggle. Against all adversity. Against extreme climates, pandemics and epidemics; against tyrant and democrat, poverty and bounty, ignorance and disease, and of course last but not least, against foreign or local orchestrated injustice and oppression --(however sophisticated, thinking of the Talibhan sending the USA and her quislings packing in unceremonious fashion after two decades of drones and hellfire mayhem.)

INTERREGNUM KANU KENYA

One of the more successful neo-colonial states in Africa is Kenya. And if you are a 'Dotkeian' and you are reading this, you know who I am comparing you to, for us to come on top. There is not much competition around. But if you let your imagination go, you will get a hollow feeling in your stomach. South Korea and Taiwan were effectively neo-colonial states in the same orbit as us, but no, today, as Achebe would quip, they are beyond our statistics. And practice.The secret to their neo-colonial stardom is beyond our knowing. No, don't talk about 'clean Rwanda' under the beloved tyrant yet.

But I imagine the Governor of the Central Bank of the Republic of Korea, an economic Egwugwu or is it Guru, asking the Opus Dei humanoid at the CBK thus:

'The mind encased in the body of the thing Patrick Njoroge, do you know me!?
And Dr. Patrick is prompt.
'How can I know you Asia Tiger, for you Harvard and Yale are just for Junk economics!'

'I am the neo-colonial economy which made it to capitalist maturity in half a lifetime!
'' Sure, you are beyond the best of my --Washington B. Woods-- mental shots!'

Really?

I apologise for the below belt hit. Every fool can look at the statistics ---available freely on the net, and compare such ratios as R&D/GDP. There are about one hundred indices to go, including kickback-to-megaproject-cost ratio. ---On the later, pleas ponder Jimmy Wanjigi's recent revelation on how the kickback ratio to the original cost of the SGR mushroomed by an indefinite exponential when Uhuruto dropped in the driving seat.

We Designed SGR To Cost Ksh55 Billion From Mombasa To Malaba - Jimmy Wanjigi


August 30, 2021

The construction of the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) was set to cost Ksh55 billion from Mombasa to Malaba, businessman Jimmy Wanjigi has revealed.
Speaking to Citizen TV on Sunday night, Wanjigi revealed that he was the SGR mastermind alongside the China Road and Bridge Corporation.

The project was to be done and operated as a private entity with minimal or no government involvement, Wanjigi said.

"SGR was a project birthed by me in 2008 alongside China Road and Bridge Corporation. The intention was that the rail was a private project, with nothing to do with the government. The government was only to provide the land. SGR was to cost Ksh55 billion from Mombasa to Malaba," said Wanjigi.
However, Wanjigi said he left the implementation of the project in 2013 when he realized it was being overpriced by the Jubilee government.

Jimi Wanjigi: Raila's time is up (Video)

SGR was built with over KSh 330 billion from Mombasa to Nairobi.

They are corrupt in Korea too, see their various scandals and how they rid off their former Presidents, but the DOTKE rate is no longer corruption. It is moral debauchery. It is a key explanation of our meagre to inferior performance since the first republic was launched in 1964, but worse, it is the harbinger to a possible terrible resolution. This web of insane corruption is tethering the land to prehistory and damming the peoples aspirations from their logical historical path. It will be smashed with cold heart.

Ouru and Ruto should have been in Kamiti like yesterday.

South Korea's troubling history of jailing ex-presidents

October 9, 2018

Half of all living former South Korean presidents are now in prison. On October 5, 2018, former president Lee Myung-bak was sentenced to 15 years for embezzling 24.6 billion won (roughly $22 million). Lee will join his successor, disgraced ex-president Park Geun-hye, who last year began her 25-year sentence for various charges of corruption. Lee and Park's lengthy prison sentences may seem striking for an established democracy. But the reality is these sentences are not anomalies; rather, they reveal how tenuous South Korea's hold on democracy really is.

So now, let us re-ask the --Achebean-- question:
Do you know the difference between my corruption and yours?
and answer
''I am the wrath of the ROK that spareth no one once they have behaved corrupt. And I especially love Ex-Presidents in jail.''

The republic of Kenya could just be gearing to take a leaf or two from the ROK. The prestigious and ubiquitous Samsung comes with an undercurrent. A streak of ruthlessness which spares no body. ---Uhuru Ruto, Raila, Kalonzo, Mudavadi (Goldenbeg, AngloLeasing, SGR, NYS, Oil-Jetty, Dams ...).
Slam dunk cases.


NEXT: KISUMU EUROPE INTERREGNUM

[Mfangano]

KISUMU EUROPE INTERREGNUM

In Kisumu Europe where I come from, we still do not, anno 2021, have flushing toilets at the famous Stend or Buspark. This spot is a number one public utility even busier than Kibuye market.  Nevertheless, the smelly calls of nature must be answered and, after doing what we gotta do in private, we of Kisumu stend scoop sh!tty water from rusting (plastic) drums, therewith to try and erase the remnants of our fishy meals from the walls and floors of the ... ooyo.... I nearly said WATER CLOSET! And, vomit not, that scooping is done with slimy jugs which have seen their best and cleanest days,

There are folk still around, old enough to remember when, believe you me, at the tag of a meter-long chain of the British-Steel brand, a water fall of foaming pressure would be triggered, this to wipe the toilet sink clean. The cisterns, all rust-free steel, hung high up on the wall; the pressure was gauged such that even if one had poo'ed like an elephant, still the heap of dung would rush away like paper in an incinerator. The mechanisms of public toilets were a sort of British pride in convenience engineering. Every week, just as elsewhere throughout the big and small towns of the global empire, maintenance technicians would prowl the WC's of the Buspark to keep up the pride. (And, this is important: their salaries were stipt on time and adequate to keep up the good life of a provincial, colonial municipality worker. These lived at then posh estates like Ondiek and Arina. But they were the railway men and their women who had the pickiest, most panoramic estates around the hills overlooking the --head of the----  lake, aka Wi-Nam, .

In the original colonial plan, she was Port Elizabeth. And the lake was Victoria. These were show-case names, Anglo-Christian baptismals pregnant with imperial bloat and gloat. These were the mega projects, some of them expressly lunatic, of a highly ambitious empire, one whose image of herself was as eternal as the sun which, of legend, would never set on her.

Well you know VINDU, and the way they CHENJANGA.

At independence when it became Kisumu ---and not Kisumo, the incoming native elite had not the consciousness to prepare Port Elizabeth for her future flowering. The lakeside town would thus puber on as Kisumo and not Kisumu. That terminological nuance is important. It is a signifier of a deeper alienation.

Kisumo  (Kasumo/Kar-Sumo) means a place of exchange. And if you don't have money (which is the most liquid form of any exchange commodity), barter is still the name of the trade. Kisumo is a market place envisioned. A Trading centre. And it is as a universal trading centre, her true identity, that the incoming elite failed to recognise, plan for and facilitate. This correct divination of historical purpose is the difference between a mature bourgeoisie and a parasitic genre. Kisumu became an ADMINSTRATIVE CENTRE. A provincial headquarters. And well, you know what happens when Bureaucrats are Kings: stagnation. Bureaucrats lack imagination, have no need to take business risks, have no social vision outside the safety of their jobs and, as a parasitic entity, cost more than their use.

Kisumu became some backwater lagoon overgrown by a hyacinth lot of politicians, polluted by their toxic KANU emissions. Commercially it was little more than a museum of small dukawallah capital. For would-be enterprising African capital, business was even more petty. The Luo capital city was the personification of the dead-end evolutionary trajectory of the first republic. A colonial relic.

ENTER THE SECOND LIBERATION AND DEVOLUTION

Well, the struggles continued. A rebellion within the ruling party was a clear warning. This was the KPU led by leftist Jaramogi Odinga. KANU, like classical colonialism mutating into neo-colonialism, had to upgrade or pimp up her game.

With devolution we voted in Dr. Baba Lupita Nyong'o; we had a dangerous card behind our backs. Who, O who is to take Kisumu back to her true identity: Marketplace. The political administration  of the county should move away from Kisumu city. It should be banished to some far-off exile mini bubble of a garbage-recycling centre, like Washington DC from New York. (In New York, a city specialising in money-making and related  financial scams, Politicians are known as garbage, and DC is the garbage recycling depot for their lot!)

Borrowing a leaf from the New Yorkers, I don't want Kisumo to be a garbage recycling unit. She cannot be the Kachok where takataka from Nairobi, be they ex Mpigs or ex Senators or ex top civil servants, are recycled into even worse filth. No, the true identity of Kisumu is a robust, even wild commercial market where everything entrepreneurial goes, where not even the sky is a limit. But no place for parasites.

Everybody knows the human imagination is infinite, human needs too. You name it, there is a market for it. But in public service one starts with the basics. A pit latrine, then a flushing toilet, then ---if you have been to a public toilet in Japan recently, all robot-care for your tenderest of parts Think of those hot-air blows to dry your hands at the WC's of Nairobi's Machakos Airport! They were quite an innovation when they came, a light year from the toilet paper serviettes at international hotels at the city centre.

We say Kisumu Europe as a cold-hearted sense of humour, to remind Governor Nyong'o of what his historical mission is: to end the interregnum which has been the (intellectual and technocratic) collapse of the neo-colonial elite who inherited Port Elizabeth. They inherited the beautiful English City by the Lake (Victoria Imagine the name!), then proceeded to degrade her to an extent she didn't even have functional public toilets at the Bus hub!

Under the former governor, The Barbarian Ranguma, the referral hospital had its water supply cut for non-payment of bills. One needs little imagination to have an idea of the scenes and tropical scents at the water-less morgue then. It was then that I first heard the battle-cry Kisumu Europe!

It is a wolf''s grin, happy thoughts on a full belly, happy thoughts at a fat meal? Baba Lupita has his nightmares. And Covid does not even feature.

INTERREGNUM 2: FROM MAPUTO TO KABUL

[Mfangano]

INTERREGNUM 2: FROM MAPUTO TO KABUL, PHASES OF THE SAME APE

Technologically we have moved on. We the human race. Emotionally, our limbic systems are still warped in the ---evolutionarily--- distant ape.  That jungle creep kills the male offspring of his b!tch, to avoid coming competition. Our versions of sour grapes as mankind --when we loose power--- are supra Shakespearean. Invariably it is a horrifying mismatch of intellect and heart, say, hell hathnt the fury of a colonial power butt-kicked by a ragtag band of deplorables.

When FRELIMO under Samora Machel routed the decomposing Portuguese colonial army in Mozambique, the Portuguese had to lower flag and flee unceremoniously. White pride was immensely hurt; the civilisation of the whitemen, finding themselves in a tails-between-the-knees position, unravelled and exacted a filthy penalty as they rushed for the exit. They destroyed every working thing in all government properties. They smashed typewriters, and bulbs; they set filing cabinets on fire and ripped electric cables. It was a scorched-earth retreat, it was a medieval scene or arson and lootKabul's Hamid Karzai airport. In the aftermath, the HKIA looked like Ilios city as the long-haired sons of Achaea boarded their beaked ships to return home.

That is how two decades of high-tech folly ended. $2.6 trillion dollars burnt. There was nothing to show for it on the ground but the power of destruction. They didn't do the body count of bomb-incinerated Afghans lest the concept genocide materialise and take root. It was the efficacy of a  secular killing machine unrestrained.

For those whose minds have not been corrupted by the deluded heights of intellect, they recognise the horror immediately.

In our historical progression, we consider secularism a higher form of social organisation than a theocratic dispensation. We consider elections a fundamental aspect of democracy, and along with it, the human rights of especially womankind under market economics. So when the current, greatest secular military power on earth, a scientific and economic power to boot, reports TOTAL FAIL after two decades of occupation and nation-building, there is an obvious intellectual and ideological crisis laid bare.

But those whose societies experienced long-term colonialism and its myths of superiority, know a truth or two. They witnessed the colonist's daily fix of heinous crimes against the humanity of the natives. They watched its denials of reality under its drunkenness with its own mystique. They recognised its essence as plunder, domination and control. The ex-colonials don't get surprised at the final outcome when colonialism in whatever ruse is faced with sustained cultural resistance and a disciplined leadership. The Talibhan-led armed struggle against the democratic facade sponsored by the USA and her NATO cohorts, was a classic case of Amilcar Cabral's thesis of the armed struggle as the flower of authentic cultural resistance against foreign domination and its quisling satellites, local or abroad.


The Left, once upon a time with the monopoly of theorising for the oppressed of the world, now having surrendered to Capitalist organisation and sworn allegiance to neo-liberalism, no longer feature in liberation struggles. Some leftists even claim the era of national liberation struggles is past. Poor Palestina! poor Kurds! poor Saharawi people! Poor Uighur's! Poor indigenous Andes peoples! Poor Papua's!Tony Blair, Barrack Obama, Angela Merkel or any corrupt winner of elections in the African continent, those merely marking time in power for self-enrichment. The former president and election winner of Afghanistan, a man named Ghani, reputedly fled with suitcases stuffed of cash. And his greed was such that there was no room for all in the plane, wherefore he left part of the loot on the tarmac! The Afghans themselves, have enough cultural depth to find an appropriate classification for such a scum of a leader! Red Najibullah stayed to face the noose.

ALUTA CONTINUA WITHOUT SECULAR PROGRESSIVES

Next door in Iran, clerics are proving themselves more than capable of repulsing the worst that modern covert warfare unleashed by the worlds leading technological nations can throw at them. 40 years of economic sabotage, total sanctions, confiscation of foreign-held assets (aka freezing), murders of top scientists, instigated hot warfare (Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iran), total medical embargo during Covid-Sars, and all other creative evils have not managed to bring Ayatollah-led Iran to her knees. On the contrary, Islamic revolutionary Iran has risen in prestige, soft power and military capability far the superior of other nations which have not suffered any sanctions. In deed, after the Trump assassination of commander Qassem Hussein, Iran obliterated a US base in Iraq with precision-guided missiles, and the The Hegemon found it wise to desist from futher escalation by open retaliation.

The lesson of Iran is terrifying enough to Christian neo-liberal fundamentalist zealots who teach their truth monopolies at their best institutions like Harvard and Yale. And here are some Mullah's proving to be Vo Nguyen Giaps at  ECONOMIC resistance! Heck! Even an atomic bomb they can make IF THEY WANT! And that, under 40 years of toal sanctions! Is there something the gods who rule the markets of the world have missed, such that their truths are outdated dogma's?

Now, another set of Mullah's with their long beards and turbans reduce the greatest military power on earth to a whining, running, fleeing dog hiding under the skirts of Qatar! It is an old lesson never to be learnt: No people appreciate foreign domination, no people value local quislings and mercenaries facilitating colonialism. Such are mere traitors, rats, however rich and powerful their puppet rule seems, however ruthless and bloody tortuous their prison cells are.

One of the more light-hearted Talib spokesmen had an easy grin as he answered a question on human rights. 'As you know, several of our top leaders have enjoyed the hospitality of the Americans at 5-star venues like Guantanamo Bay. All these people now so concerned about human rights in Afghanistan, we didn't hear their protestations as we received the full dose of goodies including water-boarding, ritualised abuse, religious humiliation etc etc, and all without any court proceedings prior!'

Something deep has collapsed in Afghanistan. The NATO occupation was corrupt and rotten. Secular  men didn't have the courage to say No. Instead they chose self profit. But religion, some strands of it uncompromising in its moral edicts, managed to find, organise and motivate both patriots and zealots to combat. Secularists, motivated by nothing but own commercial gain proved to have no fight in them. There are other values on earth men will, against all odds, fight to the end and death for. Afghan reality has made a laughing stock of would-be progressives. Progressives were just enterprising, sloganeering apologists for a colonial occupation. And now they will be apologists for the economic warfare which the defeated super power will unleash: think of the 40 years of Iranian experience post the Islamic revolution.

An experiment to watch, a clerical Afghanistan attempting national liberation and freedom from foreign control. So far this has proven a job beyond secularists. So a tougher breed must fill the vacuum. It is a fearsome lesson from history's master class. But we are apes in part, and there are things beyond part apes to learn.

[Mfangano]

FRANCIS KIMEMIA SPEAKS: WHAT DO OUR DEAD DO?

I forget the name of the ethnic group in Nigeria who commonly chant our dead speak when they hear a truth everybody recognises but which official doctrine proclaims the otherwise of. If So&So's wife is a known company wife, what the Bible might refer to as adulterous, she may occasionally be confronted by a mocker chide from one of her co-wives as she defends her matrimonial virtues. It can also be a check, paraphrasable as  ....'let the ancestors who know all quote you!'

The ancestors don't quote falsehoods to the living, at least for that people. The ancestors reckon the living themselves are more than competent in repeating their lies to themselves daily, endlessly. Truth, however, is another matter. It is worth the while of the dead resurrecting to repeat in whole.

But first, let me deal you in on a rumour.  Actually Several rumours open sourced. This is from the Mwai Kibaki days. Francis Kimemia, the current governor of Nyandarua, was very powerful then. Joseph Kinyua, later to emerge as Uhuru Kenyatta's top horse-whisperer, felt bypassed and stagnated at the treasury.

Economy

Kinyua returns as ex-Treasury officials land plum State jobs

Thursday September 26 2013

Former Finance permanent secretary Joseph Kinyua returned to government on Thursday in the elevated position of Chief of Staff and Head of Public Service.
Mr Kinyua's appointment marks the latest placement of an official who served under President Uhuru Kenyatta when he was Finance minister into another influential government role.

It also raises questions about the pecking order in State House where the comptroller, Lawrence Lenayapa, is in office as well as secretary to the Cabinet Francis Kimemia; Mr Kinyua's former boss as head of the public service.
Mr Kinyua will be in charge of State House operations as well as heading the civil service, putting the experienced economist in charge of Kenya's more than 250,000 government employees.
The hiring of the 62-year-old technocrat to the position fills a void left by the appointment of Francis Kimemia as secretary to the Cabinet under the new Constitution; which is silent on the office of public service head.

Previously, under the Constitution repealed in 2010, the head of civil service doubled up as secretary to the Cabinet. Mr Kimemia was the last holder of this office. However, the Constitution empowers the President to create administrative offices necessary to aid in the smooth running of government operations. 
-----------------------------
Mr Kinyua's career began in 1978 as an assistant lecturer at the University of Nairobi. He holds a BA and MA in Economics from the University of Nairobi.
He later joined the Central Bank of Kenya in 1980 as an economist and rose to the rank of director of Research. Between 1985 and 1990, he worked as an economist with the International Monetary Fund before returning back to the Central Bank of Kenya.
He was appointed Financial Secretary to the Treasury in June 1995, a position he held until July 1999 when he re-joined the Central Bank of Kenya as Director of Financial Markets. He was appointed the Chief Economist of the Central Bank of Kenya in October 2000.

Mr Kinyua was appointed as the PS Finance in September 2002, a position he held until January 2003 when he was appointed PS in the ministry of Planning and National Development.
In July 2003, he was appointed PS in the ministry of Agriculture where he served until July 2004 when he was reappointed PS to the ministry of Finance. 

Kibaki preferred his old pal David Mwiraria to oversee Finance. Then CBK governor Professor Njugunah Ndung'u and the likes of Treasury mandarin Joseph Kinyua he, Don Mwai Kibaki, merited as scandalous Moi goons and pedestrian-to-illiterate managers. They could stay on as spectators. And of course 'snoring sleepers' reporting to their IMF controllers on Mwai's errors. There is an interesting Gikuyu epithet Kibaki would use on them as he talked down to John Michuki, the capo.

Francis Kimemia, so goes a strand in the tale, is one of the hammers John Michuki could rely on to crack heads in the civil service. Francis Kimemia is therefore an unsung hero of the Mwai Kibaki reforms. He smashed a couple of heads around the civil service to turn the juggernaut around from its Arap-Moi ossification-cum-Ottoman dead-weight, to the swift ship of Kibaki and Raila under NARK. Francis Muthaura saw the administrative talent in Kimemia, even as the thug in Francis deeply troubled him. Man Michuki, however, had no qualms.

Crime had reached an alarming level in Kenya, ranging from car jackings and armed robberies to bank heists and highway robberies. It is at this time that the cabal around Kibaki decided to bring Michuki in to be in charge of internal security to save the government's image that was going down the drain with each and every media report about crime. One of the first drastic measures Michuki took was to order police to "shoot to kill" anybody found carrying firearms,[132]

A Kenyan commentator noted

We all remember former President Kibaki's attempt to criminalise and wipe out the Mungiki early in his tenure in 2003. The late John Michuki, the no-nonsense autocrat under the NARC Government, used an iron fist to try and decimate Mungiki. Untold carnage ensued. He hunted the Mungiki everywhere - ruthlessly. The violent group went underground. Its leaders were prosecuted and some renounced their membership. Mungiki spiritual leader Maina Njenga claimed to have converted to Christianity. 

Sir John had his lieutenants.

Here is Matere Keriri, Kibaki's personal secretary and comptroller of state house until he aroused the jealousy of Lucy Kibabki.

We had what others called the 7M Mafia, a core team that coordinated the affairs of the State. It comprised Mwai (Kibaki), (David) Mwiraria, (Kiraitu) Murungi, (Francis) Muthaura, (Chris) Murungaru, Martha (Karua) and I Matere. John Michuki joined later. We had to organise for the president to govern the country.

But  Michuki-protege Francis Kimemia would eventually go overboard. This is after he replaced Francis Muthaura to become King of all civil servants. Perhaps he was drunken with power, perhaps he became too much invested in corruption to loose power, but, in the run to the 2013 elections, he would so politicise the civil service as to make it nationally ineffectual. By the time Uhuruto installed themselves with 50/50 insanity, the Kibaki go-getter service had imploded into nothing but a looting service.

Governor Francis Kimemia in Trouble After Revival of Sh2.9 Billion Scandal

By Martin Siele on 19 September 2017

Nyandarua County Governor Francis Kimemia has claimed that the revival of a Sh2.9 Billion corruption investigation is politically motivated and meant to taint his image as a public servant.
The Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), Keriako Tobiko, has opposed a  recommendation by the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC) to close investigations into the case where former Interior Principal Secretary Mutea Iringo and the Nyandarua Governor are accused of missapropriating more than Sh2.9 Billion from coffers of the Office of the President.

Governor Kimemia at the time was Head of Public Service. The embezzled funds were part of a 'Confidential' expenditure account in the Ministry of Interior, funds used at the discretion of the Interior PS; for instance when conducting emergency security operations.
The funds were lost in the 2012/2013 Financial Year and the EACC in May 2017, recommended that the case be closed citing a lack of sufficient evidence.
The report that informed the initial opening of investigations into the case came from the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) in 2014, then chaired by former Budalang'i MP Ababu Namwamba.

The PAC Report revealed that an account at the National Bank of Kenya (NBK) had been used to siphon huge amounts of money without any documentation ahead of the 2013 General Election.
Mr Kimemia and Mr Iringo were the accounting officers in the Office of the President at the time.
Mr Iringo was appointed as Interior Principal Secretary in June 2013, eventually moving to the Defence Ministry in August 2014.

As for investigations, a man named Francis Ndegwa Muhoro, top cop and DCI then, was beholden to Frank Kimemia who had ruthlessly pushed his appointment, then deemed unconstitutional.

Exclusive: Letter From IEBC Detailing Kimemia's Links To Jubilee Campaigns

February 22, 2013

On the January 27th, 2013 at Lake Elementaita Jacaranda Hotel, Mr. Kimemia met the Jubilee Alliance/The National Alliance Presidential Candidate Uhuru Kenyatta and his running mate William ruto from 22.20hrs to 23.15hrs behind closed doors.
ii. On January 29, 2013 at the Bomas of Kenya, Mr. Kimemia held a meeting with District Commissioners (DCs), County Commissioners (CCs) and provincial Commissioners (PCs). In small meetings within a bigger one and that Mr. Kimemia did appeal to the administrators to assist presidential campaigns of Mr. Kenyatta as they would be sacked if Rt. Hon Raila Odinga were to be elected president.
iii. As facilitation the administrators were promised sums of between ksh 5,000,000 and ksh 15,000,000 each. This meeting was attended by Mr. Itea Iringo and Kennedy Kihara among other senior officials from the office of the President.

That above is what the money did among other things, but the official conclusion is

The funds were lost in the 2012/2013 Financial Year and the EACC in May 2017, recommended that the case be closed citing a lack of sufficient evidence.

The most important thing in anything, is to follow the money. In fact, that is the only thing in any transaction.

The DEEP STATE?

A great American president coined the term MILLITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX to warn his own country of teary-eyed crocodiles watching over their future. The deep state is a euphemism for state capture by a criminal gang.

We knew the deep state existed in Kenya. They have been rigging elections to such an extent that only the 1963 and 2002 Presidential ones count as having been untampered with. What we don't know, and what really would be information from Francis Kimemia, is who stole how much exactly and where the money went to when he was deep, deep into deep state labyrinths. The MONEY TRAIL. This to avoid collective punishment when the day of reckoning chances to arrive, with tempers much lost.

Word on the street today is all politicians of Kenya are filth. And the higher echelons of the Public Service, rotten. The state is corrupt to its deepest bottoms. This creates a historical vacancy for a peoples surgeon. So, should a hard man like John Michuki who didn't have to cry his tigritude arrive on the scene, and be minded to deal with the corrupt the way Kimeendero did the Mungiki in his shoot-to-kill days, every protestation of innocence by an accused need not fall on a sarcastic retort: do our dead speak!

But Francis Kimemia has spoken, but he has said nothing. The man has never faced a nasty confessor in his life. Hope he is lucky enough to die that way. Unconfessed. ---Aaah, the national archives of Kenya, what a confabulated and stop gap affair. Our dead haven't spoken!