The other side of voter registration

I registered as a voter at my local registration centre yesterday evening just before 5.00 pm the official closing time. The BVR experience was painless and flawless and took less than 3 minutes and I now have an acknowledgment slip to confirm this.

However, part of the process in addition to the photograph and the finger print taking of all 10 digits (with apologies to those with less), involves a manual process where you are required to sign an  indemnity form as well as provide your mobile phone number and email address, the first time in my recollection that this is happening. I assume this is so that they may contact you in future should any correction need to be made to their registers!

I am just wondering that given that 18 million Kenyans above the age of 18 years old expect to be registered within the one month registration period, I will not be surprised if the data being collected by the IEBC will also be used for other purposes.

Think about it for a minute!!

Here is an agency, for all intents and purposes an appendage of the government, charged with the biometric registration of Kenyan voters and whose target is to collect crucial data and information about 18 million Kenyan adults and rebuild their voters registers literally from scratch. The IEBC will have access within its database to the unique finger prints of you and I, our photograph, our specimen signature, our mobile phone number and our email address (for those fortunate to have this) of all who register. This is a watershed election since it is the first one under the new constitutional dispensation and it is expected that the registration turnout will be at an all-time high given the stakes involved.

Now which responsible government would not use such a database to boost its crime fighting capabilities, its ability to rollout a parallel system of facial identification and signature recognition software, its ability to eavesdrop on the mobile phone conversations of suspects and those that may be up to no good as well as to monitor and identify anyone who causes trouble in the period leading up to the elections and thereafter? Which agency intent on extending its reach and improving on its efficiencies would not go out of its way to lay its hands on such a massive and potentially useful data base?

By the same token, which rogue government would not use such information to harass and intimidate its populace and subject them to undue scrutiny and surveillance now that they have all their crucial details. I am not saying that this is what is going to happen, but I will not be surprised if this is the secondary motive why the BVR system was rolled out!

If as a secondary motive the information collected under the guise of biometric voter registration is able to prevent terrorists from infiltrating our borders, can assist in capturing and identifying criminals, weed out the bad elements from society, trace those that are in the country illegally and help to identify and trace criminal elements amongst us then it is acceptable to me. If however, the secondary purpose is to assist in spying on me and infringing on my constitutional rights then I take great exception to this motive.

Be that as it may however, the whole process is well grounded in our constitution and the IEBC Act and we have little choice at present but to accept it as is!!

Who is more ‘damu’ than the other?

Shameful scenes confronted us the other day. It was at a meeting called by officials in Kiambu County to discuss and agree on how the January 2013 TNA nominations for the county would be conducted.

The big guns had in all likelihood transported their supporters "en masse" to the venue in the hope of showing their popularity and perhaps to sway some of the ‘undecided’ to their side. Ugly and chaotic scenes of fisticuffs, hurling abuse and chair throwing ruled the day before some semblance of order prevailed and the nominations to the county committees were finalized. But, if this is the democracy some people talk about then I want nothing to do with it because if two people were nominated to the county committee after being read from a list and with the process having to be repeated in some instances as differing lists were forwarded, then this is not democracy!!

The forthcoming elections are going to be a high stakes game. With so many elective positions up for grabs and with so little time for nominations left, and with no ‘second’ chance once you fail at the initial nomination it will be a truly chaotic situation as all the contenders battle for the nomination ticket of the most popular party in their areas in a no holds barred, winner take all contest. It will make the actual elections in March 2013 look like a stroll in the park because the nomination process will be the final decider on who gets to be on the ballot box and on which party ticket!!

The Kiambu fiasco is going to be replayed across the country in one form or another as the current crop of MP’s, long forgotten former MP’s smelling reincarnation in the expanded democratic space, professionals looking for the excitement of competitive politics  to make a change and all looking to get the all-important party nomination for one of the various seats.

Those from the various counties in Central Province will fight tooth and nail for a TNA nomination, those in Luo Nyanza for an ODM nomination, those in Ukambani for a WIPER nomination, those in Western Kenya are still deciding, those in the Coast are still at ease waiting for direction etc, etc. There will be no negotiation and no consensus just a group of self-important people fighting for a nomination that in their own warped belief is divinely theirs by right and by virtue of the loudest praises to their party leaders and the strongest appeals to their tribal cohorts in support of their favorite candidate.

If this thing called democracy was alive and kicking in Kenya, then why the acrimony among those who claim to practice the same ideals as their leaders? Why the name calling, chair throwing and general bad manners if (as claimed) they will respect the nomination process and support the one who has won for the better good of the party? Or is it just a fallacy that your party leaders are democrats and have high ideals yet the truth of the matter is that they are mere rabble rousers content with a cabal of foul mouthed individuals only looking out for their personal interests?

I see democracy in Kenya taking a lethal body blow immediately after the nomination process and our courts inundated with petition after petition from sour losers unbelieving that even after emptying their bank accounts in a bid to woe the electorate to support them, they have failed to make the ‘cut’!

There will be a lot of very unhappy people out there once the nomination process is concluded and with nowhere else to go they will be licking their wounds and crying just how unfair the process was well after the actual election in March 2013.

And before I forget, and if you have not yet done so, make sure you register as a voter before the deadline expires on 18th December 2012!!

Celebrating Barack Obama's win

The euphoria with which Barack Obama’s presidential victory in the 2012 US elections was met with in Kenya got me thinking. Here we were in Kenya and like millions around the world,  excited and ecstatic about the goings on thousands of miles away in the USA. Is it because we have seen that someone from a minority with great oratorical skills, a political novice at that, can be the president of the only remaining super power in the world today? Probably, but it is more likely that he has galvanized us by his organizational skills, his focus on the changes he intends to bring to the US economy and his agenda for the American people and probably the fact that he comes across as one of us who values the family unit and has no skeletons in his closet having revealed all way before his historic victory in 2008. Barack is also a scion of one of us with Kenyan ties and Kenyan bloodlines and deserves to be celebrated if for no other reason than this.

We are also about to embark on our own elections in 2013 in our own little enclave called Kenya though serious campaigning has been going on for months now. Would we react with the same deliriousness if Ruto or Uhuru won next year’s presidential election? Knowing that the duo are gung ho on being on the ballot paper come election day in 2013 while they are suspects with crimes against humanity charges awaiting their trail at the Hague gives me goose bumps if any of them were to win.

What would we be celebrating if any of them were to win?  We would be celebrating a hollow victory, a win for impunity and a win for a lame duck president already a pariah in the eyes of the international community. We would be announcing to the world just how short sighted and petty we Kenyans can be allowing a criminal suspect to masquerade as a leader of a country and at its very pinnacle as a president. We would be saying that we prefer that the rule of the jungle overrides the very constitution that we fought so hard for since 1990 and that our President then swore to defend before a multitude of Kenyans and the world at large in 2010.

We would be the nation talked about as being the most hopeful in 2002 but the most hopeless in 2013 having extinguished our hopes and dreams at the pyre of self-interest and intense tribal emotions. Where the lure of the filthy lucre ‘cash’ and ‘greed’ infected all of us and imbued in us an uncanny penchant to act foolishly and disingenuously, begging to be the laughing stock of the world our past achievements rendered irrelevant.

From our world beating sports men and women, to MPESA that has revolutionalized money payment systems internationally, to James Mwangi who has led Equity Bank to the pinnacle of success and won international accolades for his visionary style of running a business, to Wangari Maathai a winner of the Nobel Prize (may god rest her soul in peace), to an economy at the brink of super expansion with recent discoveries of vast quantities of oil and other valuable minerals, to our world beating free Primary Education among other achievements, everything would count for nothing.

Future generations would accuse us of selling our souls to the devil for 30 pieces of silver and our history would be most tainted with tome upon tome written of a corrupt and inept populace that believed in the rhetoric that of the many unblemished presidential candidates in 2013 our choice was restricted to one of two that had a pending case of crimes against humanity at the international criminal court and whom we sanitized through the ballot box by electing him the president to rule over us from the Hague!

We would be thumbing our noses at our business and development partners telling them to get lost and stay out of our internal matters and shouting from the roof tops about our sovereignty and the right to govern ourselves away from the prying eyes of 'foreigners' and other ‘tourists’.

With our celebration of a presidential win by either of the duo we would be wiping away any meaningful legacy that we would have bequeathed to future generations of Kenyans and be consigning ourselves to the eternal hell and damnation that would be Kenya, since local and international crooks would find a safe haven to perpetrate their dastardly deeds secure in the knowledge that impunity and corruption have found a willing house mate and the rule of law has been effectively thrown out of the window!

Many do not like to hear the truth but I hang my head in shame when I think that this could well be what awaits Kenyans  after the 2013 elections.

I pray that the lords of impunity including their hangers on and allied associates get a resounding trouncing at the ballot box for even imagining that they will rule over us!

Leave me out of your political fundraising:

A disturbing trend is emerging where people vying for political office in the forthcoming general elections slated for March 2013 in Kenya are calling on their supporters and society at large to contribute to their campaign funding.

From leading presidential hopefuls, to gubernatorial and senatorial contenders, to women’s representatives and members of parliament expensive advertisements are splashed in the leading daily newspapers inviting people to dinners, goat eating sessions, strategy meetings etc etc. I am sure a lot of resources are also spent on invitation cards, SMS messages, email invitations, booking of hotels and other venues and whose sole aim is to raise funds for political campaigns. Figures of Kshs. 1,000,000.00 per plate have been whispered to me in the past as what some people are expected to pay for dinner in an upmarket hotel while for the not so well off (?) Kshs. 10,000.00 to Kshs. 20,000.00 per plate is expected of them.

I have been recently invited for one of these ‘meetings’ which I refused to attend and the person inviting me was promising me all kinds of favors when they are elected to their office of choice, including getting jobs for my daughters!!! Puhleeeze…………………………….I am quite capable of getting jobs for my daughters when they are done with their education thank you!!

I want to put it to these political hopefuls that standing for a political office is like participating in a lottery, you either win or your lose and there is no joy or glory in being runners-up. This means that since you will be the eventual winner, that is if you do convince the electorate that you are the best candidate, the victory is to you and you alone.

This business of playing the lottery with other people’s money is not only unfair but a downright con game if the only promise that you can make to them is that you will get their children jobs and access to the good things in life once elected yet your intention is to renege on every single promise you have made the minute you are elected to that high office. It is also not improbable that you are planning to raise the campaign funds with a dishonest motive because your intention is to carry out an unconvincing campaign using as little of the funds raised as possible with the intention of shoring up a battered bank account with the majority of the funds once you ‘lose’ because it is a known fact in Kenya that there is no transparency and accountability in how the campaign funds are raised and utilized.

So are these fund raising antics just mere distractions to fool the gullible people willing to fund your political campaign that you shall ‘look’ after them when you are in power? Or is it just the usual business as usual thing to get money from people by false pretenses even by those who can comfortably fund their own campaigns from their own bank accounts and not even feel as if anything has happened to their bank balances.

As the saying goes, a fool and his money are soon parted and to assume that just because you have wagered your shillings on someone who has promised you a ‘plum’ posting after he/she is elected or that they will honor that promise under the new constitutional dispensation which insists on certain minimum benchmarks for constitutional office holders one of which is not having donated to someone’s political kitty or/and having signed MOU’s with them is to wishful think in the extreme

Be warned, the season of political chicanery, tomfoolery and downright con games is here lest you get caught being called to 'buy' your way into some obtuse dream of being a somebody when you favorite candidate is in power while they may command no support even from their own family members.

As for me, I don’t owe anybody any political favors and neither am I owed any by anybody. I may be a fool but leave this fool alone as you go about your political fund raising!!

Be aware of what you criticise!!

I had a meeting this morning in the City Centre at 10.00 am. Knowing the unpredictability of Nairobi traffic into the CBD, I left early and was pleasantly surprised to find myself in the City Centre 20 or so minutes later. As I was early for my meeting I decided to pay my phone bills in one of the Customer Care offices in the CBD as it would save me a trip to Westlands later on in the week.

Those who read my blog know that I have an absolute zero tolerance to careless pedestrian behaviour on our roads and many times I have thrown a broadside at them for walking on the roads instead of on the sidewalks, crossing at non-designated places, walking against the flow of traffic amongst others.

Today was my turn because I was behaving exactly the same as those that I usually criticise as I cut a path across the city confidently striding on the road against the flow of traffic, crossing at non-designated places, crossing the road halfway and then waiting for a gap in the traffic  to make a mad dash across and generally making a mockery of the same behaviors that I have so often been critical about.

It dawned on me that the human being is  very fickle, quick to critique others while at the same time failing to see his own shortcomings. I am not sure why I was doing the things I was doing but to me I was doing no wrong. The only justifiable place that I recall in hindsight that required a wide berth was  a construction site along one of the roads where the hoarding had taken up much of the sidewalk leaving little space to walk and therefore forcing one to walk on the road at great inconvenience to motorists I am sure.

I would thus like to convey my apologies to any motorist that I may have inconvenienced today as my behavior was unwarranted, selfish and inexcusable. I don't know what foolishness got into my head but I can assure you that it will not happen again.........until perhaps the next time I am in the CBD!

I will now think twice before criticising anyone else in the future and I hope you do the same too!!