Sometimes ignorance is surely bliss - Part 2

....................So here we were not yet into Malaba, Uganda and had just discovered that our driver had no travel documents!! Does one get annoyed at this sheer ineptitude on the part of his employer or just grin and bear it? I can only say that our patience was now getting tested to the absolute limit!

The chaos on the Kenyan side of the border was not helping either. There are too many busybodies hanging about seeking to make a commision by fast tracking the process for groups such as ours, too many money changers most of whom cannot be identified other than by the wads of currency they hold, the only semblance of clean toilets are extremely filthy and you have to pay handsomely to use them.....and they close at 8.30 pm leaving you to god knows what devices should you suddenly cramp up and need a toilet fast!

The Ugandan side of the border is generally more orderly with a well built complex hosting a number of banks and official money changers dressed in yellow dust coats for visibility perhaps (but they make you think of the Nairobi City Council parking meter attendants instead)! The process of obtaining an entry stamp in your passport is generally less stressful then when exiting Kenya and the toilets while not generally the cleanest you will come across are free for use by all and were being vigorously cleaned by an attendant even at this late hour......and they are open 24 hours a day!!

Finally, two and a half hours later at 9.30 p.m passports stamped for all of us, vehicle export documents issued and signed, the drivers travel documents accepted in Uganda the last barrier at Malaba, Uganda was lifted and we were finally let into the country. It was now only a 210 km distance to Kampala and the end was in sight.............or so we thought until we hit another traffic gridlock of impatient, truck, bus and car drivers just inside Uganda but which mercifully released its stranglehold on us 30 minutes later.

So off into the night we sped through Tororo, Bugiri, Iganga many of us already in dreamland as a result of our long journey and the effects of the drinks we had partaken off. Then on through Jinja - the source of the Nile - and across the Owen Falls Dam then through the inky blackness of Mabira Forest mile upon mile of nothing but thick forest on both sides of the road. Then on through the towns of Lugazi and Mukono, famous for its skewered roast chicken and pork, and on towards Kampala and through the many sleeping suburbs of any great African capital city until sometime around 2.00 a.m many of us now fully awake we skirted the Nelson Mandela Stadium and swept into Kampala city centre still alive and vibrant at this time of the night. We were finally there after an exhausting 19 hour journey though not yet at our hotel destination some 20 kms south of the city on Entebbe Road where we arrived at 2.45 a.m waited for by our host whose welcoming dinner had long gone cold at the table but which we partook of with relish nonetheless. We had finally arrived!!

Taking stock of this extraordinary experience, it was apparent that we were victims of our own ignorance because had we thought this thing through, the least stressful option was to have left Nairobi the previous afternoon, broken our journey in Eldoret (this had been considered and thought uneccessary) and then start off early the next morning for our final drive to Kampala where we would have arrived refreshed and alert in the late afternoon rather than as the tired and hungover lot that arrived early in the morning. The heavy vehicular traffic as a result of the holiday vacation in two days time also did not help our cause as we came to realise later and neither did the lack of travel papers and lack of experience on the part of the driver who it seemed had never been to Uganda (or perhaps crossed any international border) help us at all.

Our lesson learnt that is exactly what we did a few days later choosing to start our journey a day earlier than intended (and forfeiting an extra night that was already paid for at our Kampala hotel) at 11.00 am, arriving in Eldoret at 7.30 p.m for an overnight stay at Sirikwa Hotel after an uneventful experience at the border and then leaving at 10.00 a.m the next morning for our second leg of the trip to arrive in Nairobi at 5.30 p.m.

Was the nominations process credible?

I am persuaded that the violence witnessed across the country over the last few days after the botched party nominations could have been avoided had all the parties been sincere about running the process cleanly and transparently.

This business of having the nominations at the end of the designated period was certainly not in good faith as can be seen when compared with the parties that held their nominations earlier and had an almost flawless experience. It would appear that the process all along was more in keeping with the requirements of individual political parties and the IEBC rules for all parties to conduct a nominations process then to ensure that the will of the people in choosing their preferred candidates prevailed. It was a mere formality. The extra period extended by the IEBC both in terms of the nomination period and the extended deadline for parties to finalise their list of nominees did not help matters and added fuel to an already volatile situation.

The resultant controversies surrounding who won or lost, allegations of electoral malpractices, elections not taking place in some areas, burning of ballot papers, suspect announcements by returning officers who were then incommunicado, winners being denied nomination certificates, people declaring themselves winners  etc all had overtures of the botched 2007 elections and the violence and mayhem that followed.

The post elections crisis of 2008 was precipitated along similar lines with delays in the counting of ballots, delays in making announcements, suspect announcements by returning officers who then went missing, people declaring themselves winners etc. The longer the process took from voting to counting the greater the probability that some mischief was afoot and I can now safely say that this has happened during these recently concluded party nominations with all the major political parties guilty of manipulation and handing nomination certificates to their preferred candidates at the expense of genuine ‘winners’.

The IEBC while not directly involved in the nominations process in my view has not come out clean and as an independent body since they were responsible for ensuring that the timelines were followed scrupulously and that the deadlines for submission of names was done as per the timelines that all political parties were aware of. This business of extending the deadlines by the IEBC as the process continued seems to suggest some subtle manipulation behind the scenes by powerful people with vested interests who wanted a certain outcome in certain areas that only an extension of time would guarantee!!

This has been a shameful process and clearly democracy has been tossed out of the window together with the aspirations of the electorate who participated in the process and whose wishes have been blatantly ignored by the parties to suit certain interests.

I foresee a political blood bath come 4^th March 2013 after voters reject those that have been imposed on them and they strongly protest that they have been rigged out. The IEBC certainly has a lot of work ahead of it in delivering a credible and flawless election process in March 2013 and all of us will be watching keenly to see if they have learnt any lessons from the recently concluded shambolic nominations process.

Is this a sign of things to come?

If this is the sign of things to come then we are in deep trouble. I have as a result decided not to exercise my democratic right to participate in the primaries for reasons that will be clear shortly.

Someone, actually the usual suspects, have cheated us…………………………..AGAIN!! We have been cheated that there have been party primary nominations that have been carried out over two days. The deadline for carrying out these nominations and submitting names to the IEBC so that they can go on with the business of informing the printers the details of those that will be on the ballot papers at the Kenyan general election has been pushed forward by 3 days. 3 days! Do we have the luxury of such time considering that the timelines are so tight or is this another conspiracy for the incumbent to stay on in office for an additional period of time? I don’t trust these jokers!!

While the presidential nominees and their running mates for all the parties contesting the forthcoming general elections are sitting pretty in the knowledge that their names are a foregone conclusion on the ballot paper since all they had to do was attend a national delegates caucus that endorsed them as the presidential candidates of their parties, it is left to ‘Wanjiku’ and her brothers and sisters to fight it out at the grassroots trying to clinch that all important nomination ticket of their party of choice.

This business of leaving the primaries to the last possible day to me stunk to high heaven and of a conspiracy. A conspiracy to knock out some popular candidates and impose those same old dinosaurs that everyone wants seen led to pasture to graze out their remaining days in peace and relative obscurity. It works this way.

Musa might be the most popular candidate for the post of Senator/Governor/MP etc in a county , but he does not have the support and  blessings of the kingmakers of his party. Otiende on the other hand may be a very unpopular candidate with some pockets of support within his area but has ‘greeted’ the powers that be and has been promised an automatic nomination at the primaries. However in this era of heightened scrutiny, this cannot be given out openly. So what do you do?

The trick is to push the primaries to the last possible day and then ensure that the areas where Otiende enjoys some semblance of support get their ballot papers early and the nominations are conducted in an orderly fashion with minimal disruption. The ballots for the areas where Musa enjoys support are late/incomplete/few/none existent etc, therefore ensuring that these areas are mired in confusion and controversy and nominations take place in a clumsy and shambolic manner if at all. This almost guarantees that Otiende will clinch the party nomination ticket not because he was the most popular but because he was the candidate of choice for the kingmakers whom he had ‘seen’ earlier on during the campaigns and whose win has been engineered by making the nomination process of the most popular candidate almost impossible in the areas where he enjoys support. In any case which court of law (if the matter ever got there which it will not) would rule that Otiende was not legitimately nominated considering that the process was conducted in an orderly manner free of rigging as opposed to the other camp where the order of the day was noisy confusion and crude improvisation!

If the above feat is accomplished within the first day, the nominations are closed for that electoral area and declared a runaway success. If this does not happen on the first day, then the party bigwigs announce that there was too much confusion and that the nominations have to be repeated the next day so that the conspiracy on how to ensure the ‘preferred’ candidate wins the primaries is made fool-proof overnight. If there was some semblance of a nomination on day one then the formula on how to rig the numbers in favor of the preferred candidate is hatched again overnight.

Though the losing candidates have the right of appeal through the respective parties, the fact that the nomination dates have been pushed by a day means that  you have no recourse to a court of law since they do not sit on the weekend. In addition the appeals will all be heard on Monday at the party level and drag on the whole day while your party is supposed to hand in the list of nominees for the various parties by the same Monday which means that Musa will be left high and dry and with little option but to throw in the towel since he has no way of joining another party because the nominations period closed the previous week and he has no one to appeal to since the party mechanism has effectively locked him out and ensured he can go nowhere else.

This is the reason I have decided not to exercise my right to nominate someone at the primaries on the second day (having been caught out at the last minute on the first day as I went to my poliing station. In any case I was told nothing happened and no voting took place) despite holding a valid party card and a being a valid registered and confirmed voter because I do not wish to be part of the wicked games that politicians play and be used as a pawn in their shameful schemes. They do not care about the injustices perpetrated on the hapless Musa’s of the political world whose only crime was not to ‘greet’ those that mattered, or the threats of possible violence when the supporters of Musa now alive to what has happened decide to protest vehemently only to be tear gassed and baton charged by the riot police…….or shot as happened somewhere.

And that is how the same tired, boring faces will be on the ballot papers fighting it out to clinch that seat. But all is not lost because their behavior at the primaries should not go unpunished and the backlash should hit them on Election Day and cause them massive humiliation which is what they deserve.

This animal called the motor vehicle:

Recently while driving within Nairobi on some errand or another, I was dumfounded by the icy eyeball stare of a pedestrian in reaction to my warning hoot as he sauntered nonchalantly across the road against a red light for pedestrians and a green light for vehicles. It was obvious he had not the foggiest idea that a car is an animal capable of devouring one in mere seconds.

 A few weeks ago I blogged about the fear of being ‘eaten’ by an animal drummed into many of us Kenyans at a very early age. My intention was to bring out the fact that perhaps if the dangers of motor vehicles had also been drummed into us at an early age maybe, just maybe the carelessness exhibited by many pedestrians walking in the streets of the towns and cities and the highways and byways of Kenya would be more wary and aware of the imminent dangers posed by motor vehicles. So I will try a different tact and see how it goes.

A motor vehicle, be it a bus, a truck, a trailer, a pick-up, a passenger car or any of the many other variants is a wild untamed animal. It moves at speeds many times faster than a human being can ever accomplish, and is unemotional, unafraid and totally unaffected by its tenacity to inflict harm on one of  its favorite meals the human being. Any human being trying to out run it would be fodder to its voracious appetite in the blink of an eye. Its appetite is not only reserved for the human being as it also devours others of its own kind who dare to challenge its authority while on its side of the path!!



I doubt anyone survived this accident!

It is so vicious that it should be feared more than a well-aimed bullet, a dangerous man eating lion, the innocuous scorpion whose sting is fatal or a hissing poisonous serpent and should be treated with the utmost respect. It is can make mince-meat out of a human being and is also an accomplished cleaver cutting through bone as easily as a saw. It can disembowel you, mangle you, throw you a hundred feet, churn you into an unrecognizable mash of meat, bone, gristle, intestine, your last meal and brain and still keep on going as if nothing happened, its innards unaffected and unblemished by its voracious appetite.

Sometimes the brainlessness and unhealthy appetite of the motor vehicle comes from a strange feeling of power and invincibility when it is is being controlled by a driver high on cheap liquor, who is anemic and suffers from poor eyesight but is too proud to accept, or one who has been exposed to some illegal substances either smoked or injected or out of plain tiredness causing him to want to move faster and faster and becoming even more of a killer animal than usual. Talk about an unseeing, unfeeling automaton!!

Often many motor vehicles are in a poor state of health and have not been subjected to the tender loving care expected to tame a dangerous animal. It often suffers from poor braking, a suspect suspension system, defective and smooth tires, use of poor quality fuels and lubricants, poor blurred vision as a result of dodgy head and tail lights all causing it to stagger all over the road and often refusing to move at all and in addition to being a dangerous animal while in motion, making it also a potential killer while at a standstill – general malaise occasioned by poor diet and health care. The sicker the animal the more dangerous it is almost like a rabid dog unable to distinguish fact from fiction.

This is an animal to be respected by all means and has been the leading cause of suffering and misery across the country - and indeed across the world - as it continues to devour people day in and day out with no respite. It has killed more people annually than cancer and AIDS in Kenya combined and will continue to do so as the Grim Reaper of choice unless we Kenyans start respecting this animal and giving it space to travel at its crazy speeds because believe or not if you give it the space it demands, it will leave you alone as it passes along its well-trodden path.  

A bad motor vehicle accident

And when the animal suffers from its health related issues, it is incumbent upon you to leave it alone and look for a healthier specimen which is much easier to tame to take you on your wild ride home. When the driver himself seems to be suffering from delusions of invincibility it is your responsibility to let him know that your life is not fodder for the insatiable greed of this animal called a motor vehicle and choose to alight rather than wait to be the next serving of its voracious appetite!

So you have been warned about this heartless animal called the motor vehicle, responsible for gruesome deaths across Kenya over the years and which is as unfeeling and as callous as they come, lurking around the corner waiting to pounce on those foolhardy enough to dice with it by crossing its path at the wrong place and at the wrong time.

For the sake of your family and friends………..TAKE CARE lest you be the next victim of this vicious beast!!

NB - For those with a strong constitution you may view pictures of motor vehicle accident victims by following this link - http://www.nairaland.com/375098/nasty-effects-road-accidents-caution .
The pictures are extremely graphic so proceed with caution

The change of guard beckons

Recently my daughter hosted some 5 friends at our home for an overnight visit. All but one of them are boys and a girl whose parents have been friends with me and my wife for many years hence we have watched them grow up over the years to what they are today, young adults.

All of them are in college somewhere or the other around the world, majority being in Kenya and they are all now on the brink of starting off on their own life journeys free from the tyranny of parents, having learnt valuable lessons along the way which they hopefully will not repeat in their own lives and with their own families. Now peer pressure stares them in the face, they have access to the internet and all kinds of information at their finger tips and the influence that this can have on them.

Several of them have had varied experiences when growing up as children either from broken families, to having to live with step parents and step brothers and sisters, being shunted off to boarding school for long periods of time and parents separating for whatever reasons and periods with the inevitable imprint that this leaves on young and impressionable minds.

There are lessons to be learnt in any such situations and some may leave a lasting impression while others may be fleeting in terms of their psychological impact on the mind and future approach to life. As they exchanged stories about their various experiences, played cards, listened to music, had a drink etc it occurred to me that these children (they will hate my liberal use of this word) were on the way to parenthood probably making me a father in law and hopefully a grandfather in the not too distant future.

I have watched them grow from crying babies, to arkward toddlers, to confident infants, through school, through teenage and now as young adults and I wonder if I also did pass through those stages in my life to what I am today - almost a grandfather. This is the future generation now ready to take on the baton and the changing of the guard to chase their own destiny and vision in their chosen career paths with all the promises of youth and energy behind them goarding them on and channeling them to a life that is fruitful and gratifying. There is a time and a place for everything and those that ultimately succeed are those that know when and where to draw the line.

I wish you all the best - you know yourselves - as you take over the guard and wish you and your friends a richly rewarding and engaging life. Do the right things and encourage those who are your friends to do the same and make sure you enjoy life but not to the detriment of what is important at any one point in time !!

A campaign to lose

I am not one who sees into the future and neither do I profess to be a soothsayer, a tea leaves reader, a clairvoyant or a Mayan! I do not know how to read palms, or shells, or the dregs of your coffee and neither do I commune with witches, wizards or anything ‘shetani’. In other words I am not a political commentator or an armchair politico, whatever that means. I use my mirror on the wall into the world

My mirror on the wall tells me that politicians are a very clever though devious lot. They are very good at manipulating the status quo so that they come out as projecting a larger than life persona, a mythical god like image that they can then use to bargain at the table of power. My mirror tells me that Uhuru & Ruto and their Jubilee alliance are just such clever politicians, who have managed to imbue in their followers this god like status and larger than life persona. They have a fanatical almost suicidal following among their tribesmen and that they command great political power is not in doubt. The Kikuyu will almost certainly to the last man vote for Uhuru while Ruto promises to bring a mountain of votes to the ballot paper for Uhuru through his Kalenjin community.

Now these two fellows are very clever and therefore they are not foolish. They know that with the ICC cases hanging over their heads like the guillotine of old, Kenya will be in extremely dire circumstances should they be elected as president and deputy president respectively. They are astute businessmen in their own rights who own either directly or through numerous proxies some of the most profitable businesses across Kenya as well as tracts of land the size of small countries. They are in businesses which rely on the international perception of Kenya including tourism, banking, insurance, real estate, insurance, dairy farming, minerals etc  and it would be foolish for them to jeopardize these businesses once elected to the highest offices in the land. Their businesses must also have also lost massively after the last fracas in 2007.

My submission therefore is that they have everything to lose if they are elected and that they are now merely running a campaign not to be elected but to entrench their positions amongst their communities so as to obtain respectable representation in parliament, the senate and other leadership positions for their rank and file so that while they may not be in government, they have the numbers to insist on their pre-election coalitions being honored to some extent even with another as president. Without these two at the apex of the Jubilee alliance, many senatorial, gubernatorial, parliamentary and other political candidates will not see the doors of the offices they aspire to occupy and that is why Uhuru & Ruto have been held hostage by these political wannabes who know that without their masters, they will get nowhere. Uhuru & Ruto badly need to be on the ballot paper as they have all along insisted but this will be merely to pander to the egos of their respective communities who want to hear nothing else other than their ‘man’ being on the presidential ballot paper.

They are therefore campaigning to lose as can be seen from the many shenanigans being played around surrounding some senior government officials, the devil and the other alliances, which are all calculated to ensure that however you look at the numbers the CORD Alliance will most likely win the next general elections, with Raila Odinga, warts and all, as the next president of Kenya and at the first ballot.

If you observe keenly, Raila has been playing a very conciliatory game including promising to fight to have the ICC trails brought to Kenya for the sake of Uhuru & Ruto and imploring Mudavadi to rejoin ODM (and CORD by extension) because this is part of the lose-lose strategy of Uhuru & Ruto’s joint presidential bid so that they get a soft landing under Raila Odinga’s presidency (assuming he sticks to his promises) as well as almost guaranteeing Mudavadi whose penchant for getting himself check mated while all along he was holding a commanding edge over his opponents is legendary, a good position in his administration.  After all you would rather have a reluctant homeboy on your side and rooting for you and not on the other side barking and letting all and sundry know your dirty little secrets!! If by some miracle Raila was to succeed in bringing the ICC cases to Kenya, then Uhuru and Ruto will be suitably chastised and avoid making a nuisance of themselves in front of the benevolent Raila.

 Uhuru & Ruto are now firmly in the barrel already in the river and moving with the high current at breakneck speed towards the elections waterfall and not knowing how to get off without hurting themselves. They have built the barrel and they must now ride it to its inevitable conclusion. Unfortunately, they will never accept that they are not in in for the long haul, because they know that the country will be ungovernable under their rule as well as the fact that Kenya will lose all forward momentum and economic growth and go the way of North Korea forever shunned and vilified by the international community and struggling to meet the basic need of its people.........and their businesses will all but collapse leaving hundreds jobless and destitute and the ensuing multiplier effect leading to complete economic collapse of the economy.

As I said before I do not see into the future but rely on my mirror into the world, but if I was a pragmatic man in the shoes of the duo, Uhuru & Ruto, I would do what is best for my country but still be seen to be putting up a semblance of a fight so that my supporters remain convinced that I am in it for the long run and that I still retain my status as king maker but I would 'throw' the election.

Whether guilty or innocent after my trail with the ICC my stature as a nationalist would be on the upswing giving me a better chance at the highest office in the land once free of the shackles of the Hague.

My mirror has spoken!!