Those bleating goats were a real nuisance!!

I and my four siblings grew up in a peri -urban area of Nairobi. The family home was on a 5 acre parcel of land as were many of the neighboring properties. The surrounding area also had coffee farms and dams so it was a paradise for adventurous children to walk, fish, ride bicycles and so on. Wild dik diks, rabbits, squirrels, snakes, chameleons, tortoises and monkeys were all over the place including occasional rumors of leopard sightings. In view of the size of the property, my parents kept the occasional domestic animals more specifically cows and goats. Some neighbors even had chickens, pigs, sheep and horses. Like most of the other neighbors, my folks also cultivated maize, beans, carrots, potatoes, bananas, sukuma wiki, spinach etc for home consumption with part of the land left for the cows and goats to graze on the luxuriant grass.

While the cows had an attendant to look after them and to milk them when needed, the goats were another story altogether. During the school holidays and when it was particularly dry the duty of taking the goats out to look for grazing pasture fell on me and my brother and there was nothing as frustrating as this chore which we absolutely hated with a passion!

Much as people say that a sheep could easily be one of the most stupid and stubborn animal alive, I think the goat is a close second if not the outright champion of stupidity. You see these animals would take the slightest opportunity to raid the maize or beans planted in the shamba (usually someone else’s shamba) at the expense of the grass they were supposed to feed on so that we spent a frustrating afternoon shooing them out of the shamba only for others to make their way back the moment our backs were turned.

At the end of a tedious day we would herd the animals back into their shed for the night, single out the most notorious maize grabbing ones and then cane them mercilessly as a punishment for taking us round and round in circles as the others watched in shocked discomfort their pitiful bleating notwithstanding. This apparently did little to change the thieving ways of the diehard goats that would the very next day stray back into someone else’s shamba to run riot on their crops. Day in day out caning did nothing to stop the goats from raiding yet another shamba and we soon saw the futility of it all and just shooed them out of the shamba when the strayed there. We wished death on all of them so that we would be freed from the misery and tedium of herding those damned animals.

Now fast forward 35 years and the same goats are now wandering into people’s shambas and making a beeline for the choicest crops, the low hanging fruit so to speak. Not even the caning that the shepherds are inflicting on them and the uproar that has arisen will get them to see their wayward behavior. Every attempt to tame them has been a miserable failure and they continue to pillage and roam unfettered in the people’s shamba unfazed and unapologetic. We wish them a thousand painful deaths because we are tired of looking after them in their wayward ways and we have been reduced to shooing them out of the shamba but knowing that tomorrow they shall be back to eat to their hearts content.

Who are these goats you may wonder? Off course it is our top heavy political class both elected and rejected who see nothing wrong in taking us round and round in circles blaming each other for their political failures while seeking our attention as they demand more and more from us by way of meeting their expensive habits as they demand recognition, status and more and more bells and whistles to boost their already bloated egos. On top of it all some are beating the drums of a referendum the cost of which shall be met from the public coffers as if we do not have other more pressing issues to deal with such as drought ravaging some in the country, illnesses and disease affecting many, the threats to our tourism industry due to the terrorism threats by Al Shabab and other disgruntled elements of society, good schools infrastructure for our children etc etc.

These goats have even raised uproar in other foreign shambas where they have been declared persona non grata for their cheap theatrics and notoriety as they eat their way through those shambas devouring the best bits as they have been doing while at home and collectively shaming us all.

I wish these goats would all go to hell while the rest of us go on with our lives for surely we cannot be eating, sleeping and drinking politics day in day out as if we have nothing better to do much to the chagrin of many Kenyans who are fed up with the political din and sabre rattling by all these bleating goats!!

The positive side of being old:

An 89 year old man just the other day told me that he shall live for another 11 years and go to be with his maker at 100 years of age. He challenged me to note this in my diary so that I could be a witness to this remarkable feat that a doctor (as he told me) guaranteed him shall happen at his last medical checkup a year ago!

Now this man has a very active lifestyle despite his failing eyesight and memory. He is proud that he has no serious physical ailments at this ripe old age despite a hip injury a while back that forced him to use a cane while walking. He is also proud to have lived to see his grandchildren and was recently made a great grandfather by one of them. He is still involved in commodity trading and purchases commodities on wholesale basis four times a month from importers in Mombasa which he sells to traders and other business men making a small profit in the process. His truck driver makes the long journey to Mombasa on his behalf in case you wonder how he does it!!

He is also actively involved in shares trading and has a healthy portfolio of investments in some of the best blue chip companies in Kenya. He told me that he is not motivated by huge profits but by the desire to stay active, sharp and focused though he wants to add fertilizer trading to the commodities that he trades in as it has better profit margins! I am sure his sons have tried to get him to relax but he seems to want none of that!!

He has endured a chequered life and business career spanning the past 70 years and has seen and done it all. His day commences at 7.00 am with a cup of tea with three……yes three heaped spoons of sugar (no heightened blood sugar levels for this guy I tell you). He then goes to visit his clients to collect what they owe him as well as to sell them his commodities. I bet few people will tell an 89 year old man that they can’t pay him his money so I guess this is a good strategy on his part. Once done with his rounds he goes back home by 1.00 pm, has his lunch and rests. He was very categorical that he does not sleep but rests until 4.00 pm after which he watches television until dinner time and sleeps thereafter.

He also very often accompanies his son and daughter in law, whom he lives with, to social functions at the Club and other places where they have been invited something that I have been witness to at some of the bank functions that we have organized. They leaves early though on his account no doubt!

A few years back he was attacked by robbers who wanted to shoot him dead for God knows what reason. He prayed to God that they would spare him and they instead shot at one of the security guards responding to the alarm and then they ran off. Who would be so callous as to shoot an 80 something mzee and again I guess his age was his good fortune!

What I have learnt from this remarkable mzee is that positive thinking, a healthy life style and frequent medical checkups are vital to longevity as is continual activity in something you enjoy doing as in his case commodity and shares trading. There is also nothing wrong with sugar so long as your body can handle it or so he seemed to suggest.

I shall be around when the whistle blows for this mzee in 11 years’ time for I too plan on being around for a long time till the ripe old age of 100. At his age few people will want to embarrass themselves by refusing to pay you or shooting you dead so there is a positive side to age as well!!

The theory of speed:

“Hiyo gari ilikuwa inaenda kasi sana”! (that vehicle was moving very fast!) is a statement you very often hear every time there is an eye witness describing a road accident to a television news crew.

Having talked about ‘speeding’ trucks on Mombasa Road recently it got me thinking that speed is one of the most misunderstood concepts probably universally. Without going into the tedious descriptions of speed in physics that many of us have long forgotten, speed is a relative concept and it is always relative to something else. That means that where an object is stationery, then something moving past it is moving at speed. On the opposite end, two objects moving towards each other will have a closing speed of the combined speed of both of them (perhaps double speed would be an apt descriptor of such a scenario).

A tortoise plodding along would therefore consider a rabbit running past it to be moving very fast while a rabbit would consider a cheetah to be moving at great speed if the cheetah were to hypothetically be running in a race alongside the rabbit or even come to think of it the rabbit was running for its life from a cheetah out to make a meal of it! Similarly, a cyclist would be moving at speed when passing a walking pedestrian while a car would be at speed when passing a cyclist at top speed on his bicycle traveling along the same road. Ergo, a policeman waving down a truck that refuses to stop would consider the truck to be ‘speeding’ in relation to his relative position in regards to the truck!

However, this fascination with speed makes one think that all drivers in Kenya cause accidents by perennially speeding the concept of a speed limit not withstanding! Is it correct to state that an accident was caused by a ‘speeding’ vehicle (as would be reported by a watching bystander) which was travelling at 50 km/h while the maximum speed on that section of the road is 80 km/h? If the reaction by our overzealous police officers is anything to go by then they too believe that speed is the root cause of all road accidents and hence the recent crackdown on over speeding in various parts of the country.

They forget that decrepit and poorly serviced vehicles, poor road surfaces, careless pedestrians, slow moving trucks, foggy weather, tired drivers etc all contribute to the accidents on our road. If speed were the defining factor then those German autobahns with no speed limits would be a veritable disaster zone though access is restricted to motor vehicles with a top speed of more than 60 km/h meaning that many of our ‘speeding’ behemoth trucks would not be allowed on these roads.

Recent statistics sourced from Wikipedia indicates that the autobahn fatality rate in Germany is 1.7 deaths per billion-travel-kilometers and is much better when compared with the 5.1 rate on urban streets and 7.6 rate on rural roads in that country. On autobahns 22 people died per 1000 injury crashes; a lower rate than the 29 deaths per 1,000 injury accidents on conventional rural roads. I am sure these numbers are much higher in our speed deprived nation of Kenya.

So don’t believe any eye witness reports that an accident was caused by an over speeding vehicle in the absence of facts to back this up and to the detriment of other contributing factors. Similarly don’t believe any policeman who says that speed is the main cause of accidents on our roads because the well-built autobahns in Germany would be veritable killing fields if this were the case.

My take is that if the governement were to build us better roads, get those ‘speeding’ trucks of those roads and then leave us free to get to our destinations as fast as possible they would see the accident rate plummet!!

Trucks speeding off, go tell that to the birds!

A recent story where the newspapers reported that some policemen in Mombasa are having a hard time arresting truck drivers on account of technology that enables the trucks tires to remain intact even after rolling over the police road block spikes in the middle of the road thanks to self-sealing properties injected into the tyres piqued my interest. This was a fable if ever I have heard one but that probably explains why most police road block spikes look like something akin to well run over road kill, but that’s a story for another day.

The excuse by the police officer (who comes up with these stories anyway?) that their vehicles were rammed into by over loaded trucks and then the trucks sped off is the stuff of Aesop’s Fables which however difficult to rationalize have kept children enthralled for generations! No self-respecting Kenyan should believe such utter nonsense when clearly the intention is to deflect our attention from some nefarious goings on along our highways.

But, let’s analyse this issue logically.

Firstly you have a contingent of police officers manning a road block at a weigh bridge along with assorted other officers from the Ministry of Transport and the SGS at two sections along the 500 kilometer Mombasa to Nairobi highway. Each of them is responsible for something or the other within the weighbridge station while the policemen are presumably there to ensure law and order is maintained and that there is adequate protection for the other personnel carrying out their lawful duties. In between the two weighbridge locations at Mariakani & Athi River you have innumerable police checks of one form or another some equipped with police vehicles at the more remote sections of the highway some even equipped with speed guns to catch unwary over speeding drivers. How come they were unable to catch the ‘speeding’ trucks either through the speed guns use or the tried and tested method of just giving chase!!

Secondly, the trucks in question are behemoths and what are popularly referred to as trailers with 18 or 22 wheels with most carrying heavy loads of commodities and machinery to destinations upcountry and even beyond our borders. Many carry the 20 or 40 foot closed containers and as someone told me you just have to look at the way the tires are in contact with the road surface to known if the contents of the trailer are heavy or light. If you have ever had the misfortune of being stuck behind these trailers while on Mombasa Road, then to say that they are capable of ‘speeding’ off is to mangle the usage of the term speeding if you know what I mean.

Thirdly, these trailers crawl along at a mind numbing 50 kmp/h………on a downhill slope when fully laden and at a slothful crawl when going up even the smallest hill. At certain places on this highway, they even have special climbing lanes for the trailers so that other traffic may at least overtake at these sections and flow comfortably and where many of the trailers, huffing and puffing and belching obnoxious clouds of diesel exhaust come to a juddering halt unable to complete the climb clear signs of being over loaded. Then some joker claims that these trailers ‘sped’ off!

Finally, my experience of Mombasa Road is that there are few if any alternative routes that one may take along the highway to get to Nairobi & beyond. Something as big as a trailer cannot possibly hide or be hidden anywhere along the highway without being spotted by anyone with 20/20 vision and if the shambolic recent police recruitment exercise is anything to go by, a great premium is kept on the physical attributes of those keen to join the force including presumably eyesight. So how can we entrust our security to people who can’t ‘see’ a large trailer on a 500 kilometer highway which is the gateway to East Africa that has almost run over other fellow officers along the way? Even if we extend the journey by any of these ‘speeding’ trailers all the way to any of the border crossings with our neighbors, that gives the authorities a 1,000 kilometer and at least a 3 day window in which to locate and arrest the offending drivers!!!

Some of the comments (excuses is more like it) attributed to our men and women of the police force are just comedic in their dead pan delivery and this one clearly takes the cake. It belittles the intelligence of the Kenyan populace and becomes yet another joke focused on the extent of the (in)abilities of those in charge of keeping us all safe. Who is responsible for disciplining and keeping such dim officers who can’t even be trusted to communicate propaganda statements right?

Come on man, we Kenyans are not as daft as you think so go tell that to the birds!!

So what’s wrong with slaughtering a dog?

Another guy has been arrested slaughtering a dog in Naivasha hardly a week after another guy (who I can bet was probably not the first to do so, nor was it his first dog to slaughter) was arrested doing the same dastardly deed. Haven’t these guy heard of something called in the privacy of your own home, where you can do all you want including dancing nude and slaughtering dogs without a nosy neighbor pointing the cops in your direction? Whether the meat was for sale or for personal consumption is not the issue here because no one will admit to offering dog meat for sale in Kenya.

Why I ask, as an aside, would someone one to chow down on man’s best friend? I however think that we may be making a mountain out of a mole hill (as usual) because one man’s meat is another man’s poison or so the old adage pontificates! If you recall the recent loud protests when one enterprising Kenyan decided to set up a donkey slaughter house in Naivasha (not Naivasha again!) for export (so he said) to places where they are not so full of pretenses about what they eat and after obtaining all the licenses from the authorities including building and NEMA approvals only for the same authorities to turn around and sabotage the project “in the public interest”. Was theirs a knee jerk reaction or a well calculated and well thought out reaction to an issue that had hurt the sensibilities of a populace who have probably partaken of the same donkey meat under the mistaken belief that it was beef all the while smacking their lips at the deliciousness of the punda nyama choma!

For thousands of years the Chinese have been eating all sorts of creatures including dog meat with no apparent ill effects. I hear that so long as it walks, crawls, flies or swims it is fair game for the cooking pot in China! The Chinese are also considered to be one of the longest living human beings on Earth no doubt as a result of their not too choosy life style when it comes to culinary matters! Dog probably makes a delicious meat stew as well as a tasty kebab or samosa and by the same token you would never hear of someone in China dying of hunger thanks to their keen noses for something tasty irrespective of the wrapping around it!!

Closer home when the Chinese arrived to construct ( the soon to be stripped bare of all metal) Thika Super Highway several years ago there was a hue and cry that all of a sudden there were no stray dogs in the vicinity of the area where many of the Chinese engineers and foremen lived. I don’t recall if it were Zimmerman or Kamiti or both. Was it a mere happenstance that the arrival of the Chinese and the demise of the stray dogs in that general area were a coincidence? Why in any case would anyone care for the welfare of a stray dog in their neighborhood a creature which is more famous for scaring children and women as they go about their business and fighting for scraps of food while howling loudly in the dead of night while all along these same people had been calling upon the City Council to remove the strays from their midst unless of course it was their timid and half-starved Jimmy, Simba and Tiger watchdogs, for lack of a better word that were finding their way to the Chinese wok to be garnished with some dhania, onion and soy sauce.

Was this magnanimity towards the strays as a result of competition for the dogs from local Zimmerman and Kamiti dog meat aficionados now starved of their favorite delicacy since the masters of dog delicacies had finally arrived and pitched camp in their hood and knew how (thanks to a long tradition) to entice these animals so as to turn them into a tasty dish they probably craved after the novelty of goat meat, chicken and beef had worn off? We will never know!!

Stories abound of a thriving bush meat trade in West Africa where beef, goat and chicken meat are considered expensive delicacies and where the choice available even in many upscale hotels is bush rat stew or fish stew whereas in the seedier parts of many towns your culinary fare shall probably comprise a wide variety of ape, bat, snail, porcupine, warthog, wild boar, any unidentified rodent and so on. In many parts of South & Central America, Central Africa and South East Asia, I would like to believe that no one is too squeamish about what lands on the table because let’s face it, when you have a choice between starvation and a nicely roasted vampire bat, the bat would land on a grill faster that you can think….eehww and the bigger the bat the more people it can feed.

So even as you make disgusted noises at these folk from Naivasha slaughtering and eating dog meat, rest assured that something you eat is anathema to someone else and vice versa. What you crave as a delicacy may make someone else puke at the mere thought of how it has landed on the table. It is likely that you have partaken of dog meat or donkey meat sometime or other in this great land called Kenya because after all my own brother partook of ‘agouti’ (look it up) while on a visit to Senegal under the mistaken belief that it was goat meat!!

Why not have similar medical facilities here as in India?

In recent years, India has taken on a larger than life persona among the middle class in Kenya as a preferred medical tourism destination. As one who studied in that country many years ago when it was a perfect education destination for those who required university admission but missed the minimum floating entry points required for admission into the only university in Kenya then, it was the logical place to go as it had hundreds of universities to choose from, a myriad of courses to suit any number of individuals, a mere 5 hours flying time from Nairobi, a multicultural student population depending on the university college that you were admitted to and more importantly was easy on the pocket.

Today with tens of universities across Kenya to choose from and access to distance and correspondence studies from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide, I think India is one of the destinations that has lost out as a favorite education destination for Kenyan students. However, it has more than replaced what it lost in student enrolments with medical tourists from Kenya and indeed across the world seeking to visit the hundreds of medical facilities, many of them specialist facilities for advanced medical care and treatment at a fraction of the cost of similar treatment here at home.

India as a country with a population exceeding a billion strong (I heard 2.1 billion on radio recently but it was probably a dyslexic radio announcer that meant to say 1.2 billion) the doctors there have surely seen it all and by the same token have become experts in their chosen fields of specialization if the success rate of the many people that I know that have been treated in that country is anything to go by.

By and large the same conditions that saw many of us flock to India for studies many years ago are the same ones driving the medical tourism business today, to wit hundreds of hospitals to choose from, a myriad of specialists to suit any number of individuals, a mere 5 hours flying time from Nairobi, a multicultural patient population and more importantly is easy on the pocket.

My understanding is that the medical field in India is so competitive that to get to the top of the profession requires a commitment to providing medical care and not necessarily enriching yourself in the process. Pre-eminent and wealthy doctors are also found in India, but their journey to the apex of their careers has been a slow slog after years of success and positive contribution to their chosen speciality that then gains them a glowing professional reputation. This is a country where if your condition is diagnosed as being at an advanced stage and therefore inoperable or untreatable, this information is conveyed to you early enough without expensive surgical interventions, whereas the practice at home might be most likely for a doctor to see an opportunity to make some money and to therefore immediately recommend an elaborate surgical procedure to be carried out exploiting the desperation many families face and they are ready to cling to any possibility of a cure and that shall cost a fortune and with no hope of recovery to the patient therefore ensuring that families spend the last few resources they had paying for a treatment regimen that is doomed to fail from the word go!

But why can’t this medical tourism business practice be replicated right here in Kenya? Has any county government thought of partnering with those hospitals in India to set up facilities and laboratories similar to those in India in their backyards? Has any county government thought of partnering with those same hospitals and utilizing existing medical facilities in their counties for setting up of specialized medical units/branches of those Indian hospitals?

At the risk of possibly aggravating those in the medical profession, would any government refuse duty and tax concessions for life saving medical equipment and drugs so as to push the costs of seeking treatment here at par with what one pays in India? Imagine the consequences of such actions such as outsourced residential accommodation close to the medical facility, a possible reduction in the cost of treatment at competing private hospitals in the country, a reduction in health insurance premiums because now health care is now more competitively priced and the cost of repatriation to India to seek cheaper treatment is no longer an insurance rider option, additional jobs for Kenyan nurses and doctors in the facilities, improvement in general healthcare practices as competition intensifies etc etc.

A well thought out strategy to increase the accessibility of quality healthcare through such strategic partnerships formulated by the Central government, the licensing board for doctors, dentists and other medical practitioners, the KRA, Immigration Department and other interested bodies would see the destination of choice for medical tourism shifting to Kenya (or specifically one or several counties) and by the same token improving on the accessibility of quality medical care to more Kenyans who may not have the resources to seek treatment in foreign countries.