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PRESIDENT ELECT BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA

2008-11-05T08:55:00.000-08:00

Are George Bush and the republicans torpedoing Obama using the economy?

2008-09-26T07:10:00.000-07:00

Kibaki is bad for Kenya

2008-07-18T10:14:00.001-07:00

Raila is a breath of fresh air, unlike stale meat like kibaki.I hate to say this but kibaki has outlived his usefulness, and is now counterproductive to have as a leader. Look at mandela, he served his purpose as a freedom fighter and defender of the weak, and when he was in power, he gladly stepped aside when he realized he was not fit for the job. I admire such courage, such a man is what Raila is like. But instead, in kenya we have a vulture called kibaki. A hyena that wants to eat everything, including the grass and soil upon which the predators have left the bleeding innocent and helpless kenyans dying.

Even if raila has faults, he looks spotless in the face of such open greed and naked lust for power and ambition as exhibited by the ogres such as kibaki and mugabe. its a shame, for an african to stand up and open his mouth out here in the west or japan and say you come from kenya or zimbabwe. people look at you as if you have rabies...thanks to imbeciles like kibaki.

KIBAKI WILL RESIGN.

2008-07-13T06:06:00.000-07:00

It came as a surprise, but the kimunya fiasco shows that corruption is not welcome in kenya. People know that raila won in 2007, and so it will be almost impossible for a kibaki who lost mandate to rule over kenyans who are well aware of the fact that they were used and abused by kibaki in 2007. I dont think people dont know who was behind the violence in 2007, it was an angry population.

I will be brief and say that It will be a welcome relief when raila is made president very soon, because it will happen. mugabe only helped to make this morte apparent, because the world, and mostly kenya, does not have an apetite for a corrupt megalomaniacal tyrant who imposses himself on people. it just wont happen.

HOW TO CATCH AN ARMADILLO

2008-06-16T17:58:00.000-07:00

OK GUYS, I FINALLY CAUGHT THE BASTARD, BUT HAD TO RELEASE IT NEAR LAKE LEWISVILLE BECAUSE IT HAS CULTIVATED MY FLOWER BEDS.

The Tragedy of Emma McCune

2008-05-10T07:28:00.000-07:00

Saturday Magazine
Saturday, July 10, 1999
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The Tragedy of Emma McCune
The unlikely coupling of an English girl and a Sudanese warlord reads like a fairy-tale romance; but one with an ironical ending

By Wayua Muli

Seven years on, Sally Dudmesh remembers her best friend Emma as if she died yesterday. We manage to catch her at the house that Emma and her were planning on leasing together, where she pours out her heart about her best friend, and shows us her 'Emma' scrapbook - a collection of pictures, pullouts of newspaper and magazine articles and photocopied cuttings. "We used to call her the First Lady when she married Riek, because we were so sure that if peace finally came to Southern Sudan, she would be among the most powerful women in that area. She did so much for the people and they all loved her and would have wanted her to be one of their leaders," says Sally. But in that curious way that life has of playing tricks on us powerless mortals, fate was to conspire against all of Riek's and Emma's dreams, in a way neither of them could ever imagine or prevent.

Emma's interest in Africa begun when she met Sally in 1984 at the Oxford Polytechnic, where Emma was studying art and Sally anthropology. Emma had spent her formative years in India and in Britain, and her rather unconventional life had resulted in a strong character with an individualism that would reach out and literally punch you in the face. "Emma was very tall and striking, and she had these peculiarly eye-catching clothes that she would wear to great effect," recalls Sally. On this particular day, she was wearing a long purple velvet coat whose effect was, well, very Emma. "I was reading a notice board when I spotted her, and she came and stood next to me. Then we started having a conversation as if we had known each other for years," Sally told us
The two discovered that they had many things in common - they made statements with their non-conventional clothing, for example. Emma wore extravagant scarves, hats and beads, whereas Sally - who had been bred in Africa - wore very bold African jewellery. They both had a fascination for the Dark Continent, and they had friends in common. One was Willie Knocker, a white Kenyan, who was Sally's live-in boyfriend in London at the time. The three of them became inseparable friends.

In 1985, Emma's travelling spirit was awakened when she took time off from her course to travel on a round-the-world-trip in a two seater plane with a friend. When Emma from the trip, she found it impossible to settle down to her art course. She had become exposed to a life that was wider than the confines of her British existence, and she wanted more. Also, Sally and Willie had left for Kenya, Willie's birthplace, and she was yearning to join them. She decided to join them later that year for a tour of Africa, but she had to work hard to find the money for the airfare. She got a job in a restaurant fraternised by African students with whom she quickly made friends. She soon found out that she was more attracted to African men - more so the tall, dark Sudanese ones - than to white men. She became fascinated with Sudan as a whole, keeping track of the conflict that ripped North and South apart.

There had been war in Sudan since 1955 when it was freed from colonial rule. In 1983 John Garang formed the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) to fight for the south. Riek Machar, a tall, distinguished, British-educated man from the Nuer tribe, was Garang's right hand man. There were constant appeals for help for the region, and Emma took advantage of this by contacting the Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) in Britain to help her get a job in Khartoum. In 1986, she got a job teaching briefly at one of the local schools. When she returned to London she moved in with Sally, who had by then come back from Africa. "She and I were always living together, wherever we went," Sally says. "She never bought any furniture or anything, but she would just move in and fit in somehow.
Back in London, Emma joined various organisations that offered aid to Sudan, and even started a newsletter on the region. But she was yearning to go back, and in December 1986, she got another brief teaching position in the country. Three months later she was back in London to continue trying to find a permanent place in Sudan, and to finish her Masters in African politics. In 1989, aged 22, Emma's dream of coming to Africa for good was finally fulfilled.

She spent her first few months on holiday with Willie, whose romantic involvement with Sally had ended, but with whom she was still good friends. The holiday with Emma invariably led to a romance, which Sally was only too happy to encourage. "Willie and Emma were such good friends of mine that I was only too happy to let them make a go of it," she says. Emma split her time between dodging bombs and bullets in Nasir, a small town on the Sobat River in the south of Sudan, and parties and safaris in Kenya.

January 1990 found her attending a conference at a hotel in Nairobi, where she hoped to meet Riek and tell him face to face what she thought of him and the war that was disrupting the lives of the school children in Sudan. She waited the whole day. When she finally cornered him in the evening, she launched into her tirade and fell in love, all at one go. Riek came face to face with a white woman with an axe to grind and was smitten by her. Riek's soft-spoken manner and wise answers to her questions were so unlike the war-lord behaviour that Emma had expected that she softened her stand and soon begun to ask questions about his personal life. They ended up spending that first night together. The next day Riek departed, leaving no information of his whereabouts.

Emma continued her relationship with Willie in spite of her feelings for Riek. However, she and Riek tried to keep track of each other, which proved almost impossible. Whenever Riek was in touch with the SPLA office in Nairobi he would ask whether anyone had seen her, and when she could, she would try and get radio messages to him. She wrote him letters that were never replied to. Finally, over a year later, Riek managed to get a message to her through a writer called John Ryle. He asked that she meet him in Nasir. Emma immediately begged a lift on a United Nations plane in an effort to get there on time - only to find that he had already left on urgent business. She returned to Nairobi to wait for a message, and when a few days later she heard via radio that he was back in his home base in Sudan, she decided to go there. Emma convinced Willie to drive her, something Willie later became very bitter about. He had earlier asked her to marry him and he was anxiously awaiting an answer. Somewhere inside of him, he hoped that this 'wild adventure' that they were embarking on would lead to a positive answer for him. So they got into his four wheeler and drove off towards the army garrison village of Wedenyang, Riek's base. Some 24 hours after their arrival, Emma had received another marriage proposal - from Riek. Having already decided that Riek was the man for her, Emma made up her mind quickly. The only problem was telling Willie. She finally told him on the journey back to Kenya. Willie was immensely hurt and angered by the thought that the woman he loved had used him to drive her straight to the arms of another man. Meanwhile, Emma convinced Street Kids International, the organisation she was working for, that Nasir, where Riek lived, was the perfect place to set up a school. So in April 1991 Emma found herself living in Riek's compound.

In June the two were married in a quaint little ceremony. Emma had no nice wedding clothes to wear and so she was married in a mud-splattered white Ethiopian shawl - their 'wedding entourage' Land Rover had been stuck in some mud and they had all had to get out and push. The Master of Ceremonies wore a pink quilted bathrobe (probably a 'mtumba' item whose purpose was unfamiliar to him); an inauspicious start, perhaps, but the start of a fulfilling marriage nevertheless.

"Emma never lost that initial attraction for Riek," Sally says. "The food was disgusting, the sanitary conditions appalling and there was literally no social life there, but Emma loved Riek enough to stay." She would occasionally visit Nairobi and stay at the house that she had shared with Sally in Lang'ata. She used the opportunity to attend all the parties she could and borrow Sally's clothes. "I would get so mad sometimes because she would take my best party clothes and wear them to the 'duka'," Sally laughs. "But it was okay. She was like my sister and I felt nothing but immense pride being with her, because of who she was and the things she had done."
In August 1991, political events in Sudan brought about a permanent change in Emma's life. The SPLA split into two, due to differences between Riek and his leader Garang. Garang's men blamed Emma for the split, claiming that she had been a British spy and a catalyst for the split. Suddenly Emma's life was in danger, and she had to travel everywhere with a bodyguard lest she fall prey to Garang's men. She was in England at the time, visiting her mother, but she flew right back to Sudan, in the middle of the fray, to be by her husband's side. The conflict soon became a tribal clash, when members of Riek's Nuer tribe massacred about 2,000 villagers from Garang's Dinka tribe. A ripe war erupted. To make matters worse, Emma lost her job as a direct result of her marriage to Riek; they looked upon it as taking sides, whereas the organisation was meant to be neutral; she had also lost friends and support because of Riek. She later suffered a bout of typhoid malaria which weakened her considerably. Ironically, Emma survived life in war-torn Sudan without a scratch, but died in the relatively safety of Kenya.

EPILOGUE
"This was the house Emma discovered for us," Sally says of the beautiful Ngong Dairy, situated about a kilometre from the Karen shopping centre on Ngong Road in Nairobi. From it, one has a lovely view of the Ngong Hills. This is the house where Emma had probably hoped to bring her first and much-wanted child to term. Riek's security men, however, looked at the wide expanse and told her that it was a security nightmare - so she ended up living in Riverside Park, in an apartment she called 'The Peace House'. She had finally found the perfect balance between her life in Sudan and her life with her husband; she had found a lovely house to share with him and to top it all, she was pregnant. Emma could not have been happier. That is the moment death chose to take her.
The day before she died, Emma held a dinner party at her house, where she had been in her element. The next day she decided to meet with her friend Willie - who in spite of the heartache she had caused him, had forgiven her - at Sally's house, the Ngong Dairy. "Emma has never been a good driver, and that particular day she was really excited about everything," Sally comments. Emma did not have a driver with her - not even a bodyguard, which was rather unusual, and was driving herself to Sally's house. At the junction of James Gichuru Road and Gitanga Road, with the sun in her eyes, Emma drove out into the intersection, where a speeding matatu promptly rammed into her. She was tossed into the yard of a neighbouring house with severe internal chest injuries. Had an ambulance been called immediately, Emma may have been saved. But the owner of the house where she had been thrown spent valuable minutes looking for the 'baby' Emma was muttering about, thinking that her child had been thrown out of the car, not able to see that Emma was talking about her pregnancy. It was only when a policeman arrived and insisted that they first take care of Emma that she was ferried to the Nairobi Hospital, where she died.

"I don't think anyone engineered her death - I mean we all knew that Emma was a terrible driver," Sally insists.

Riek has since tried to recover from her death, although he has abandoned the rebel SPLA movement for the government in Khartoum. His efforts to bring peace to Sudan through talks between the guerrilla forces and the government have come to naught, as the SPLA forces are now suspicious of him, and his popularity had at one time plummeted.

In an effort to reconcile herself to her daughter's untimely death, Emma's mother, Maggie McCune, has written 'Till the Sun Grows Cold', which was published this year. Sally sells jewellery in Nairobi and Britain, and continues to be good friends with Willie Knocker, who still harbours a little resentment about the treatment he received. And the African sun continues to rise and set, heedless of the little lives of these and other mortals who can only plan their lives as far as fate will let them

AIDS Created as BIO-warfare, Says Nobel Laureate

2008-05-05T23:38:00.000-07:00

The first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, Wangari Maatha of Kenya, spoke out on the AIDS virus saying it was man-made and deliberately created as a weapon of bio-warfare.

"In fact it (the HIV virus) is created by a scientist for biological warfare,” she said. "Why has there been so much secrecy about AIDS? When you ask where did the virus come from, it raises a lot of flags. That makes me suspicious,” Maathai said.

The Kenya based East Africa Standard reported that in response to questions from Asian and European media, she said, "I want to dedicate the prize the African woman. I want to hold and embrace her. She has suffered so much and I feel this is an honor to her.

"Although I am a biologist, I have not done any research. I may not be able to say who developed the (HIV) virus but it was meant to wipe out the Black race," she continued.

"When she first blamed the HIV/Aids on 'some sadistic scientists, Professor Maathai kicked a storm, leaving some experts outraged and others supporting her," the Standard reported.

"Initially, said Maathai, HIV/Aids was only concentrated in selected spots in the continent, only afflicting the 'undesirable classes.' She insisted that some scientists from the developed world deliberately researched and developed the virus in order to "punish the Blacks".

"I cannot prove this but everybody knows that there are biological weapons. America invaded Iraq because they believed such weapons existed," said Maathai.

Africa accounts for 25 million out of the estimated 38 million people across the world infected with HIV/AIDS, and the vast majority of infected Africans are women, according to UNAIDS estimates.

“Some say that AIDS came from the monkeys, and I doubt that because we have been living with monkeys (since) time immemorial, others say it was a curse from God, but I say it cannot be that.

“Black people are dying more than any other people in this planet,” Maathai told a press conference in Nairobi a day after winning the prize for her work in human rights and reversing deforestation across Africa.

“It’s true that there are some people who create agents to wipe out other people. If there were no such people, we could have not have invaded Iraq,” she said.

“We invaded Iraq because we believed that Saddam Hussein had made, or was in the process of creating agents of biological warfare,” said Maathai, who is also the Kenyan Deputy Environment and Natural Resources Minister.

The unspoken truth is that both the United Nations and the United States have promoted so-called "population control" for decades. What better agent for the reduction of population than a man-made virus that will take care of millions of so-called "useless eaters"?

AIDS certainly fits the bill. But nobody is talking about its "efficiency."

RANDON IMAGES

2008-03-10T06:36:00.000-07:00

KIBAKI AND RAILA SIGN AGREEMENT.

2008-02-28T10:40:00.001-08:00

Kenya's bitter political rivals have struck a power sharing deal, but will it work and can it end the violence that has so far cost the lives of more than 1,000 people?

Earlier this week the mood in Kenya was very gloomy; the prospect of a settlement seemed a long way off. But, after weeks of tricky negotiations the president, Mwai Kibaki, has reached a deal with his opposition rival, Raila Odinga, who is now expected to be prime minister.

Will such a peace last?

"The deal sounds almost too good to be true," says Ernest on Thinking Kenyan. "Mwai Kibaki is known for breaking promises. Until the agreement is entrenched in the constitution or passed by parliament, the deal is still a 'gentleman's agreement'."

Commenting on Kenya Image, Doris Sadera says she is not doing cartwheels yet.

"I want to know the terms of the agreement and know that an agreement has been signed. This is, after all, Kenyan politics, where deals can turn 180° in the span of five minutes."

Simba points out that Kofi Annan is "not going to be around to babysit" Kenya's leaders in future. "They are going to have to show some initiative on their own."

Taabu on Kumekucha says the deal could be the "fire extinguisher" Kenya needs. But he adds: "I just hope Annan is not being bid bye in style to escape a killing field."

On Kenya image, Eric is angry. "The deal means that, in the future, if one loses an election all one needs to do is kill and displace people of some other tribe and they will be rewarded. A sad day indeed."

But Tom Carghill, manager of the Africa programme at the foreign affairs thinktank Chatham House, draws some hope from the lack of violence in the past two weeks.

"The violence was able to be turned down when there was a prospect of the two groups talking to each other," he told me. He says this reduction in the tension shows the violence was predominantly political and not tribal, as many people have claimed.

"It shows the extent to which politicians controlled the violence," he says.

As to the whether the deal will work, Carghill says: "It depends whether the settlement will help bridge divisions between rich and poor in the long run, or whether it is just another way of dividing up the political cake between different members of the political elite.

"It is looking more positive. But these are leaders who are not renowed for their ability to compromise."

On Annan's part in the deal, he says: "Very few other people could have got this far."

A Perfect Example of a Failed State

2008-02-25T14:27:00.000-08:00

Nigeria is principally a coalition of the unwilling. She is simply a coercion of the unwilling; a conscription of federated grievances; a boiling cauldron of mutually-assured platonic hatred, mutual suspicion, and collective bottled loathing. To this end, nothing positive could ever be achieved on this platform of potentially explosive unease. No tribe believes in the goodwill of the other. Every tribe is of the worst opinion of the other. There is no good Igbo man as far as a Yoruba man is concerned and vice versa, even when that stereotypical generalization falls short of the laws of logic and thought, which should hold eminence and primacy in any rational postulation.

On this volatile base was erected a nation, which is most unfortunately expected to succeed. National success cannot be predicated upon a base of ontological instability. Hence the Nigerian dream was from conception, compromised and sabotaged to fail. All the attempts at salvaging an iota of sense from this boiling cauldron of dissensions, have failed woefully to avert the certain catastrophic disintegration, and disastrous implosion of this hegemonic geopolitical ogre, upon her inglorious weight.

The colonialists yoked these ideologically parallel nationalities together, to achieve their imperial designs, predicated only on an avariciously exploitative blueprint. They never intended this vassal ship to come to an end. When the wind of change rendered the political heat unbearable for their unwelcome presence, they sought the naturally un-progressive elements, versed in the fine art of imbecilic serfdom; that would hold cosmetic fort for their vested interests, while they suck the honey pot clean in a vampyrean plunder of rapacious proportions. In Nigeria, the Hausa/Fulani North fitted the bill. They schemed out the progressive nationalities that could not bow subserviently at the altars of oppression, from the matrix of power. The progressives were arm twisted and decimated into the emasculated role of figure heads. From this enfeebled position, they were congenitally excluded from the epicentres of reckoning, and hence rendered politically impotent in offering any atom of resistance to British re-engineered plunder of Nigeria.

They could not actually challenge the improprieties of a tele-guided nincompoop. The suppressed exasperation of an enfeebled opposition went in, to devastate their oppressed psyches. The West of Nigeria exploded in a furious wave of self-digestive violence. Awolowo and Akintola battled for supremacy. Lives and dreams had to go up in flames for Akintola or Awolowo to impress their insular and parochial concepts of authority and supremacy on the Western region. Nigeria tethered on the brink. Pregnant expectations of federal action oscillated between puerile consideration and partisan implementation. The West continued to conflagrate. All these mixed with a census fouled up by political farts, laid the nation prostrate and ripe for explosion.

Meanwhile, a group of young ideologically fired revolutionaries waited in the wings. Actually no one treasured the vacillation of Nigeria between a rudderless leadership and engineered directionless ness. Disintegration hovered in the air. Politicians advertised their selfishness and executive incompetence. Tribalism became the operative principle. National unity took a hike to the mountains of irrelevance. Ethnic demagoguery hawked impious nonsense. The people were agitated into taking ethnic stands on national questions. At the height of this, the army struck.

The army that struck was no army of occupation. It was a group of graduated teenagers, appalled by the inglorious manipulation of primordial forces by politicians on the national turf. They had a vision of re-negotiating the path to national felicity. Circumstances conspired to scuttle that vision. And nationalistic young men, armed with a blueprint of goodwill, ended dressed up as scoundrels, to fund the desperate underwriting of a British-engineered politic of dissension. The trajectory of the Nzeogwu-led, January 1966 intervention was simply a revolutionary projectile. The signs of seismic changes were written across the whole ideological landscape of their vision. From the four cardinal points, were men who were collaborators in the torpedoing of the Nigerian dream. They sought and removed the principal actors. Britain, denied of her puppets, feared for her neo-imperial access to Nigerian resource. She could not abandon her lecherous parasitism without a fight. The British Intelligence, that saw to the manipulation of the 1959 elections, to favour British vassals of Nigerian extraction, went to work again.

Fate played ping-pong. Nzeogwu lost his grandiose vision. His coup failed. Ironsi was catapulted by fate, into profiting from a revolution he never conceived nor dreamt. He bought into the peddled rumour of an Igbo conspiracy to hijack Nigeria, as he convoked a government geared towards placating and propitiating, those he perceived as being on receiving ends of Nzeogwu's guns. But when vendetta rapes greed, it sires a corrosively incinerative phobia that either destroys its object of hate or self-destructs in the process. The North was sold the British redacted version of the coup story. All the ingredients for its successful purchase was in place; a dangerously uneducated critical mass; Igbo notorious entrepreneurialism and business adventurism; a widening wealth and holding gap between the Northern natives, and a majority southerners that stepped in to fill the posts of the departing colonial officers; and now a military coup, led by mostly Igbo officers, that saw many Northern leaders dead. All these broiled to brew a social sauce, which was managed by the British intelligence to whip up a frenzy of genocidal pogrom unparalleled in Africa since King Leopold, the Butcher of Congo. Ironsi was murdered with his host. Gowon came to power.

Social evolution is always a history of accidents, and un-intended consequences. Had Nzeogwu ever visualized that some nincompoops would skewer his dream or disembowel his vision for Nigeria; he would have elected to let the country implode on its inglorious weight. Today, people glorify the politicians that rendered the Nigerian dream of those days, a fractured fairy tale. Many passively consult a historical amnesia that betrays buffoonery, while others actively seek to doctor or revise history, in order to rehabilitate the self-battered images of the tribal gods of their political pantheon. For instance, there was a movement a few years ago seeking to canonize Festus Okotie-Eboh, as an innocent victim of blood thirsty Igbo Commissioned officers. But the facts of history painfully recorded Okotie-Eboh as a finance minister, who was a by-word for corruption and veniality. Today equally, those seeking to resurrect Obafemi Awolowo as the best thing not to happen to Nigeria, seem to forget his role in the Western Nigeria Wettie saga, and the fact that history punctually recorded him as the man who led the introduction of tribalism and mediocrity into Nigerian politics. Need we talk of Ahmadu Bello, who never wanted Nigeria´s independence in the first place, and who saw the whole of Nigeria as a conquered territory, that must bow to his jihadic farts; or Nnamdi Azikiwe who preferred convenient compromises to hard choices born of principles, which have been the furniture of immortal and revolutionary changes. These unfortunately, were the principal players, upon whose shoulders was laid the birth and emergence of a nation, from an amorphously, conscripted conglomeration of tribes. Ontologically compromised by circumstances surrounding her birth, it could only take men of great genius, charisma and invincible character, to forge a nation out of a motley band of strange bedfellows. But these men were great and original. The parts of them that were great were not original, and the parts of them that were original were not great. The flaws in their individual characters, was meant to sabotage whatever dreams they claimed to have because the colour of your dreams must issue from the colour of your eyes.

Few years after independence disillusion arrived. The political class killed our dream. The lacked any vision for the people. Their politics became a radical politicization of pettiness. Awolowo stole the Western Nigerian premiership from Zik, as a result of his pettiness. Instead of transcending that, Zik himself became floored by his pettiness. He scampered back to the East to kick out Eyo Ita, from a seat he was ably managing. The spiral continued. The politicians having lost every direction sought to remain relevant. To achieve this, ethnicity was shameless consulted. Mediocrity and grotesque incompetence was crowned. Corruption exploded. Patronization and politics by settlement conferred a sorry legitimacy on nepotism. Nigeria hovered between the Hamletian Question. The chain reaction led to coup and to a counter coup, and to a civil war. Over One million Igbos were massacred; majority starved to death by a war policy that violated every canon of warfare. Biafran children were starved into extinction. Civilians, women and children were bombed and strafed with psychopathic relish and for fun. And the Igbo man had this etched in his collective memory for eternal remembrance. The war saw Igbo brilliance enjoy some meteoric rise and dissipation. The RAP, which should have served as a platform for a scientific revival in Nigeria, was through the consolations of ethnic envy allowed to desiccate and shrivel out of existence.

Gowon sat upon wealth. He swam atop Nigeria's oil revenue like a drunken sailor would; frittering them away in an orgy of a national moronic consumption. The future was never considered. Nigeria embarked on a spending spree characterized by the purchase of the most un-needed rejects of foreign industrial powers. We bought the inconsequential and every shade of non-essentials; even toothpicks and toilet papers from abroad. That was the era of oil money. It flowed in abundance. Money submerged the boiling dissensions of marginalized Nigerians. But Gowon achieved nothing save boasting to the whole world that Nigeria's problems were not making money, but how to spend it. As oil money flowed, the bovine stupidity of Gowon's governance glowed.

This is simply a summary of infamy. Subsequent governments wrecked Nigeria beyond measure. Ethnicity was enthroned. Bad leadership mutated and peaked. Military brigands and civilian thieves held Nigeria to a ransom; creating a cabal of elitist leeches, masquerading as patriots. Nigeria became a playground of coup plotters.

Gowon was sacked for his dalliance with puerility. That was in 1975. Murtala Mohammed toppled him and sat on the wheels. The coup cycle continued once more. He perished a year later; falling to the speaking ends of Dimka's guns. Obasanjo was accidentally thrown up to replace him. He embarked on progammes that were grandiose in their conception and in their uselessness. Operation Feed the Nation (O.F.N) succeeded only on television screens and radio jingles. The funds mapped thereto, was squandered. Some claimed Obasanjo stole it, as the programme may have been a front for redirecting the funds to another O.F.N=Obasanjo Farms Nigeria. Then came the Telecommunications saga handled by ITT; an American company that fits every profile of what John Perkins referred to, as the corporatocracy, which hires hitmen to destroy Third World economies, and ensnare them into inescapable debt. Fela, Anikulapo Kuti, a popular Afro-beat musician angered into exasperation, by the rip off of Nigerians in the ITT contract scam accused General Obasanjo and Moshood Abiola, as International Thieves-(International Thief Thief), mirroring the acronym of the American company. Festac 77 came. Nigeria under Obasanjo continued Gowon's idiocy. Nigeria took that singular opportunity to advertise her wealth to the whole world, though her people lacked the basics of a sound, secure future bereft of want. After oscillating like a scalar quantity with a lot of magnitude but no direction, Obasanjo finally handed over to the civilian headed by a Mallam from Sokoto, Alhaji Shehu Shagari.

Under Shagari, the politicians returned as national leeches that they were. Politics became an essential arena for disservice to the country. Funds were embezzled. State policy was predicated not on sound reasoning, but on ethnic considerations or the mood of party stalwarts. Politics became a festival of impunity where men elect to exist on borrowed intelligence. Nigeria was slowly but steadily going to hell. Umaru Dikko became the power broker holding Shagari to a ransom; heading the Presidential Task force on rice, after both the Green Revolution and Operation Feed the Nation have failed respectively. He presided over the importation and distribution of rice to the Nigeria people. Instead, NPN, his party was buying and selling influence with bags of rice and import licenses. Sonny Okonsus lamented the decay in his 1983 music "Which way Nigeria". Prior to that had Achebe articulated his masterpiece "The Trouble with Nigeria"-, where he gave a radical vivisection of how leadership constitutes the trouble with Nigeria; and how the political class are very busy embezzling Nigeria's posterity. They were treated as alarmists. Their warnings fell on deaf ears. It was a repeat of pre-1966 happenings. Nigeria waited for implosion. None came until the military struck again on the 31st of December, 1983.

We must not fail to reiterate that Shagari's government achieved nothing of radical significance or value to the Nigerian project. That government was visionless in everything save puerility. She slept while Nigeria was marooned, aground in the sandbanks of omni dimensional decadence.

Buhari-Idiagbon came claiming a messianic vision, to lead the waters through the Nigerian socio-economic and political Aegean stable. This government tired no doubt. But paucity of days, cannot conduce to a historical assessment of the impact of this government. Even though this era witnessed the reappearance of draconian decrees, and brutality of exuberant soldiers; some Nigerians today, still relish and remember those meteoric days with nostalgia, rendered imperative by the congenital indiscipline, rascality, and thievery of succeeding scoundrels.

Ibrahim Babangida was the first scoundrel to succeed them. He sacked Buhari-Idiagbon in coup, which many have come to see as the triumph of greed and superlative kleptomania. He stole Nigeria blind, debauched her social structures and wrecked her moral climes. Babangida presided over the liberalization of official corruption in Nigeria. He ran Nigeria like only a robber baron would. He bribed those who opposed his Machiavellian manipulative vision, with offices, money or threats. Opposition to his inordinate craze for power was ruthlessly and decisively eviscerated. IBB and two of his intelligence chiefs were fingered in the letter-bomb murder of the Nigerian investigative journalist, Mr. Dele Giwa, who was on the trail of a drug-smuggling story that revolved around Babangida's wife. Babangida manufactured programs and crises to extend his stay in power. His populist policies were briberies designed to buy off opposing voices, or bones cast the way of the people so that they keep their eyes off the excesses of his caprice. When this guy finished dealing with Nigeria, the country was destroyed for good measure. He annulled an election, in which majority of Nigerians, chose to express their exasperation with the military. That election, which was purportedly won by Moshood Abiola, was more of a vote against the military more than it was a vote for Abiola. He wasted over 40Billion naira in an orchestrated transition to civil rule program, which was designed to self destruct. As Nigeria was again tethered on the precipe, he chose to step aside with his loot, but moved to secure his ass, by leaving a co-thief, Sanni Abacha around the corridors of power.

One step shy of the target, Abacha was a dog that no amount of training could ever rewrite his genetic blueprint. He could not keep his eyes off the bone, which was the presidency. Before the hurriedly established Interim National Government headed by Ernest Shonenkan could settle down to business, Abacha, who was in control of the Army, kicked the government out, and installed himself as the new president of Nigeria.

Abacha was a thief on a mission. His kleptomania was hidden behind dark goggles that belied his calculated meanness. He outclassed Mobutu both in the ambitious nature of his stealing project and in the ruthlessness employed thereto. Nigerians sought for hope. None was in sight. He knew that for him to keep the loot he ripped off the Nigerian people, he must be in power forever. To this end, he embarked on a life-presidency scheme, borrowing a lot from the perverse dissimulations of Babangida his friend and predecessor. This guy was a kleptocrat, unparalleled in meanness and scurrility. He only achieved the bastardization of every sane social structure in Nigeria. The state continued to derail. Agents and agencies of state were used as hammers of tyrannical wickedness. Abacha's henchmen murdered Kudirat Abiola for daring challenge her husband's incarceration. Pa Rewane was shot dead in his house for daring oppose Abacha's lewd excesses.

In Abacha, corrupt power connived with eviscerated and disembowelled public opposition, to create a tyrant, who terrorized the citizenry, and destroyed their stakes to posterity, through his dipsomania and crapulent kleptomania. Nigerians scampered in silence. Abacha grew in impunity. Many Nigerians under these circumstances fed from garbage dumps. Abacha basked in opulence. Nigerians slept with hunger. Abacha slept with prostitutes. The knell sounded, as he perspired in debauchery atop imported harlots. And he expired. The professional coup plotter was floored in a coup from Heaven.

Nigeria accumulated a lot of other socio-political, and economic dirt due to these persistent bludgeoning. Abacha's dirt kicked Abdulsalami Abubakar up to a position he never bargained for in his entire life. He was no less a thief. The speed, with which his administration skimmed off billions of naira off the Nigerian coffers, cannot even challenge comparison with that of Abacha. His only achievement was the handing over of power amidst international pressure to a civilian elected government headed by Olusegun Obasanjo, on May 29th, 1999.

Obasanjo came on a second missionary journey. We thought that passing through the shadow of death would sharpen his vision and goodwill. Well, we are yet to see any of the two. His vision becomes more parochial as the days go by. His goodwill became non-existence, while honour was never a watchword of his. He promised Nigerians that there was never to be sacred cows in his fight against corruption. Today, sacred cows have been cloned everywhere. IBB, Abdulsalami Abubakar, and those fingered by the Vincent Azie's audit report, became sacred cows over night. Tony Anenih is yet to account for the roads he purported built with 300billion naira, in the planet Mars. Under his rule, his party the PDP metamorphosed into what Wole Soyinka the Nobel laureate described as a nest of killers. Under his tenure insecurity reigned supreme. A governor of a federating state was kidnapped by the Police in consort with a private citizen, and yet no-one was prosecuted. The number one law officer in his administration, Mr.Bola Ige, was murdered in a mafia-like style, while his orderlies have allegedly gone to eat. No one was apprehended or arraigned for the murder of this guy. Under him, political assassination became elevated to odious levels. Marshall Harry, Aminoasari Dikkibo, Engr. Agom, Jerry Aiyegbeye, Victor Nwankwo all fell victim to assassin bullets. Nobody was ever caught nor prosecuted for those crimes. The criminals all came from planet Venus. The Nigerian police kept protecting public enemies like Chris Ubah and Emeka Offor, while the taxpayers are left to fend for themselves, against the sophisticated fire-power of the armed robbers that prowl unchallenged.

The economy kept up its anaemia. SEEDS and NEEDS or NAPEP and UBE have all failed woefully to better the lot of the citizenry. All the government does it to adopt the discredited prescriptions and mantras of the IMF and World Bank that only essays to pay Nigeria's odious debts, while the citizenry starve for want of necessaries.

That Nigeria is a failed state is evidenced in the fact that no economic or social policy has essayed to impact positively on the lives of the people. The government keeps finding ways of laundering its image, or blowing the trumpet of its achievements, while hunger and inexcusable poverty harass the people daily. Nigeria the 6th largest exporter of crude lacks evidence based on solid achievements to show for the billions of dollars it has earned from crude oil sales since its discovery in Nigeria. Over 67% of Nigerians are still illiterate, without a sound educational policy to attend to that. Unemployment rate is so high as to be immeasurable. Over 70% of Nigerians are now living below the poverty line. World Bank recently reported that only 1% of the population hold 80% of the oil wealth. The country has consistently vacillated between the gold, silver or bronze medals, on the rankings of the most corrupt nation on earth. Her citizens are leaving the country in droves; seeking greener pastures, which is simply a new form of comfortable slavery abroad. Power generation has reach an all time low, as the country now enjoys more electric power outages, than a city in medieval times, ever experienced. Many Nigerians lack access to basic potable water, which is the signature and staff of life. Primary health care delivery is so poor as to be epileptic. Hospitals have metamorphosed into mere consulting clinics, where people go to die. Drugs are unavailable, as government spends more money in debt services, and funding corrupt and questionable policies, than in funding education or other social schemes.

Failed states in Africa, Kenya leading the way.

2008-02-25T14:24:00.000-08:00

The African continent is littered with failed states. Most of these states are economic backwaters, social apologies and political ruins. This landscape runs from the Casablanca to the Cape Town and from The Horn of Africa in the East to the Island of No Return in the West Atlantic. Most of these states true to type were the creatures of imperial convenience. To that end, they were meant to serve a purpose after which their ontological legitimacy or raison d' etre would then expire. At this expiration; the states, naturally not designed for self-propulsion; were condemned to tether on the brink, and finally implode upon the inglorious weight of their inherent contradictions. Colonialism designed and inspired the problems. But the decadence was then driven along by a horde of native pirates; trained in the fine art of piracy. These set of political actors were rogues personalities, weaned on selfishness. They were brilliant students of kleptocracy and political perversity. In about four decades they completely outclassed colonial perfidy and bested them in thievery. They did an inglorious job of mismanaging Africa, so much so that she is today the laughing stock of the world.

At the advent of the White man was tsunamic for Africa. Chinua Achebe captured this well: Things fell apart! Africa and her centre could no longer hold. She became embroiled in a dynamic, which would change her structure, her culture and her future forever.

The former league of tribes coagulated into pseudo-states, at the instance of colonialism. Strange bedfellows became fellow citizens over night. Consanguinal relatives find themselves facing each other as citizens of different countries. The African psyche was ripped apart. The changes were too radical, as his culture was demonized and labelled as inferior. He had to forfeit his language in so many cases. He was equated to dogs, when he seeks admittance into drinking parlours because dogs are not admitted. There arose a miseducation on the socio-cultural level, which as was well articulated by Chinweizu, deformed the collective African psyche from which it is yet to recover.

To carve up Africa, drawing boards were built in 1885 Berlin. Africa was scrambled up among the occupying powers. The aim was to ensure each power an unimpeded and unmonitored freedom to loot as much as they could in their area of influence.

The Belgian-Congo became an abattoir, where King Leopold's polymorphous perversity, sought and obtained unrestrained ventilation. For the sake of rubber, Leopold's men sacked villages, decimated cultures, and harvested a pyramid of chopped hands, in an orgy of brutality, unmatched even by Hitler's men. Congo bled, and haemorrhaged her resources into Belgian coffers. The Germans tried the annihilation tactics on the Herero of Namibia. British piratical treachery blossomed in Nigeria and her other territories. All in Europe, Africa bled, so that Europe could have a river of wealth flowing through her.

To effectively continue this when their various suns must have set, they created states; which were simply neo-colonial dependencies. And to run these states, the mass-produced a semi-literate, middle-class of yes-men, to complement the paucity of men they have on the ground. This crop of creatures became the collaborative vehicle of colonial exploitation. Hatred for them, which was a rampant phenomenon, sometimes took deadly proportions, as was mirrored in Achebe's Things Fall Apart, where Okonkwo had to kill a court messenger, to vent his anger on an invading establishment that has despoiled the land of his fathers, and insulted his culture.

Almost all the Modern states in Africa today were built on political ontologies, oozing from this engineered political metaphysic. The people never dialogued their differences as a basis for federating. They never talked to each other about a political union. They woke up one morning, and saw themselves conscripted into geopolitical constructs they neither chose nor bargained for. For the natives, it was a bazaar of unfunny jokes, and for the colonial officers; a duty for country and queen.

African states were created to facilitate and ease the efficiency of rapid colonial exploitation. That was their raison d'etre. They were never designed to be independent, or cease being a source of cheap raw materials, and slave labour for colonial industries. They were equally meant to be a cheap market to cushion the inflationary effects of mechanised mass production. The colony was a laboratory of caprice. Every socio-economic, geopolitical or cultural hypothesis was subjected to clinical trials on the hapless colonies. This accounts for the fact, that every discredited socio-political, economic or eugenic theory was once tried out in Africa.
Every failed social edifice translates into a jungle. The core operative principle across its embrace perfectly mimics that native to the forest of unreason. For us to appreciate the dangers posed by a failed social construct, we must apprise ourselves of the transactions obtainable in the markets of a jungle.

A jungle is an amorphous piece of territory governed by anarchy. In this arena, survival is of the fittest, while the operative principle anchors on the currency of "Might" is "Right". In every jungle, law and order are alien concepts. The Orwellian principle of "some animals, being more equal than others" abundantly holds sway in this dark world of inchoate randomness. In a jungle, nothing is predictable. The only constant in this huge stew pot of irreconcilable variables is lawlessness. Any participant in this concourse of crudity who is able to carve out a territory for his whims by the agency of raw and naked might, positions himself to intimidate the lesser mortals within his vicinity, with threats and abundance of fear. Peace here is only a calm pond with a subterranean current of turbulence and dissensions boiling like volcanic lava underneath. It is no peace, as the least excuse is utilized to ventilate the suppressed angst of the oppressed powerless. Stability is absent as anybody who has the power is allowed to prey on those who are unfortunate to be powerless around him. He is obliged to feed on them without qualms. Violent death is a norm as fear rules. The only semblance of order is that predicated on a balance of terror. Every one here by necessity sleeps with one eye open, if not for anything to be conscious enough as to take flight before the predator floors him or to be a conscious witness to the onslaught on him; or to be in a position to negotiate an escape from the grip of those who have the power to do him in. This was the Hobessian state of nature where the fear of violent death paralysed development, rendered life nasty, brutish and short.

In the jungle there exists no common weal, public good, or social service. Every animal in this arrangement strives to survive. Survival is the word. The weak are crushed and eaten out of existence by the stronger predators. Every one consults the instincts of survival in all transactional situations. Joy here is of the instinctual order, while Love is fundamentally absent. Self survival commands procreation, and the offspring commences his own independent struggle for survival the moment it arrives. In a society that has degenerated into a jungle, all these features are activated, enabled and are abundantly obtainable. In Nigeria for example, law and order exists only in the statute books; reminiscent of the jungle. The only law is survival. The stronger individuals swallow up the weaker ones. The rich get richer by gobbling up what belongs to all, while the poor are further impoverished into powerlessness. In this kind of social situation, individuals make their own laws, interpret and implement them according to the dictates of their caprice. This is a situation where a man for example could get up, equip a private army drawn from the National Police, and kidnap a democratically elected Governor, in a brazen contravention of the grundnorms of the country; and yet he is feted by the powers that be. This is a situation where anyone who dares criticize the President, is framed-up, disgraced and sacked from office, without due process; and beaten up by armed robbers in his house. This is a situation, where an auditor-general would sacked for auditing government accounts and revealing that unrestrained corruption thrives in the presidency. And this same presidency that has lost every moral authority to talk about justice empowers a bulldog of an agency to track down his opponents, both real and imaginary and blacklist them so good, as to sabotage and compromise their political careers. Some instances later will bring these from the pinnacle of arid theorizing to the tables of normal discourse.

Man engineered an escape from this primeval broth of unreason, when he hewed society and developed law and order out of this assured destructive tendencies. Reason and experience taught man that there needs to be a guarantee for the sustenance of this order. It bid him invent government as a safe bastion for the sustenance of these ideals. Government to that end arose as the last line of defence of the society from its primeval tendency to destroy itself. It equally rose to guarantee rights and responsibilities of all participants. It rose equally to foreclose forever, the possibility or the ease with which violent death lurks around every social nook and cranny. It became the bulwark against retrogressive and anti-social forces that seek to overthrow the social order by the forces of might. That was the raison d'etre of government; the common good of its subjects.

In a situation, where a government fails to live up to its ontological raison d'etre, that government has really failed. That government cannot lay claims on its being overwhelmed by social forces as an excuse for its failure. This is consequent upon the fact, that it remains the Leviathan, to whom we leased some of our powers and rights; to whom we gave up most of our privileges, to enable him agglomerate and wield an influence unparalleled or unequalled by any constituent of the social order. To this end, no excuse is admissible for any failure to act in defense of the social embrace left in its charge.

Kibaki is joking around with Kenyan lives

2008-02-19T14:03:00.001-08:00

If its a matter of shaking hands, kibaki has shaken many hands since he rigged the elections.I am sure he feels pretty good about himself right now, and about the fact that many people all over the world know his name. He rigged the elections, and has been under alot of pressure to form a coalition government with someone he hates properly. One wonders why kibaki hates raila so much, that he tried to cheat raila not once but twice, but the second time around many kenyans died, and many kikuyus got displaced. Kibaki's hanging on to power is equated to the last kicks of a dying horse. An unwilling participant in a contest who does not play according to the rules, but creates his own rules.I think kibaki will do his level best to derail these talks, and will only agree to any agreement, which waters down the opposition as much as possible.Only time will tell, but as kibaki is still wasting time and wasting precious opportunity, it has been heard that kalenjins are preparing for total war against kikuyus, to finally and completely drive them and kisiis, from the rift valley. We are going to have war in kenya, and thanks to kibaki, it will be a terrible war.

This war is not new, check this link out, here

Raila Odinga cannot afford to give up the presidency.

2008-02-10T06:20:00.000-08:00

We have to be very careful about what we accept, and we have to understand what it is we are dealing with. Mr Odinga, cannot give up his quest for the presidency.He has moral reasons, and reasons which are now beyond his control, that govern what he can and cannot do.When Kibaki knew he was losing the elections,and rigged himself back into power, he was pre-empting Odinga, and basically undercutting Odinga and the wishes of Kenyans in a very dramatic and callous way.If Odinga gives up the presidency, there will be alot more deaths in Kenya, immediately in the short run, and in the future. The chaos in kenya right now, were caused by a massive but ineffective rigging by the kibaki machine.

Kikuyus will be killed wherever they live outside central province. That will happen either immediately, or in the future, probably sparked by another injustice in the future. That by itself implies that the root causes of the current conflict have to be adressed. If not, then we are simply postponing violence and war, to occur with more brutality in the future.Why are Kalenjins so angry? Why are luos and luhyas so angry? We have to know why, and simply not brush these aside as tribalism, because all these groups voted for kibaki in 2002.

If Kibaki and his machine remains in power, the army will be used to kill the dissenters in rift valley and nyanza and western.That will fracture the country, because the military will not want to continue to butcher non-kikuyus.That is not what is expected of a professional army, just to maintain a corrupt regime in power.

If kibaki remains in power, nyanza province will never be rebuilt, and kisumu will be in the stone age.

people have died already, fighting to defend odinga's right to the presidency, and giving up will mean they died for nothing.

If Obama become US president, nyanza province will need protection from alqaeda, and his grand mother will need protection from possible abduction and kidnapping. That is something kibaki is incapable of providing, and has o be seen in the light of the fact that kenya and luos are nolonger objects of kikuyu wrath and abuse.

Lucy Kibaki is too primitive and uncouth to be in the state house.

2008-02-04T18:19:00.000-08:00

HERE IS THE BEAUTIFUL PICTURE OF LUCY
I am still seething with anger after reading what lawyer Gitobu imanyara said in today's standard newspaper about how the deranged lucy kibaki feels about luos,and the statements were made right after her husband stole the elections and barricaded his coward self in state house away from the anger of the disenfranchised masses.Imanyara said she went on: "You are a friend of the Luos. Foolish Merus voted for you. . As I decipher that loaded statement from a 'first' lady of a country torn apart by tribalistic violence, I am left perplexed by the double speak the kikuyus have been engaged in. The kikuyu presidency of mwai kibaki is crippled and illegitimate, based on the lame manner with which they bungled kibaki hurriedly as they doctored tallies to put their tribes man in power. I am glad people went on a rampage and destroyed property worth millions. I only wish they destroyed more property in nairobi. Uncouth thugs like kibaki and lucy should not be allowed to get away with such murderous atrocities and criminality. It is very sad, to hear a woman who is the wife of this kibaki person project such hate towards luos.What I can say at this point is I am glad the united nations and US, UK, Canada and others have weighed in on the kibaki thievery and stated kibaki must follw whatever anan decides.If luos did not raise the uproar, and kalenjins did not kill kikuyus like they did, these evil misdeeds of the kenyan jezebel and ahab might havce gone underground. Thank God for the Elijah of Raila, and the saintly voice of anan, the robbers in state house will be held accountable.

How Will Mwai Kibaki be remembered?

2008-01-27T12:13:00.000-08:00

Kibaki has casually, willingly and greedily brought our hitherto internationally respected nascent nation onto it’s democratic deathbed. With that goes all pretense of human rights, free press and respect of laws. The fact of the matter is that whoever and wherever you are in kenya, kibaki is playing russian roulette with your life, your present and your future. Ask any internally displaced person - kikuyu or not and they will confirm this. The desire to steal; enrich oneself and hold on to power which is given by the populace is the greatest bane of african leaders.

Nobody expected this of kibaki having himself come into power through the ballot in what all observers agreed was a free and fair poll. The least he would have done would have been to ensure justice and fairness was upheld. These were tenets that allowed him to be president - for god’s sake!!! any elemets of trust or gentleman behavior as peddled in various adds before the election have been found to be vacuous in this post-election period. He has made my country just ”’another regular african country”, an also ran… having witnessed in my local upcountry polling station the initial rig that gave him the 25% in all provinces. (ap’s marking ballot papers outside my local primary school in a car, where he subsequently came second, 2 votes behind raila despite majority of people voting for raila) i was shocked by the brazen steal of votes so openly!!! my farm workman with the radio could tell me it was a rigged election!!! that has directly lead to this sordid state of affairs we find ourselves in. That is also why he will resist any attempts at a rerun with an independent body since these earlier rigged votes will not be available to him and the loss will be all the more obvious. It is also said kibs had wanted to concede defeat and called the media houses but his hardliners would not let him do it!!! they are behind all this but the buck stops at kibs door. It is however suprising that among my kikuyu friends in the kenyan diaspora, international diaspora and in nairobi they are all convinced that kibaki wond fair and square.

These are highly educated folk, including economists, surgeons, paediatricians, dentists, and businessmen!!!! they have chosen to bury their heads in the sand and allow the rape of our young country and it’s democracy proceed, so long as it is by ‘one of their own’. Just the other day they would froth at the mouth when moi did just a 1/4 of what kibaki has done. These are the sellouts, the tribalised fellows who would sell their country down the road of civil war for……nothing! kibs does not know them, does not care about them and would gladly put them in harms way to achieve his ends, but they do not see that!!! i shudder because they are the opinion leaders in their areas. If this is what they think, i cant blame the herdsmen in their areas for their thoughts…. This is why i respect a fellow like karoki because the truth will always set one free.

Truth and justice make for a sound peace anyday!!! kibaki has taken the name of the lord in vain during his swearing in. He plays with another power that is far greater than him. In rome they did not say vox populi, vox dei for no good reason. You cannot wily nilly lord it over me if i do not want you to. This is the essence of democracy and that choice must be respected. Living in harmony requires respect of rules of engagement without which chaos ensues. God is not mocked, for what a man sows the same shall he reap (after it has grown up). What we are seeing are but the first fruits of that reaping, the real fruit, the whirlwind after this casual sowing to the wind is yet to come. The ubiquitous flow of violence meeted out to kenyans by their own security forces and mercenary ugandans will result in a greater demystification of violence and the gun.

The population will be ready for them next time especially since they have crossed a threshold and used deadly force. I predict we shall soon see private well armed militia that will be held in reserve to ensure whoever gets or feels disenfranchised at the ballot box will be able to enforce a dialogue. The state will no longer have the hitherto widespread monopoly of violence it misuses on it’s citizenry. Welcome to a new kenya. Nobody should blame the citizens for merely doing what comes natural to any person. It is evident kibs and henchmen cannot be doing all this unless they are sure the army is on their side. The army is not 100% on their side and they know it. Talk has seeped through of unhappiness in the ranks. An unstable army is a recipe for disaster.

Many army men have lost brothers, sisters, fathers, nephews and nieces to the thoughtless actions of kibaki and his men. Life is sacred, and once that sanctity is breached we are asking for trouble. This is a tiger he cannot ride, even if raila was not to be in the picture. Kibaki is not going to be remebered for a 5% growth in the economy. He will clearly be remembered as the man who took kenya back into the dark ages, alienated his kikuyu tribe from other kenyans and invited foreign troops to shoot down kenyans n their own country.

He will be remembered as the man who tore kenya’s social and ethnic fabric, the man who stole votes and administered a near killer blow to democracy in kenya. The nse etc is just piss in the wind. Kenya may well go into civil war, but it will rise stronger and better in so many ways than it has been before, and the name of every person killed whilst protesting this rape of democracy will be remembered.

I AM ExTREMELY PISSED OFF with kibaki.

2008-01-26T11:13:00.000-08:00

I AM ExTREMELY PISSED OFF with kibaki.First of all, kibaki nakedly and openly and stupidly rigs an election that kenyans overwhemingly queued for very long hours in the sun to vote for.Their patience was misconstrued for stupidity by kibaki.they did not vote so that someone else can muzzle their choice, or so that kibaki can remain in power, they voted him out. the violent aftermath is just a reflection of the simmering anger. people want their president, but kibaki keeps insisting he was duly elected, without a majority. at this point in time, it is technically impossible for kibaki to rule kenya. someone will try to assasinate him to revenge for one death or another, because at the end of the day, when all dust settles, it will be said that the violence started after kibaki stole an election. kenyans are suffering because kibaki just wants five more years to rule. what utter nonesense. people must and should continue to riot until the thug steps down. all the unnecessary deaths are unfortunate, but there is a price to pay for freedom. it must be made very obvious to this blind man that he cannot and will not be tolerated, and that corruption must come to an end in kenya. the deaths from the election violence pale in comparison to deaths caused directly or indirectly by corruption that has been propagated by kibaki and his cronies. kibaki's time is over, and he needs to retire after having been in politics since before independence. did he struggle just so that he can tear the country apart with hate and tribalism.kibaki is a thug, a bandit, a usurper, an armed robber, a pick pocket, an arsinine coward and reject of society. An abnormal effeminate man, whose wife rules over him and insults him in public. A man without honour, a man who does not keep his word, and breaks promises and agreements at the slightest opportunity. An opportunist, a rapist of kenyans, a blind and deaf mute who wants to be a figure head. A door post, and aging fossil. A reminder of colonial occupation. A grim prophet of doom and death, spreader of hate, war monger and forgetful . Kibaki is not a keeper of promises, but an adulterous polygamist who dishonors his own children and wives. Why some people would be supporting him at this time when he has let not only kenyans and kikuyus down, but africa as a whole and democracy as a principle has been sacrificed at the selfish temle of kibaki's ego baffles me.

HOW KIKUYUS HAVE BEEN THINKING ALL ALONG

2008-01-17T15:41:00.000-08:00

Disclaimer: Another abysmal one from the motherland..

Subject: GEMA

Importance: High

ATTENTION: GEMA COMMUNITY ALONE

HOUSE OF MUMBI! LET US WAKE UP!

KIBAKI TENA!
We the Gema community must wake up to the reality and call a spade a spade
and not a big spoon. From the various opinion polls even from the Consumer
Insight which is owned by our own Hon Mutahi Kagwe has shown that the rest
of the Kenyans have decided to isolate us by not supporting our own son.
We
should stop pretending and come out strongly in support of President Mwai
Kibaki since failure for him to be relected will spell a lot of misery to
most of our tribesmen because of many reasons best know to us all. We must
return thanks to Kibaki and his government for ensuring we got the most of
the nation's cake during his past five years. I had never seen many people
from Central Province being employed the way it was done and I believe he
created the 500,000 jobs per year as he had promised. Those who are saying
he did not am wondering which Kenya are they in.
We have to admit that some of our leaders from Mt Kenya let down the
president by misadvising him in various issues affecting the all country
the worst of which being the mishandling of the terrorist Muslims, the
looting rustlers from kacurias from rift valley, the uncircumcised lake
side boys, gluttonous luhyas and the blind gusiis (Nyachae married our
daughter and all of them thought they have become our blood relatives).
We need to plan to win the Election with or without their support. I say
so
because there is no point of pretending they are on our side after all
they
seems to have been bribed to support the opposition and no amount of
wooing
will help as .Remember during Moi's time we the GEMA were also stubborn
refusing completely to support him despite many gestures he had extended
to
us. We should not hope the rest are stupid not to be the same. This is a
fact and am not ashamed to state so. Let them go to hell!

It is with this reality that His Excellency The President Mwai Kibaki
should start consolidating our Kikuyu, Embu and Meru .I believe we are
enough to give him victory given the fact that we are all over the country
so on the top of the 4 million plus votes in Central and Eastern we can
still manage to get another 4 million in the rest of the provinces. In all
the major towns we make more than half the population.
Kibaki Campaigning team should discard the issue of trying to woo some
empty parties such as tip tip, ford Kenya and ford people. The opinion
polls have shown they have got no following from there back yards and
there
insistence of going it alone on parliamentary and civics seats is suspect
and is delaying actualization of any meaningful coalition. Kibaki should
do
away with those warlord nyachae, bitter kombo and the uncircumcised tuju.
They will definitely not be relected. So if they do not
Have hope of getting themselves votes how do President Kibaki expect them
to assist him? No wonder the President has been scoring poorly in their
backyards. Another wastage was the award of Kshs 5 Billion to Ali Taib to
try to woo the terrorists to our side. This won't work because the
terrorists are hard core supporters of the boy from the lake.

Only Kanu can be worth working with because some of its followers are
still
remote, backward in life and we can easily win them by bribing them. After
all they were used to bribes. Kudos Uhuru for showing them the way.
Also shirikisho party of the mijikenda can be arm twisted with hand outs
because this is a party of the poorest people in Kenya if not in the
Africa
or the world for that matter. Kibaki should exploit this. You remember
during the magarini by elections Kibaki's Government needed only to show
them how electricity poles look like and before the reality hit them that
there was no electricity project they had already supported our choice for
them. See, we sons of Mumbi have brains and I believe if we go this way
the
lakeside uncircumcised tinga will see dust. We cannot talk about the dog
> eaters kambas so kalonzo is no match he is in the league of muiru or
patni.
Let them know if they do not support our Kibaki they will continue eating
dogs due to hanger.

To assist Kibaki to win he should ensure the construction of roads past
Nakuru going to the west to be slowed down to hamper the movement of those
going those sides since it seems they have closed their hears to pleads by
president to re-lect him. I think so far
The government of President Kibaki has done something on this as you can
remember the constructions from Limuru to Gilgil was done quickly and from
there the enthusiasm of construction seems to have faded. Cheers our
beloved President. I hope you will do more to hamper any development in
these opposition zones.

Also during Christmas and Election all Gema owners of busses plying
western
routes should re-route all the vehicles to Central Province and be paid by
DP , NARC KENYA AND KANU THE KING MAKERS IN PNU. Note that majority of
the
PSVs are owned by us and we should not waste any opportunity that come our
way.

Kibaki should use the administration thoroughly to harass those supporting
opposition and can even enlist our dreaded Mungiki and bank robbers to
target non Mount Kenyans . Mungiki should stop killing our own because
this
will have adverse effect in our voting block. Instead our Kibaki
government
should encourage those in opposition to reduce their numbers the way they
are doing in Mount Elgon . This is congratulation to our Michuki. Keep it
up Mr. Michuki, do not waste your policemen by sending them to quell the
killings in Mt Elgon as you know the killers and victims are all ODM
supporters. We people of Central should be proud that Hon Kibaki's
government was swift in stopping Mungiki killings which would have lead to
many of our own dying. There is need to integrate Mungiki into the army as
had been suggested by the Minister of Defense Hon Karume. This will be of
much assistance in the unlikely event that we lost the coming election. If
this happens President should use military to help him rule Kenya till he
retires on his volition.
We cannot afford to lose the power of governing this Nation as that will
mean most Kikuyus will lose jobs in most of the crucial ministries such as
Ministry of Finance, Internal Security, Justice and Defense which by their
crucial nature must remain headed and manned by Kikuyu professionals the
way it have been in the last five years. During these five years no one
can
complain that these ministries have not superperformed under our notable
House of Mumbi sons and daughters such as:

STATE HOUSE
1. Mwai Kibaki-President
2. Lucy Kibaki-Deputy President
3. Stanley Murage-De facto State Hosue Controller
4. Muthaiga Group lead by Chancellor Wanjui-Presidential Advisers
5. Muthaura-Head of Public Service
6. More than have of other permanent secretaries
7. Cardinal John Njue-In charge of wooing non Kikuyu stupid
Catholics

8. Pastor Ng'ang'a of Neno wooer
9. David Githii- PCEA mobiliser
10.

INTERNAL SECURITY
1. Hon Michuki-Minister
2. Hon Munya-Assistant Minister
3. Erick Kiraithe-Police Spokesman
4. All the 8 PCs except for two who are married to our daughters
5. All 72 DCs except for 13 out of whom 7 are also married to our
daughters
6. Head of NSIS

MINISTRY OF FINANCE

1. Hon Amos Kimunya-Minister
2. Hon Peter Kenneth-Assistant Minister
3. Mr Kinywa-Permanent Secretary
4. Mr Ndung'u-Central Bank Governor
5. Mr Michael Waweru-Commissioner General -KRA
6. Mrs Nelius Kariuki-Chairperson Kenya Re
7. Mrs Eunice Mbogo-MD Kenya Re
8. Mr Jimnah Mbaru-Nairobi Stock Exchange Chairman
9. Mr. Wangunyu-CMA vice chairman
10. Mr James Mwangi-MD Equity Bank

Ministry of Environment

1. Hon David Mwiraria-Minister
2. Hon Wangare Maathai-Assistant Minister
3.

Ministry of Energy

1. Hon Kiraitu Murungi-Minister
2. Hon Mwangi Kiunjuri-Assistant Minister

Ministry of Communication

1. Hon Mutahi Kagwe- Minister
2. Hon Koigi Wa Wamwere-Assistant Minister
3. PS
4. Mr Linus Gitahi-MD Nation Media

Ministry of Defense

1. Hon Njenga Karume-Minister
2. PS

Ministry of Education

1. Hon George Kinuthia Saitoti-Minister
2. Mr Karega Mutahi-Education Secretary

Ministry of Transport

1. Mr George Muhoho-MD Kenya Ports Authority
2. Mr Mbugua-Head of PSV's

Ministry of Works

1. Hon Simon Nyachae- Minister married to our Kikuyu daughter so we are
also well represented here.

Ministry of Agriculture

1. Hon Kirwa- Minister married to our Kikuyu daughter so we are also well
represented here.

Ministry of Foreign Affairs

1. Hon Raphael Tuju-Minister married to our Kikuyu daughter so we
are
also well represented here.

The above is just but the top cream but also the bulk of those working
under them are
Mostly our Kikuyus and Merus and that is why we should be proud of
Kibaki's
leadership and that gives us the reason to defend at any cost.

We must give extra credit to Waweru of KRA in that since he took over our
sons and daughters have been able to secure the lion share of jobs in this
crucial Revenue Authority even without going through the rigorous
interviews subjected to the rest f Kenyans. The same goes to Hon Michuki
and his men at the ministry for ensuring our sons and daughters from
Central Province takes the lion share of enrollment to police and
administration positions.

We should ensure Kibaki gets reelected to enable us take over all the jobs
in strategic positions in all government institutions after all Mau Mau
who
brought independence were from the house of Mumbi and we should not be
criticized when we claim what it rightly belongs to us.

KUDOs Matatus and City Hopas for fare hike and Kibaki Tena Posters

We should also be gratefull to our people from Central who owns 90% of the
matatus and buses operating in Nairobi for coming up together and ensuring
that they increase fares by Ksh 10 which is channeled to Kibaki Tena
Campaign Fund. Note that this was a clever way of making even opposition
supporters to contribute towards Kibaki reelection without noticing. More
congrats goes to CITY HOPA BUSES for on top of raising funds for Kibaki
and
PNU from the fares they have gone an extra mile to ensure that even ODM
supporters endorse Kibaki by boarding their buses with Kibaki and PNU
posters. Note that they have got no choice but we have to tread carefully
given that the terrorists
(Muslims) have decided to side with them and they might be desperate to
petrol bomb buses bearing Kibaki's posters. We should be extra careful
while using these vehicles and if possible we should let those opposed to
Kibaki to eat humble pie and use them so that in the event that they are
stoned or bombed at least our enemies votes will be reduced.

EVADE PAYING TAXES IF ODM WINS

In the unlikely event that ODM wins the coming elections let us deny them
tax they way our Kikuyu business men (who actually owns over 80% business)
used to deny Moi's government. Let them know that our people accepted to
pay tax in solidarity with our own being the President and we must say No
Kibaki No Taxes from Kikuyu Meru Businesses.

HAIL KIBAKI FOR DISPOSAL OF PUBLIC CORPORATIONS

We should not condemn Kibaki's lieutenants for rushing to dispose
Safaricom
and Telkom . The amounts raised will assist us in the campaigns and more
so
our sons in Tran-century Group lead by Jimna Mbaru , Jimmy Kibaki, Amos
Kimunya will ensure Gema are allotted the lion share of these corporations
they way they did with Kenya Power, Kenya Airways, Kengen, Kenya Re and
Kenya Railway . This should be done with haste since we do not know if the
rest of Kenyans have known their rights and in that case might vote us out
of government come 27th December 2007.

THANKS A LOT TO OUR SONS FOR THE CAPTIVATING PROPAGANDA

Our sons should intensify spreading of propaganda materials against the
stupid ODM candidate. We must portray him as a devil worshiper but hold on
a bit I have heard some say if Tinga is a devil worshiper then Kibaki is
himself the devil and according to them it is better the servant (Raila)
than the master (Kibaki). We should also counter this. Non Kikuyu
Christians are fools . Just intensify propaganda that Raila is a devil
worshiper and they will believe. Hawataweza Kikuyu .
All Luos are stupid. Do they think they can rule this country while
Kikuyu's have the anointed sons and daughters. They must know that after
Kibaki Uhuru and after Uhuru Jimmy Kibaki,Martha Karua, Kimunya, and Muiru
etc etc but only from House of Mumbi forever and ever and ever.

Sincerely speaking Kibaki has done us good people of Mount Kenya and we
should all turn up at Election Day and give it all. Let the rest stupid
Kenyans languish in poverty as we continue to enrich our selves. WE ARE
INDEED THE JEWS OF KENYA -THE CHOSEN FEW. No other tribe can dare invest
in
our Central Province because we have our Mungiki and Robbers to take care
of that. We also cannot buy from a non Kikuyu shop. Tutoboe ukweli. Kazi
iendelee.

TOTHI MBERE DOGA COKE THUTHA. TIGANA NA KERIMO.

Yours truly,

PNU SECRETARIAT- CENTRAL PROVINCE EXCUSIVE WING.

NA WERA IENDEREE

Rebuking Thomas manton and his fake prophecies about Kibaki.

2008-01-13T07:40:00.000-08:00

What I do know from the Lord’s own word is that such prophesies as from a Mr. Manton are not from above but are DIVINATION, because they are on earthly matters which will pass away. These prophecies add no value to the progress in the kingdom of Heaven. What did Jesus tell the Devil about the Kingdoms of this world? The focus of Christians is the great hope, the arrival from Heaven of Our Lord Jesus to take us home. Don’t rejoice in earthly victories especially politics. Paul, even when in chains still wished that the politicians became like him except for the chains (Acts 26:29). Our victories are in the Lord Jesus.

On Kibaki’s stealing of a rather democratic election: that does not make him a righteous ruler. If anything, God will use him (for the time he manages to hang onto that stolen throne) to teach Kenyans some lessons about consequences of dishonesty and stealing. You cannot say that God has raised Kibaki because in that case you will have to accuse God of approving stealing. God does not anoint people in that fashion. Watch out Christians and let us remain clear minded distinguishing godliness from all the spiritual confusion destroying the Kenyan people. Do not approve what is evil. Kibaki has been ALLOWED BY GOD (BUT NOT APPROVED OR WILLED BY GOD) to outwit his opponents through cunning methods so that lessons can be learnt. Wait and see for yourselves if the Lord tarries.

Let us Christians get to acknowledge sin despite the prevailing tribalism and call for justice and repentance unto salvation for leaders and all men. Let us pray that Kibaki gets saved into eternal life and thus becomes a more trustworthy individual. If we can do this honestly, then, we can claim to be true children of God.

But all the time as we see political events killing people, let us feel for the displaced and the suffering. Let us help all of them where we can. Let us love everyone with the love of Christ. Let us not glee at supposed losers of election as some so called Christians tend to do. May the name of our Lord Jesus be praised forever and ever because He is in control and later we will all appreciate His wisdom.

Shailja Patel's Open Letter to Samuel Kivuitu‏

2008-01-13T07:13:00.000-08:00

AN OPEN LETTER TO SAMUEL KIVUITU, CHAIR OF THE
ELECTORAL COMMISSION OF KENYA

Mr. Kivuitu,

We've never met. It's unlikely we ever will.
But, like every other Kenyan, I will remember you
for the rest of my life. The nausea I feel at the
mention of your name may recede. The bitterness and
grief will not.

You had a mandate, Mr. Kivuitu. To deliver a
free, fair and transparent election to the people of
Kenya. You and your commission had 5 years to
prepare. You had a tremendous pool of resources,
skills, technical support, to draw on, including the
experience and advice of your peers in the field -
leaders and experts in governance, human rights,
electoral process and constitutional law. You had
the trust of 37 million Kenyans.

We believed it was going to happen. On
December 27th, a record 65% of registered Kenyan
voters rose as early as 4am to vote. Stood in lines
for up to 10 hours, in the sun, without food, drink,
toilet facilities. As the results came in, we
cheered when minister after powerful minister lost
their parliamentary seats. When the voters of Rift
Valley categorically rejected the three sons of
Daniel Arap Moi, the despot who looted Kenya for 24
years. The country spoke through the ballot, en
masse, against the mind-blowing greed, corruption,
human rights abuses, callous dismissal of Kenya’s
poor, that have characterized the Kibaki
administration.

But Kibaki wasn't going to go. When it became
clear that you were announcing vote tallies that
differed from those counted and confirmed in the
constituencies, there was a sudden power blackout at
the Kenyatta International Conference Centre, where
the returns were being announced. Hundreds of GSU
(General Service Unit) paramilitaries suddenly
marched in. Ejected all media except the government
mouthpiece Kenya Broadcasting Corporation.

Fifteen minutes later, we watched,
dumbfounded, as you declared Kibaki the winner. 30
minutes later, we watched in sickened disbelief and
outrage, as you handed the announcement to Kibaki on
the lawns of State House. Where the Chief Justice,
strangely enough, had already arrived. Was waiting,
fully robed, to hurriedly swear him in.

You betrayed us. Perhaps we'll never know
when, or why, you made that decision. One rumor
claims you were threatened with the execution of
your entire family if you did not name Kibaki as
presidential victor. When I heard it, I hoped it was
true. Because at least then I could understand why
you chose instead to plunge our country into civil
war.

I don't believe that rumor any more. Not since
you appeared on TV, looking tormented, sounding
confused, and contradicting yourself. Saying, among
other things, that you did not resign because you
"did not want the country to call me a coward", but
you "cannot state with certainty that Kibaki won the
election". Following that with the baffling
statement "there are those around him [Kibaki] who
should never have been born." The camera operator
had a sense of irony - the camera shifted several
times to the scroll on your wall that read: "Help
Me, Jesus."

As the Kenya Chapter of the International
Commission of Jurists rescinds the Jurist of the
Year award they bestowed on you, as the Law Society
of Kenya strikes you from their Roll of Honor and
disbars you, I wonder what goes through your mind
these days.

Do you think of the 300,000 Kenyans displaced
from their homes, their lives? Of the thousands
still trapped in police stations, churches, any
refuge they can find, across the country? Without
food, water, toilets, blankets? Of fields ready for
harvest, razed to the ground? Of granaries filled
with rotting grain, because no one can get to them?
Of the Nairobi slum residents of Kibera, Mathare,
Huruma, Dandora, ringed by GSU and police, denied
exit, or access to medical treatment and emergency
relief, for the crime of being poor in Kenya?

I bet you haven't made it to Jamhuri Park yet.
But I'm sure you saw the news pictures of poor
Americans, packed like battery chickens into their
stadiums, when Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana.
Imagine that here in Nairobi, Mr. Kivuitu. 75,000
Kenyans, crammed into a giant makeshift refugee
camp. Our own Hurricane Kivuitu-Kibaki, driven by
fire, rather than floods. By organized militia
rather than crumbling levees. But the same root
cause - the deep, colossal contempt of a tiny ruling
class for the rest of humanity. Over 60% of our
internal refugees are children. The human collateral
damage of your decision.

And now, imagine grief, Mr. Kivuitu. Grief so
fierce, so deep, it shreds the muscle fibers of your
heart. Violation so terrible, it grinds down the
very organs of your body, forces the remnants
through your kidneys, for you to piss out in red
water. Multiply that feeling by every Kenyan who has
watched a loved one slashed to death in the past
week. Every parent, whose child lies, killed by
police bullets, in the mortuaries of Nairobi,
Kisumu, Eldoret. Everyone who has run sobbing from a
burning home or church, hearing the screams of those
left behind. Every woman, girl, gang-raped.

Do you sleep well these days, Mr. Kivuitu? I
don't. I have nightmares. I wake with my heart
pounding, slow tears trickling from the corners of
my eyes, random phrases running through my head:

Remember how we felt in 2002? It's all gone.
(Muthoni Wanyeki, ED of Kenya Human Rights
Commission, on the night of December 30th, 2007,
after Kibaki was illegally sworn in as president).

There is a crime here that goes beyond
recrimination. There is a sorrow here that weeping
cannot symbolize. (John Steinbeck, American writer,
on the betrayal of internally displaced Americans,
in The Grapes of Wrath)

Haki iwe ngao na mlinzi....kila siku tuwe na
shukrani ("Justice is our shield and defender....
every day filled with thanksgiving" Lines from Kenya
's national anthem)

I soothe myself back to patchy sleep with my
mantra in these terrible days, as our country burns
and disintegrates around us:

Courage. Courage comes. Courage comes from
cultivating. Courage comes from cultivating the
habit. Courage comes from cultivating the habit of
refusing. Courage comes from cultivating the habit
of refusing to let fear dictate one's actions. (Aung
San Suu Kyi, Burmese Nobel Peace Prize winner).

I wake with a sense of unbearable sadness.
Please let it not be true.....

Meanwhile, the man you named President cowers
in the State House, surrounded by a cabal of
hardline power brokers, and a bevy of sycophantic
unseated Ministers and MPs, who jostle for position
and succession. Who fuel the fires by any means they
can, to keep themselves important, powerful,
necessary. The smoke continues to rise from the
torched swathes of Rift Valley, the gutted city of
Kisumu, the slums of Nairobi and Mombasa. The Red
Cross warns of an imminent cholera epidemic in
Nyanza and Western Kenya, deprived for days now of
electricity and water. Containers pile up at the
Port of Mombasa, as ships, unable to unload cargo,
leave still loaded. Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi,
Southern Sudan, the DRC, all dependent on Kenyan
transit for fuel and vital supplies, grind to a
halt.

A repressive regime rolls out its panoply of
oppression against legitimate dissent. Who knew our
police force had so many sleek, muscled,
excellently- trained horses, to mow down protestors?
Who guessed that in a city of perennial water
shortages, we had high-powered water cannons to
terrorize Kenyans off the streets?

I am among the most fortunate of the
fortunate. Not only am I still whole, alive,
healthy, mobile; not only do I have food, shelter,
transport, the safety of those I love; I have the
gift of work. I have the privilege to be in the
company of the most brilliant, principled, brave,
resilient Kenyans of my generation. To contribute
whatever I can as we organize, strategize, mobilize,
draw on everything we know and can do, to save our
country. I marvel at the sheer collective volume of
trained intelligence, of skill, expertise,
experience, in our meetings. At the ability to rise
above personal tragedy - families still hostage in
war zones, friends killed, homes overflowing with
displaced relatives - to focus on the larger picture
and envisage a solution. I listen to lawyers,
economists, youth activists, humanitarians; experts
on conflict, human rights, governance, disaster
relief; to Kenyans across every sector and
ethnicity, and I think:

Is this what we have trained all our lives
for? To confront this epic catastrophe, caused by a
group of old men who have already sucked everything
they possibly can out of Kenya, yet will cling
until they die to their absolute power?

You know these people too, Mr. Kivuitu. The
principled, brave, resilient, brilliant Kenyans. The
idealists who took seriously the words we sang as
schoolchildren, about building the nation. Some of
them worked closely with you, right through the
election. Some called you friend. You don't even
have the excuse that Kibaki, or his henchmen, might
offer - that of inhabiting a world so removed from
ours that they cannot fathom the reality of ordinary
Kenyans. You know of the decades of struggle,
bloodshed, faith and suffering that went into
creating this fragile beautiful thing we called the
"democratic space in Kenya." So you can imagine the
ways in which we engage with the unimaginable. We
coin new similes:

lie low like a 16A (the electoral tally form
returned by each constituency, many of which were
altered or missing in the final count)

We joke about the Kivuitu effect - which turns
internationalists, pan-Africanists, fervent
advocates for the dissolution of borders, into
nationalists who cry at the first verse of the
national anthem .

Ee Mungu nguvu yetu
Ilete baraka kwetu
Haki iwe ngao na mlinzi
Natukae na undugu
Amani na uhuru
Raha tupate na ustawi.

O God of all creation
Bless this our land and nation
Justice be our shield and defender
May we dwell in unity
Peace and liberty
Plenty be found within our borders.

Rarely do we allow ourselves pauses, to absorb
the enormity of our country shattered, in 7 days. We
cry, I think, in private. At least I do. In public,
we mourn through irony, persistent humor, and
action. Through the exercise of patience, stamina,
fortitude, generosity, that humbles me to witness.
Through the fierce relentless focus of our best
energies towards challenges of stomach-churning
magnitude. We tell the stories that aren't making it
into the press: the retired general in Rift Valley
sheltering 200 displaced families on his farm, the
Muslim Medical Professionals offering free treatment
to anyone injured in political protest. We
challenge, over and over again, with increasing
weariness, the international media coverage that
presents this as "tribal warfare", "ethnic
conflict", for an audience that visualizes Africa
through Hollywood: Hotel Rwanda, The Last King of
Scotland, and Blood Diamond.

I wish you'd thought of those people, when you
made the choice to betray them. I wish you'd drawn
on their courage, their integrity, their clarity,
when your own failed you. I wish you'd had the
imagination to enter into the lives, the dreams, of
37 million Kenyans.

But, as you've probably guessed by now, Mr.
Kivuitu, this isn't really a letter to you at all.
This is an attempt to put words to what cannot be
expressed in words. To mourn what is too immense to
mourn. A clumsy groping for something beyond the
word ‘heartbreak’. A futile attempt to communicate
what can only be lived, moment by moment. This is a
howl of anguish and rage. This is a love letter to a
nation. This is a long low keening for my country.

Shailja Patel

WHAT IS HAPPENING IN KENYA TODAY?

2008-01-12T09:23:00.000-08:00

1. People are queuing to return looted goods in Mombasa after a Timber Merchant sent out word that a Jinn had put a curse on any one who uses the items.
2. The student who beat his teacher in Eldoret is looking for a new school.
3. The residents of Kisumu have nowhere to shop after they completely ransacked shops, banks and educational institutions along the aptly named Oginga Odinga High Street in the Central Business District which also houses the third British Council offices in the country.
4. Lake shipping traffic has plummeted after Uganda switched the port of entry to Dar es Salaam to the rail head at Mwanza followed by shipping to Entebbe and Jinja.
5. Sony Sugar in Awendo Town has no cane after the nucleus plantations were burnt.
6. The boy who had smoked cannabis and led a gang to torch his mother's house and prevented fire fighters from reaching it is heading for his Aunt's home in Karungu. He is not sure what reception he will get now that Safaricom Mobile is back in the air and word might have reached the Aunt.
7. A Kibera resident is receiving help from Kenya Red Cross after his shack went up in flames minutes after he had burnt his neighbour's property.
8. One would be First Lady is stuck with paint of a certain colour and the one in State House is waiting for the outcome of the peace talks before she starts re-painting.
9. A group of young people who had bought tickets for the cancelled swearing in of the would be President are demanding their fares back.
10. Kenya is losing out on Sports Tourism as the Cricket fixture against Namibia is transferred from Nairobi to Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. It has been reported that 2010 World Cup Finalists have planned direct flights to South Africa without a stop over in Nairobi.

The real cause of the Kenyan conflict

2008-01-12T09:17:00.000-08:00

The real cause of the Kenyan conflict is not tribalism as people would like us to believe.
It is multifactorial as follows, ranging from overpopulation to inability to understand numbers:

1. Failure to control the population from Independence (educating girls leads to smaller families)
2. Global warming, the El Nino and la Nina phenomena
3. Globalisation (Labour intensive jobs in textiles, shoe manufacturing etc. exported to India and China)
4. The decaying infrastructure
5. Failure by Habitat, UNEP and other UN Agencies based in Nairobi to pay serious attention to the situation in the slums
6. Failure of the authorities to develop the rural areas leaving people no choice but to head for Nairobi
7. Failure to use Aid money for the intended purpose
8. The delusion of the rulers who shunned Foreign Aid by claiming that they can balance the budget from internal resources without relying on donors while serving only 10% of the population and ignoring the rest.
9. The economic growth in the last 5 years that led to the increase in the middle class and consequent rise in prices thus marginalising the poor.
10. Bad politics and greed for Money (feeling poor even with one billion shillings - please teach these people basic Maths).

The country has indeed gone to the dogs.

2008-01-06T21:22:00.000-08:00

It is worse than Zimbabwe where the infrastructure has not been damaged. The inept way in which the Kenya security forces have handled this election aftermath leaves a lot to be desired. As Africa descends into chaos, think of how the previously dominant economies of Zambia, Cote d'Ivoire and Zimbabwe were reduced to ruins. People thought it would never happen to Kenya but it is happening before our very own eyes. Can you imagine, this morning Baghdad celebrated New Year in style when Nairobi could not. It is safer in Iraq and Somalia than it is in Kenya !!

The Security Forces should have deployed long back and made it quite clear that looting and lawlessness will not be tolerated. They should have done it the way the US National Guards managed to control the riots in South Central Los Angeles and New Orleans and prevented these from spreading nationwide. Instead, they allowed the criminal elements and the unemployed thugs to take over and this is what made the ordinary people to take to the streets as well after the bungled election results that have now turned into a farce. As it is, they are now unable to control the masses hence the order of shoot to kill. And the body count is definitely an underestimate.

Kisumu was deliberately left unprotected in order to let the Central Business District to be reduced to rubble. This is what has happened to the city centre. It is a shell of its former state. Instead of playing catching up from where it had reached, the clock has been put back 40 years and it will never be the same again. In fact, it is worse than the pre-independence days. The same applies to other towns and cities.

Don't be fooled that this is a Luo versus Kikuyu struggle as the politicians would like us to believe. it is a conflict between the haves and the have - nots. It is unfortunate that the politicians have pitted the poor Kikuyus against the poor Luos and the other tribes who have been enjoying an uneasy struggle with existence staying side by side in the slums of Mathare, Korogocho, Kibera, Mukuru Wa Njenga and elsewhere. These people irrespective of their tribes, were united in poverty and were doing their honest business, it is their leaders who have let them down.

In fact the Kibaki Presidency, I dare say, has been hijacked by the self-seekers and the 'poor man' is being used as their pawn to ensure the continued domination of the economy by a few greedy fellows. You can even see that the script he was reading from as he was sworn in illegally for a second term in office was written for him and he simply repeated it verbatim like a parrot.

The previously sane voice of Industrialist Chris Kirubi formerly Chairman of the Kenya Association of Manufacturers interviewed on the BBC this morning was full of praises of how Mwai Kibaki found a moribund economy in 2002 and transformed it into a vibrant one with a growth rate of 6-7% and a strong Kenya Shilling. A Raila Presidency would have served them just as well if not better. What they forgot is that their companies cannot do business when the masses have revolted. True, the economy may have been strong but now it is hurting and will continue to hurt. The sensitive tourism sector will be the first to suffer after Mombasa was torched, followed by the service sector and manufacturing. Unless calm and sense returns to the country and a way forward is charted to ensure that in future, no slum dweller or the unemployed will ever be forgotten again as being insignificant. They have just shown that they are not to be taken for granted.

I am sure Yoweri Museveni in Uganda, Paul Kagame in Rwanda and Joseph Kabila in the Eastern Congo are beginning to curse themselves for not finding an alternative route of imports and exports through Tanzania away from the troubled Kenya Uganda Railways and the Mombasa - Malaba Corridor.

Kenyans are very good people and I am proud to be one of them.

2008-01-06T21:16:00.000-08:00

Kenyans are very good people and I am proud to be one of them.

The Kenyan people are more enlighted now than in previous years; and are proud to elect leaders democratically.

65% of Kenyans are poor and exploited by the Kibaki administration.

Our beloved Kenyan people are poor and exploited with heavy taxation and high commodity prices!!!

Kibaki is the enemy of the Kenyan people.

He has trashed our democratic gains which were made since multiparty politics were introduced.

He has apparently promoted one community until their estrangement is sure.

Now he has stolen openly our election!!!!! Kibaki is a thief of our democracy and does not keep any promise. He has no love for the poor even among his own tribe.

Our people are dying. These are our beloved Kenyan people caught in political games generated by Kibaki.

This political untrustworthness must be eliminated. Kenyan people must not be made to loose faith in democracy otherwise there is no future for Kenya.

Kibaki has stolen our election. God is punishing Kenya because we have put the wrong man on the throne!!!!!

Kibaki must go and Kenyans will stop killing Kenyans. Our beloved Kenyans are killing each other because Kibaki has stolen an election and destroyed democracy.Election results must be retallyed to prove that he forged and manipulated figures and for this lying habit of his, he must go.

We are praying to the Lord Jesus Christ to help us out of the ditch. Join us in interceding that Kibaki gets away from that seat.

Wrong impression about post election chaos in Kenya by Antony Otieno

2008-01-06T08:57:00.000-08:00

Wrong impression about post election chaos in Kenya, by Anthony Otieno.
While the whole world is aware of the crisis is in Kenya, thanks to the international and local media, most of their reporting is accurate, however, there is need for an honest analysis of the situation in Kenya.

The media

It is sad at this moment in time to apply oudated tactics of muzzling the people who are expressing a democratci right. In the case of kenya, gagging the media would not help Kibaki and his cohorts, since the level of wareness and resolve among kenyans not to return to the dark days of dictatorship is so high. The courage of the Kenyan media and journalists despite setbacks intitated by Internal security Minster (Michuki) is worth noting, but more so the way in which they reportde the events during the campaigns and venteful day of vote counting. Howver, there are problematics with headlines (both local and intrenational) that have appeard in print media since the outbreak of post elections violence.
The ethnic dimension is appearing to be the main focus of international press and they are also reporting that it is a Kikuyu-Luo issue but that is not true. Besides the fighting in the slums where most Luos and Luhyias live in Nairobi and Nakuru, Luos are not the inhabitants of Rift valley or Coast province or Masaai areas where fighting has been reported against the Kikuyu. These kinds of statements misinform the world of the actual facts on the ground and hinder insights that could help get Kenya out of the situation.

Reducing the current post election conflict to a Kikiyu-Luo affair is cheap analysis that is devoid of facts and reflections of what happens on the ground. Most of the current Western media analyses do not taken into account the underlying factors such as the failure of institutions of the state, such as the electoral commission of Kenya whose mediocre performance has plunged the country into bloodshed, a draconian constitutional frameworks that has been at the service of the ethnic chauvinists and jingoist in power since 1963, the centralised power and networks that benefit from it, whose abuse and actions have led to marginalisation of certain groups from national resources, equitable public appointments, and the grand scheme involving local and international elites in exploiting Kenya under the “old order” and interests/forces that want to keep the status quo and their role in the current problem.

Biasness and partisan analyses are also observed in the local media especially the media owners association, Kenya broadcasting corporation, Kenyan citizens in the diaspora through various blog sites and debaters in the local Newspapers where intellectuals like Karuti Kanyinga among others have taken sides, instead of guiding the debate in a more honest way so that all Kenyans can identify where the problem lies (draconian laws, out-dated political system, poverty, inequality, corruption, appointment in public services, un-equal distribution of resources countrywide and lack of access to essential, services among others). Kenyans suffer under these conditions regardless of their tribe, and that is why those who live in the slums are from all tribes, though previously marginalized by earlier regimes like the Luo, Luhya and other minority groups make up the majority in those dwellings.

Leadership and national interest

Questions that people need to ask is why did Kibaki sought to be Kenya’s president, in 1992, 1997, and finally became one in 2002? Was it because he lacked money? Was he someone with an agenda for the “whole “ nation? And if he had one, what was the agenda? Was that agenda realised between 2003 and 2007? Why are Kenyans having a problem with his agenda presented during the campaigns and the people around him majority of whom have been rejected in their own backyards? Why did most Kenyans have a problem with giving him another mandate? Why would someone who is a billionaire and aged 76, not want to leave a legacy that would be remembered in positive terms? What is so painful to forego that Kibaki would not want a clean election? More important to ask is why the current “elite” and morons around Kibaki afraid of change of the current system and/or leadership to go into the hands of “lesser” communities? And lastly, why was the current regime rejected by majority of provinces and communities? Even though there are arguments that Kenya’s economy has grown at 6% over the past two years, the gap between the rich and poor has widened, with more people falling below the poverty line. The slums did not get smaller, nor did North eastern and Eastern provinces get piped water from lake Victoria, the Samburus did not receive hospitals and tarmac roads, No fish industry was built along Lake Victoria and loans given to fishermen. 40 years is along time for the Samburu, Turkana, Rendile and Somalis to wait for basic and essential services to reach them, it is a along time for Kamba people to wait for water and receive food hand outs during starvation, it is a long time before a the Luo and Luhya to have a fishing Board to take care of their interests is agriculture as done to coffee, tea, pyrethrum and dairy farmers; it is along time to wait for major industry in western Kenya; it too long time for Mijikenda to have resources from Coastal investments recycled back to alleviate their poverty, thirst for water, better schools and hospitals.

Obstacle to dialogue

In my view Kibaki is hostage to a number of factors that seems to contradict his call for putting the nation first. First and foremost are the networks of buddies and business comrades and elite form Mt Kenya who have been on the Gravy train since 2003. For what explains the refusal to find a middle ground while knowing so well that the outcome of the elections are not acceptable to everyone including their own people? The people holding Kibaki hostage are the ones Kenyans need to address in their quest for finding a peaceful solution to the current crisis. These people have a lot to loose if the man goes, thus the reason they are against recount, judicial review or re-run of presidential elections. Kenyan comes distant in their priority of needs. The opposition also have a role to play in the process and that will depend on the kind of proposal they put on table, which should be scrutinised by Kenyans since the issue at hand is about how Kenyans are governed and therefore Kibaki or Raila are just but people they expect to govern them through their mandate which includes listening to their views.

The Killings

Kenyans should stop Killing each other. The culprits are few people who are out busy with self-aggrandisement at the expense of a whole nation. Although the current killings are unacceptable since they are an outcome of a stupidity of failure by Kenyan politicians to grasp the communality interest, Kenyans and more so those who abuse the political system and state institutions and resources should know that "Kenya belongs to all who belong in it" and all should be given equal treatment. There is no justification for the minister of internal security to use the outdated tactics of targeting specific ethnic groups with paramilitary force and order to kill. The images ion television shows that most of these people could be apprehended and taken to court. Senseless beating and shooting based on order of a politicians with colonial hangovers will exacerbate acts of revenge instead of resorting to the rule of law to settle disputes or address acts pf violence that re currently being perpetrated by some Kenyans who exploit the chaotic situation. The paramilitary police used by Michuki on the Luo (this is historical tactic, Kenyatta did the same, in the 60s and early seventies) is selective and directed in one direction towards a group of people but that too will create more anger and feelings for revenge.
Struggles in the Rift Valley are also about past wrongs against the minority communities like Ogieks who were chased out of the forest and the places given to the central province groups. Masaai and Kalenjin whose l [prime was taken by the British, and later by the elite around Kenyatta. These grievances have never been addressed and due to the complex nature of ethnic blend in those regions, Moi for instance exploited this mix to cause chaos in order to vilify the onset of multiparty in Kenya. Ethnic clashes in 1992 and 1997, produced suffering and anger which have been kept low, but now fully exploited in the face of a dashed hope for change. These people thought there could be some equity with change pf government but that hope is gone, so we expect anger, but also revenge as result of past clashes that were instigated by Moi prior to 1992, and 97 elections

Democratic test

What I fear most is that if Kibaki is allowed to rule, Kenya will return to the dark ages, all the democratic gains will be lost. They will know that they can always rig elections and get away with it no matter what people do including protest, they don’t mind whether people die or not, since they will be able to get away with it.
Kibaki’s behaviour in relation to vote tallying and results in the 2007 elections makes democracy look sick in Africa. It bring to mind the question whether there are free and fair elections? Or whether franchise or high voter turn out as witnessed in Kenya can turn a regime out of office? What about the role of institutions to support such a process like an independent police, electoral commission, judiciary and a parliament that is sensitive to the needs of the country, free and non-partisan media, respect for the rule of law by all parties involved in the electoral process? Even though Democracy has never been perfect although being adopted by nations and peoples, its institutionalisation depend more on local history, culture and geography and not analyses and prescription as it is applied in other contexts. In the case of Kenya, the political, economic and social systems are complex and full of nuances, combined with other forces/vested interests/pressure groups that exert more power, thus making the ordinary voter appear to be a pawn rather than a "king" maker.

Therefore if Kenya is to build on the already made gains on the democratic front, a solution to the current crisis must be found in tandem with the reality on the ground. The reality that the “presidential election was rigged” and the incumbent is hell-bent on hanging to power no mater what cost, but also the reality that the opposition is making claims which have been proved right by the electoral commission itself and the various poll observers that Kibaki did not win the elections”. Although, calling for peace or on the major players to urge their supporters to clam down is an first step, the call for peace should not water down the main cause of the problem which is “rigged elections” and it is a threat to democratic gains. Being soft on this point would Bolden the antagonists especially the “winners” and based on their history of arrogance and lack of decorum in addressing national issues, they will brush aside the issue at stake and this will fuel anger which is not only expressed by the opposition, but the very people the winners want to “rule” at all cost.

Way out

Asking Raila or Kenyans to forget this and forge ahead, and wait for another 5 years by many partisan authors in various local dailies and international blogs is not sincere and honest since such calls are directed at one party and not the other two. Why are people not asking Kibaki to resign? Why not ask for recount and audit of the votes? If the Electoral commission is not honest, how sure can we be of the courts in Kenya? Kenyans know that the system is rotten thus the overwhelming vote and a clear message that they want something different. They should not be denied this difference by hiding behind discourses that keeps on mystifying the problem. If Kibaki goes on without the approval of Kenyans, he is not making it better for those already hurt in one way or the other through killings and destruction seen in the past days. These things will haunt the nation after he is long gone and people around him or groups supporting him will not escape blame and demands to be held accountable. Peace can only come when the two parties agree to talk, engage and get into a process that will heal wounds on both sides of the divide (the people, the Opposition and PNU politicians). Allowing Kibaki to go ahead and burrow his head as if nothing serious has happened will only exacerbate the arrogance of the group around him as witnessed during a recent press conference and the exchange between PNU Ministers and the press. Such one sided approach attach on the opposition will only help strengthen the status quo, the exploitation, discrimination and inequality along tribal lines, which with exacerbate problems even if calmness would return today.

What is urgently needed are;

Curfew in Opposition areas to be lifted and regular police patrols with a humane face be initiated in hot spots to give people confidence in the state institutions for their safety. The general service unit has no role in the process since it is a catalyst instead of providing safety.
The Kenya pipeline should immediately resume pumping Oil to western Kenya and Uganda. Cutting this supply is not different from scorched earth policy and if someone in the government has ordered such action, which was observed already before the election days, and then he or they are fuelling the crisis instead of solving it. This should apply to other services like electricity, food items among others
Kenyan civil society organisations, Law Society, The Kenya National Human Rights Commission and invited institutions to help in the process of reconciliation and putting in place a framework that would bring back the credibility of the electoral process and an acceptable conclusion
An independent audit of the presidential, results, or a re-run of presidential election supervised by a team of independent observers and representatives of the two parties (ODM and PNU) within an agreed time frame. It is now clear from ECK that they did not know who won. The ECK had put aside funds for a run off, and that money can be used to SAVE KENYA.

CONTACT ANTHONY OTIENO BY CLICKING HERE.

Where did democracy go in Africa?

2008-01-06T08:49:00.000-08:00

Most presidents after clinching power they taste power hence arrogance and dictatorship. Kibaki is pretending to be Kenyas President when actually Raila Odinga ousted him and now he is using his powers of president to impose himself on people.We have a poor constitution .

He can't even explain it himself! Raila Odinga has 100 ODM party parliament seats while his loose coalition of many small small parties could only afford 36 seats. As if not enough his former cabinet was all voted out including vice president and when the country was striking the guy retreatred to statehouse for a night swearing in ceremony. The guests were senior military officers and all his last poll rejected cabinet and the worst is they were in a rush that they dint raise Kenyan flag or even sing national anthem! Plus no diplomant was present.what a shame to Kenya when we thought they were more democratic than other african countries. The worst still is that Electoral commissioner Samuel Kivuitu declared him president under siege despite concrete evidence of inflated figures for Kibaki and he later confessed that he did not know if Kibaki won.He has finally admitted to having his officers altering results and inflating them infact in 48 central constituencies the voters were estimated as 150 percent for Kibaki.

How do you even explain this? all the largest provinces that's
Riftvalley with 3,000,000 registered voters.Turnout was 2,000,000. 1,599,007 went to Odinga.
Westen province voter turnout was 1,300,000. Odinga got 986,045
Coast province turnout 1,436,980. Odinga got 893,098
Nyanza province home ground for Raila voter turnout 2,000,000. Raila got 1,599,000
North eastern province voter turnout 120,000 Raila 87,000
Nairobi province capital center-this has eight constituencies and 5 parliament seats are for ODM and still Odinga won here in votes. turnout 1,780,002 Raila got 754,097. the remaing votes shared by other 7 presidential candidates.

Now Central province Kibakis strongholds, voter turnout 2,000,000 Kibaki got 1,788,000
Eastern province with 1,800 000 turnout Kibaki got 1,050,000.( KIbaki has become a president because of two provinces) am laughing my head off about african politics. provinces he won in two got 36 parliament seats and he is a president.

Odinga won in 5 provinces out of 8 with 101 parliament seats and somebody wants him to be in opposition. Final tallying revealed Kibaki had 4,533,008. Raila 4,348,980,Kalonzo-807,005 and others.Its
rather absurd. Kibaki got a maximum of three million votes and Odinga had over four point five. Its very unfair to say the least.

Thats why Kenyans reacted in that violence manner. Whoever said here that its Luo and Kikuyu he is mistaken. Kenya has 42 tribes and all 40 except two Kikuyu(central) and Meru(eatsern voted for Raila.
Kenya is crying blood because of a greedy man with self egos who has no remorse that people are dying and instead of dialogue he has turned kenya into a police state threatening opposition with dire consequences and also he has denied them media coverage as he has suspended live coverage.

The European Union observers have dismissed the tallying process and other dignatrories say it was flawed.In this whole world its only Museven of Uganda who congratulated him reasons you all know that he also rigged himself to power. raila is the kenyan peoples democratic choice and Kibaki knows thats why he can only take refuge at statehouse

BETTER TO DIE FREE THAN TO LIVE UNDER OPPRESSION. KENYANS FOUGHT BACK.

2008-01-06T08:35:00.000-08:00

The tragedy of Kenya is an undiluted product of the sit-tight mentality that African leadership have come to represent. When Joaquim Alberto Chissano became the first winner of the Mo Ibrahim prize for achievement in African leadership, I was very skeptical as to the ability of the award to produce at the most three more African leaders who can effectively match-up to the exploits of the former Mozambican leader.
The criteria with which candidates were selected for the award are based on Promotion of the rule of law, Economic opportunity, Political freedom, promotion of the rule of law, offering security to citizens amongst others. I honestly believe it would be easier finding a missing padlock in the middle of the Atlantic than finding a leader in Africa with these qualifications at present.
Well! My cynicism is being given life in the form of Mwai Kibaki of Kenya, who at present is attempting to carry forward the life-long gene of “sit-tightism” that has hitherto clamped down on any form of progress in the Continent of Africa.
Recently I read in the papers that Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika was contemplating making a constitutional amendment that will enable him run for an extended term in office, there is also the case of Robert Mugabe of Zimbabawe who has been the only leader the southern African country has known. Mugabe has spent all his youthful effort, which could have been used in uplifting his country, fighting resistance to his ambition of being life-president. He is the African enigma that has eluded comprehension. His case is made more astonishing, in that fellow African leaders seem to care less if he is killing his people or not. Foreign presidents have called for the removal of the “Beast of Rhodesia”, yet surprisingly no African leader has thought it wise to lend a voice in that respect.
The much respected South African leader, Thabo Mbeki also initiated a rather lame attempt at perpetuating himself in office, this was quickly done away with as the people rather accept an accused rapist that a man slowly I becoming inebriated with power.
We cannot so easily have forgotten how Olusegun Obasanjo right in the full glare of the Nigerian public sought to extend his tyranny by yet another four years, but his political opponents were able to whip up enough sentiment to stall his evil attempt.
There are also rumors that President John Kuffour of Ghana is also about to join the “league of extraordinarily ungentlemen”, as he is already harboring intention to extend his stay in office beyond the stipulated date.
All over Africa this crazy trend seems to exist where there is a seat of power. The continent has become known for its awkward leadership style and governmental approach rather than for anything else. This malaise is slowly spreading to the lower cadre of leadership in the continent.
In total honesty, The elections that were conducted in Kenya where no worse than that which Maurice Iwu and his assembly of diabolic fraudsters organized in Nigeria. But what I find interesting and I dare say commendable is the Kenyan people’s will and desire not to be taken for a political ride anymore.
Unlike the Nigerian experience, the Kenyan people decided to fight for their freedom, they stood up against the powers of the incumbent who had decided to subvert their will and wishes.
They chose not to murmur and grumble in their reticence, they decided for the sake of their future generations not to allow evil claim any form of space on the pedestal of their history.
They decided to stand up for the sake of morality against the enthronement of slavery; they chose to put their destinies in their hands. They decided to control the manner in which they will be ruled. They sought for a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
It is unfortunate lives were lost, more so innocent blood, but that was all the result of Mwai Kibaki’s devious intention to remain in power against the wishes of Majority of the electorate.
The attention of the world has now been drawn to the extensive evil that has been wrought in the country largely because the people decided to take a stand for their future. There is a popular saying that says; “if you don’t stand for anything you will fall for anything”. We fell for anything in the country, while the Kenyans stood up for something

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold

2008-01-05T07:55:00.000-08:00

Kibaki is in a tight corner. Peace can come temporarily, but if the electorate feels like Raila has been deceived, then the whole scenario plays out again. It’s a no-win situation, but unfortunately, blindness is a terrible disease, particularly when the blind insist that they can see .Kikuyus can only be comfortable, if Raila gets what he wants. What surprised me is the ease with which matters can escalate and assume monumental proportions especially if left unchecked. Kibaki cannot be serious that for five damn years he is willing to sacrifice the entire welfare of all Kikuyus. Was Kibaki unable to see the consequences of his actions, or is this exactly what he wanted, because he does not want to be held accountable for misdeeds in his government? whatever the outcome of the American peace initiatives, which always don't work as long as someone feels disenfranchised by the whole process ( look at Israeli/ Palestine for reference) , Kenya has been damaged thoroughly by the roughness with which Kibaki treated a delicate democracy handed over to him in 2002 by Mr. Daniel Arap Moi.
This reminds me of the classical poem by William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming"
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of "Spiritus Mundi"
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The opposition leader Raila Odinga

2008-01-04T03:17:00.000-08:00

The opposition leader Raila Odinga has rejected the election result, saying of President Kibaki: "There is no difference between him and Idi Amin and other military dictators who have seized power through the barrel of the gun."

TRIBALISM IN THE KIBAKI GOVERNMENT BEFORE THE ELECTIONS IN 2007

2008-01-04T03:08:00.000-08:00

FINANCE MINISTRY

Minister - Amos Kimunya – Kikuyu

Asst. Minister- Peter Kenneth – Kikuyu

Permanent Secretary - Joseph Kinyua – Kikuyu

Economic Secretary - Kamau Thuge – Kikuyu

Pensions secretary - Anne Mugo - Kikuyu

Budgetary director -P.B Ngugi – kikuyu

ERD director - Kenneth Mwangi – kikuyu

D/Finance secretary - Mwirichia – Meru

CENTRAL BANK OF KENYA

Governor- Prof. Ndungu – Kikuyu

Dep. Governor - John Gikonyo -Kikuyu

CONSOLIDATED BANK OF KENYA

Chairman - Phillip Njuki – kikuyu

Chief Executive Officer - David Wachira - kikuyu

KENYA REVENUE COMMISSION
(The most absurd)
1. Commissioner General: Michael Waweru - Kikuyu
2. Board Secretary: Mrs. Ngang'a - Kikuyu
3. Senior Deputy Commissioner, Investigation & Enforcement: Mr Joseph Nduati Kikuyu
4. Deputy Commissioner, Investigation and Enforcement: Mr Namu Nguru - Kikuyu
5. Deputy Commissioner, Administration: Mr Karimi – Meru
6. Deputy Commissioner Procurement: Ms Murichu. - Kikuyu
7. Commissioner Customs: Mrs Wambui Namu. - Kikuyu
8. Senior Deputy Commissioner (Customs): Ms Githinji- Kikuyu
9. Deputy Commissioner, Enforcement (Customs): Mr Maina.-Kikuyu

10. Deputy Commissioner, Finance: Ms Wachira.-kikuyu
11. Commissioner Domestic Taxes (LTO)- Mr Njiraini. -Kikuyu
12. Deputy Commissioner: Mrs Mwangi . – Kikuyu
13. Senior Deputy Commissioner, Finance: Mrs King'ori - Kikuyu
14. Senior Assistant Commissioner, Security: Major Kariuki - Kikuyu
15. Senior Deputy Commissioner, Southern Region: Wagachira - Kikuyu

120 Management trainees recruited to KRA IN 2005, 67/120 are Kikuyus

CAPITAL MARKETS AUTHORITY
Board Chair- Chege Waruingi – Kikuyu

CEO - Edward N'talami - Meru

Jimmna Mbaru-...... ........NSE- Kikuyu

DIRECTORATE OF PUBLIC PROCUREMENT
Chief Procurement Officers - 23 out of 36 first appointees are all
from GEMA. Rest of Kenya = the remaining 13 (out of the 36).

KENYA RE-INSURANCE CO.
Chairman of Board - Nelius Kariuki. -kikuyu
Chief Executive Officer - Johnson Githaka -kikuyu
Financial controller - John Kinyua - kikuyu

The New CEO-Mrs.Mbogo- Kikuyu
The latter two were just recently sacked for grand corruption.

Kenya Institute of Education(KIE)
Director - Gabriel Muita -Kikuyu
Higher Education Loans Board (HELB)
Chairman - H.M Kimura -Kikuyu

Commission for Higher Education (CHE)

Head of scholarships /credentialing
Snr Asst. Commissioner- George Njine -Kikuyu
Head of Administration (Asst. Comm) - Margaret Kobia - Meru

Ministry of Foreigh Affairs

95% of Ambassadours and High Commissioners from Mt.Kenya region.

MINISTRY OF INTERNAL SECURITY & PROV. ADM
Minister- John Michuki - Kikuyu
Asst. Minister - Peter Munya - Meru
Permanent secretary - Cyrus Gituai - kikuyu
CID Director - Simon Gatiba Karanja- Kikuyu
AP Commandant - K. Mbugua - kikuyu
GSU Commandant - Mathew Iteere -Gema
Deputy & Asst Commissioners of Police - majority -kikuyu
Provincial Commissioners (PC's) 3/8
Nairobi J. Waweru - kikuyu
Coast - Earnest Munyi- "
NEP -Kiritu Wamae - "
DC's
38/71 are GEMA with most concentrated in; Rift Valley (19) ,

Eastern(8) , Coast & Western (3 each)

MINISTRY OF DEFENSE
Minister - Njenga Karume - Kikuyu
Asst. Minister - none
Permanent secretary - Zachary Mwaura -kikuyu
Vice Chief of Armed Forces - Lt. Gen. Julius Karangi - kikuyu
Army Commandant - Lt. Gen. Augustine Njoroge "
Navy Commandant - Maj. Gen. Mwathethe "
Dep. Air Force Commandant - Maj. Gen. Jackson Waweru "

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION
Minister - Prof George Saitoti - Kikuyu
Asst. Minister(s) - Beth Mugo - Kikuyu
Kilemi Mwiria - Meru
Permanent Secretary - Karega Mutahi - kikuyu
Director Basic Education - Mary Njoroge -kikuyu
Director City Education - Margaret Thiongo- kikuyu

Kenya Institute of Administration Director: Margaret Kobia

Water Services Regulatory Board Chairman: Jane Njagi

National Campaign Against Drug Abuse
Chairman: Frank Njenga Secretary: Jenipher Kimani

Kenya Tourist Development Corporation Chairman: Charles Wachira

Public Archives Advisory Council Director: Lawrence Mwangi

Export Promotion Council Chairman: Peter Kimuyu

Kenya Revenue Authority Commissioner General: Michael Waweru

Tea Board of Kenya Chairman: Sicily Kariuki

Retirement Benefit Authority Director: Kanyi Gachoka

Kenya Water Institute Chairman: Jacob Kaimenyi

Kenya Re-Insurance Corporation
Chairman: Nelius Kariuki Director: Eunice Mbogo

Capital Markets Authority Chairman: Chege Waruinge

Consolidated Bank of Kenya Director avid Ndegwa

Kenya Post Office Savings Bank
Chairman: Wilson Kinyua CEO: Nyambura Koigi

KASNEB Chairman: Francis Kibera CEO: Erastus Gitau

Kenya National Assurance Chairman: Alexander Kaminchia

Central Bank of Kenya Governor: Njuguna Ndungu

Capital Markets Tribunal Chairman: Morris Njage

Kenya Institute of Public Policy and Research
Director: Moses Ikiara

National Irrigation Board Chairman: Francis Gichaga

Kenya National Trading Corporation Director: Gladys Maina

Kenya Industrial Property Institute Chairman: Moses Thairu

East African Portland Company Director: Ndegwa Kagio

Industrial Property Tribunal Chairman: Lillian Wanjira

Kenya Industrial Research and Development

Institute Director: Elias Njoka

Numerical Machining Complex Chairman: Jonathan Muturi

Co-operative College of Kenya Principal: Esther Gicheru

Pyrethrum Board of Kenya Chairman: Isaac Mwangi

New Kenya Cooperative Creameries
Chairman: Matu Wamae Managing Director: Francis Mwangi

Kenya Ordinance Fact Corporation Chairman: Jeremiah Kianga

Tana and Athi River Development Authority
Chairman: A Mureithi Director: S.Maina

Horticultural Corporation Development Authority Chairman: Joseph Kibe

Jomo Kenyatta Foundation Director: Nancy Karimi

Agricultural Finance Corporation Chairman: Patrick Kariuki

National Sports Stadia Management Authority Director: S.Mwai

Kenya Plant Health Inspectorate Chairman: Justin Irina

National Housing Corporation Director: J.Ruitha

Kenya Cultural Centre Chairman: M Kaggia

Kenya National Library Director: Irene Muthoni

Moi University Chairman: Evan Mwai

Kenya Literature Bureau Director: Adams Karauri

Kenya Education Staff Institute

Chairman: Joseph Kimura Director: B .Gachanja

Commission for Higher Education Chairman: Kihumbu Thairu

Kenya Power and Lighting Company Director: E.Njoroge

Higher Education Loans Board Chairman: Joseph Kimura

Water Service Trust Fund Director: S.Mwangi

KENGEN LTD Chairman: Titus Mbathi

Athi Water Service Board Director: L.Mwangi

National Oil Corporation Chairman: Peter Munga

Communication Commission of Kenya
Chairman: Joseph Njagi Director: John Waweru

Coast Water Service Board Chairman: Joseph Muturi

Kenya Film Corporation Director: Wachira Waruru

Tana Water Service Board-Chairman: James Kimani

National Council for Science and Technology
Chairman: Henry Thairu Secretary: G.Kingoria

Kenya Petroleum Refinery Chairman: Justus Kagenu

Coffee Research Foundation
Chairman: K.Njuguna Director: J.Kimemia

Energy Tribunal Chairman: Njuguna Nganga

Kenya Airports Authority Director: George Muhoho

Kenya Railway Chairman: Jonathan Muturi

Kenya Broadcasting Corporation Director; David Waweru

Postal Corporation of Kenya Chairman: Peter Kariuki

Kenyatta National Hospital
Chairman: Margret Wanjohi Director: Jotham Micheni

Kenya Information and Communication Technology
Chairman: Cathrine Ngahu

Nyayo Tea Zones Director: Anne Karimi

Kenya Medical Training College Chairman: James Kahindi

Kenya Agricultural Research Institute
Chairman: J.Mutungi Director: E.Mukisira

Agricultural Development Corporation
Chairman: L.Wariunge

Kenya Sisal Board Director: Charles Kagwimi

Agricultural Information Research Centre
Chairman: Thirikwa Kamau

COMMENTS ABOUT KENYAN ELECTIONS 2007.

2008-01-04T02:48:00.000-08:00

Micah 6:8 (King James Version)
8He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?
YOU CAN CLICK THE TEXT TO BE TAKEN TO THE SOURCE PAGE. BY THE WAY, WHY IS THE WORLD SO COMFORTABLE WITH THE FACT THAT OVER A MILLION KENYANS LIVE IN SLUMS, AND DONT EXPECT THEM TO BE FURIOUS ABOUT IT?
The Attorney General has called for an independent team to tally the presidential votes afresh and end post-election violence.

Mr Amos Wako said in a statement: "It is necessary, and I agree with the Catholic bishops and others, that a proper tally of the valid certificates returned and confirmed should be undertaken immediately and on a priority basis by an agreed and independent person or body."

European election observers have called for an inquiry into the accuracy of Kenya's official presidential election results

THE mayhem that killed hundreds of people following Kenya's election on December 27th completes a depressing cycle of democratic abuses in Africa's biggest countries. Nigeria held its own mockery of an election last April. Scores were killed and observers pronounced it the most fraudulent poll they had ever witnessed. Congo held a more or less peaceful election in October 2006, since when the main opposition leader has been hounded into exile. And the year before that, flawed elections in Ethiopia resulted in the deaths of 199 protesters. Needless to say, the incumbents all won.

So it is easy to be angry, as well as gloomy, about African leaders' continual betrayal of the democratic values they say they hold so dear. And all the more so in the case of Kenya, which has a strong tradition of holding elections, a vibrant political culture, a relatively free press and a sophisticated economy. Given all these advantages, as we wrote before the election, Kenya had an opportunity to “set an example” to Africa and hold free and fair elections. But the country blew it.

Or, more precisely, the political elite blew it. A small cabal of politicians almost certainly stole the result by fraud (see article). In the parliamentary vote, President Mwai Kibaki's ruling party was routed. Yet in the presidential vote Mr Kibaki emerged victorious at the last moment and had himself sworn in only a few minutes later, forestalling pleas from all sides—even from the head of the election commission he himself had appointed—for a pause to investigate mounting claims of malpractice. The report of the European observers was unusually strong in its condemnation of the count.

As in Nigeria, Kenyans queued quietly to exercise their right to vote, reflecting the enormous appetite for democracy that exists on a continent that was until recently dominated by dictators and “big men”. But for democracy to survive, it is not enough to hold elections. Politicians must accept that they may have to give up office, and thus all the opportunities for self-enrichment that come their way. It is no coincidence that the most corrupt politicians are also those who cling most desperately to power—as in Kenya and Nigeria.

In stealing the election, Mr Kibaki has also invited a dangerous backlash against his Kikuyu tribe, the country's largest. Tense tribal divisions have long threatened to widen as the minority groups, including opposition leader Raila Odinga's Luo, have come to feel marginalised by the concentration of power in Kikuyu hands. If the current violence does evolve into something worse, perhaps even civil war, Mr Kibaki and his henchmen will bear much of the blame.

No time to be nice
Initially, America, which sees Kenya as a front-line ally in a war against Islamist militias in neighbouring Somalia, made the mistake of endorsing the president's re-election. Now Britain, America and the African Union are urging Mr Odinga and Mr Kibaki to talk in an effort to stop the bloodletting. That lets Mr Kibaki off the hook far too easily. All the violence should certainly be condemned, but most of the diplomatic pressure should be exerted on Mr Kibaki's supposed new government to annul the results and organise a recount—or a new vote.

If Mr Kibaki will not do this, the rest of the world should suspend direct aid to his regime and impose a travel ban on his officials. That is the least the wretched people of Kenya have a right to expect from their friends abroad.

Kibaki's Hypocrisy

2008-01-04T02:25:00.001-08:00

Mr Mwai kibaki is right now hiding behind the security walls of the government of kenya, while the kenyans he lied to and deceived are furious with him, and feeling the backlash of his gluttonious grab for power. Just 5 years ago, many kenyans were very hopeful, that the union of mr kibaki and mr raila odinga which were enough to uproot moi, would be enough to put kenya on a path to industrial development, but that was just a dream. It has been said that raila and kibaki had a memorandum of understanding that would have allowed them to share power while kibaki remained president, but kibaki renegged on those promises and instead pushed for constitutional reforms that would have increased his powers while treating the mou with mr odinga as trash. Kenyans are very angry today, because they have been raped by the electoral process, and many kenyans have said they will never vote again. Do you blame them? Some very strange news has come to me today regarding the church burning in eldoret. . What is becoming apparent is that kenyans are very furious, and the ethnic differences have only exacerbated this wound.I have heard that kikuyus have essentially been driven out of the west of kenya and perhaps also from the coast. What has happened is fracture along ethnic lines because of corruption in kibaki. Odinga has called kibaki a thief and a liar. That is not far from the truth, as evidenced by kibaki's actions.

CHAOS IN KENYA AND WHAT THEY MEAN

2008-01-03T23:02:00.000-08:00

I am a Kenyan. I would like to begin by stating that I do not advocate for violence in any shape or form. Secondly, I congratulate kenyans for holding a peaceful election, even though they have been robbed of a fair tabulation and announcement of results.I have been watching with amazement the brazen attempts by Mwai kibaki to muzzle freedom of speech and expression in kenya, from banning live tv broadcasts, and preventing public gatherings that want to question the legitimacy of his presidency.Kibaki has to resign.The naked and open manner with which the elections have been rigged is betrayal and grossly demonstrative of callous neglect kibaki has had for poor kenyans. The president of Kenya swears an oath to uphold all the laws of kenya, and to protect the.You cannot be the chief law breaker, and expect kenyans to not violate the same laws you have grossly violated. The reason kenyans are angry is because Kibaki violated their democratic right to elect their own president as the constitution allows. If he won fair and square, openly without rigging, Raila would have been condemned by the international community, and Kibaki would have received congratulations from all over the world, but that is not what happened. Do you remember when Obama came to kenya? He issued very damning condemnation of the corruption in Kibaki's government. All the mayhem and chaos you see in Kenya today do not compare to the damages caused by corruption in Kenya. Kenyans are fed up with corruption and voted for change. So no matter how bad things look in kenya, its actually good, because that is the way corruption will end. Corruption kills more people than you might imagine, and so the lives being lost in kenya today are not lost in vain. ECK officials overlooked the fact that Kenyan police personnel deployed to guard all the 36,000 polling stations countrywide also kept a record of the voting and compiled an accurate record of the results, so that even if something happened to the ECK structures, the Kenya Police is in position to give the nation correct results of the polls. Sources say that the Kenya Police tally indicates a major difference from what the ECK announced. I am amazed by either the steely core or inept attitude displayed by Kibaki's insistence that he is the rightful president, and yet kenyans rejected him, and in the meanwhile, kenya is torn apart.I have been asked to tell All Luo,LUHYAS, Kalenjin, Marakwet, Teso that all vehicles going To Nairobi Are Being Stopped In Naivasha And Kijabe And People From Those Tribes Flushed And Killed By Armed Kikuyu Thugs. JANUARY 3 2008.