April 2005

DON’T PRESS THE RED BUTTON!

An Oxford-educated lawyer has become the first barrister to be disbarred for racism in the UK after he called a senior black solicitor a “nigger” and suggested he returned to Ghana.

Mutahi Ngunyi analyses the realpolitik behind Kibaki’s flirtation with Biwott in the Sunday Nation. A central question: Is a Kibaki-Biwott alliance stronger than Kibaki-Ralia one? The rise of Biwott would be the strongest move by any camp so far in the election of 2007. Ngunyi also looks at the influence of the wazees, the old men of Kenyan politics, which makes the vijanas, Young Turks, look and behave like amateurs. Biwott, hate him or hate him, is a massive political power, in addition he has the ear of and speaks on behalf of the ultimate political mzee, the Professor of Politics himself.

To be elected president in Kenya under the current constitution you have to win at least 25% of the vote in 75% of the Provinces. In Kenya today that would mean you have to win 25% of the vote in 5 of the 8 Provinces. Something Kibaki may struggle to do. Right on cue the Standard on Sunday reveals a plan to over haul the current Provincial Administration system, the main part of the reform being the creation of four new provinces taking the total to 12. Suddenly things begin to look rosy again for Kibaki. If Nyachae delivers 25% of the new Nyanza South province, Biwott delivers 25% of the new North Rift province, Ntimama delivers 25% of the new South Rift province, assuming North Eastern and the new Northern province go with the incumbent, which the usual do, all Kibaki has to do is hold onto Central and the new Central Rift province to be laughing all the way to the bank statehouse. The wazees will have kept Kibaki in statehouse.

However the Kibaki camp may be committing the ultimate miscalculation. By courting new votes and new supporters so vigorously (e.g. this fliration with biwott) they risk isolating previously loyal supporters.

It is an indication of how low opinion of political leaders in Kenya is that even something as worthy as the reform of an outdated Provincial Administration system immediately looks like an attempt to buy strategic votes. I for one have become the ultimate cynic where this government is concerned.

OneWorld International is offering a mobile phone text messaging service that advertises jobs and allows candidates to apply from wherever they are in Kenya.
All together now: Na hiyo ndio maendeleo!

Rogers Cadenhead is sharp guy. Why? Because he bought the domain name benedictxvi.com. Before you accuse him of being a cybersquatter you should know that he bought the name at least 24 hours BEFORE the new pope was elected! He also registered the names:

• ClementXV.com
• InnocentXIV.com
• LeoXIV.com
• PaulVII.com
• PiusXIII.com

Meanwhile my amateur media analysis conducted via television, radio and internet simultaneously (it was my day off what did you want me to do?) revealed that skynews.com, unsurprisingly, and news.bbc.com, surprisingly, were the first outlets to post the election of the new pope on their websites. cnn.com was still focusing on the Oklahoma memorial for at least 2 minutes after the SKY and BBC had reported on their websites. Reuters and AP, although were the first to report that a new pope was elected through their newswire, while the rest of us were trying to figure out whether the grey smoke we were seeing was white or black, did not bother updating their website for as long as I was looking, about 10 minutes. But they did hit my RSSBandit fastest together with the Guardian which was the one website I forgot to check.

In the time between the white smoke and our first sighting of the new pope BBC had the best coverage. This was because all the other stations had pope experts who had finally ran out of things to say after repeating themselves for the last week. The BBC, probably too broke to afford a group of experts, went into the crowd instead, interviewing nuns, priests, chain smoking Italians, and the gathered faithful.

Strangely enough the guys that had all the right connections, the ones who had people on the inside i.e. vatican.va were the last guys to report anything. And when they did it was, very helpful to the waiting surfing masses, in Italian.
I sat there waiting to see the coat of arms change but nada. For those of you who don’t know, (or those of you who have a life) when there is no pope the Vatican use a modified coat of arms to signify a Vacancy in the Holy See. It looks like this:

After the new pope is elected they change the coat of arms back to its original with hat, bells, keys and everything which looks like this:

As for the new head honcho himself, some Kenyans love him, others don’t like him that much.

And that concludes Pope Watch 2005.

White smoke: check
Bells: check
Habeum papam!

McDonalds is reported to be launching a campaign that will offer financial incentives to rap artists who mention its Big Mac burger in their lyrics. Boondocks is having lots of fun
with the idea.

Have I gone mad? Yes, but that’s another story. This rhyme is based on www.mentalacrobatics.com and is generated by HTTP in tha House. Submit your site and see what you get! [Via
cogdogblog]

Most obvious headline on today’s main news item: Holy Smoke!
The confident are predicting that a new pope will be elected in one of the two ballots tonight with an announcement at around 20.00 GMT tonight. All the major stations have their cameras focused on the most famous chimney in the world which is not surprising as TV stations had been booking rooftop vantage points overlooking St Peter’s Square since 1999, renewing each year, parting with hundreds of thousands of dollars. The Jesuits had been offered $250,000 (£133,000) by an American network to use the roof of their large, austere house on the edge of the square. They said no. “But we promise not to disturb you,” said a TV executive in a vain attempt at persuasion. “We’ll put an elevator on the outside of the building.” The Jesuits are letting an Irish Catholic station film there instead. No money changed hands.
I for one wouldn’t mind the conclave lasting a few more days just to see the major news anchors freezing and frustrated on having to report from a windy rooftop for days and nights on end.

They (evil people that they are) are banning the Cookie Monster from eating cookies and have started force feeding him fruit instead. The world is going mad.

1978 Wales win the 6 Nations Grand Slam
1978 Pope dies
1978 Liverpool win European Cup, new creative player scores winner

2005 Wales win the 6 Nations Grand Slam
2005 Pope dies
2005 Liverpool win European Cup, new creative player scores winner ???

Warning this is a rant

Just after I had been offered a place at university to study for a degree in Politics I was walking in Nairobi city centre with a member of my family when we bumped into a lady who at the time could reasonably claim to be the most powerful woman in Kenya. Well when I say we bumped into her, we bumped into her and her entourage of bodyguard/cronies. After the exchange of pleasantries amongst the wazee attention was focused on me.

“Young man what are you doing with your life”, this powerful woman directed at me.
“I am at university”, I replied.
“What are you studying?”
“Politics” I replied.
” Politics, POLitics, POLITICS???? NO. You must change your course. We need doctors, we need engineers, and we need accountants.”

She then proceeded to lecture me in the middle of Nairobi city centre about my lack of understanding of Kenya’s situation, about my wasted life, she gave what was ironically a very political speech on why I should not do politics. Here was a person who had grown rich in the excess of the dark days of Moi’s regime giving me a lecture on accountability. That in itself steeled my resolve to study politics if nothing else just to find out what she didn’t want me to know.

Fastforward 2 years. This time I am sitting a Christmas lunch for African students organised by a prestigious and powerful international organisation. Each student was assigned a partner from the great and good for the night. The look my hosts face when he learnt I was studying politcs can only be described as horrified. You should be doing medicine, veterinary science, engineering, he told me. Is it to late to change your course?

I can give you countless more examples all with the same central theme. Africa does not need students of politics.

Bollox.

It is now fashionable to lay the blame for Africa’s problems at the feet of Africa’s political leaders. This opinion is justified in more ways than one. Our leaders have let us down again and again. Sometimes you wonder whether they know what they are doing, don’t you? Well what do you expect?

Take Kenya as an example. You take a unique parliamentary system of cabinet government which took the UK centuries to develop and evolve for themselves, mix it with a presidential system of governement which the fathers of America developed in direct opposition to the British model and then thrown in some measures to make the president untouchable thus in a stroke wiping out the whole principle of checks and balances and impose it on a young African democracy, you can not seriously expect the thing to work. And it didn’t and it doesn’t. Those of us who studied politics can hardly understand just how the system is meant to work. So what chance do you amateurs have?

Africa needs student of politics, millions of them. I’ll let John Adams explain

Without a political base, with out a civic base, without governance, without the people running the country knowing how to run the country we will never move forward. It is as simple as that. You can have the best LSE educated economists at the helm which we do, you can have the Oxbridge educated lawyers being driven in cars with ministerial flags, which we do but without the political scientist to examine, probe, devise a system of governance you will end up with chaos.

But isn’t the UK government full of lawyers. Si Tony Blair is a lawyer?

Yes but in the UK everyone knows how the system works. It has been working for centuries. Go back to the beginning when they were making drastic changes to the constitution, when political ideologies were being formed and you will find great thinkers who devoted their whole lives to politics.

In Kenya politicians do not even know what they stand for leave alone what the want to impose on the country. At the last election a group of Social Democratic Party candidates were asked which of their policies where social democratic in nature. Their response, and I quote directly, “argh we just took this name because political parties have such names.” Clowns. Do they understand that by calling themselves Social Democratic they are casting their lot with a movement over 100 years old? That it actually means something? What about the Liberal Party of Kenya? Do they believe in proportional representation? In internationalism? Do they understand that Liberalism argues that the F-P-T-P system of elections, which we use in Kenya, is flawed? Do they care? And what about our good friends the Democratic Party?

How about our regional organisations? Is there any surprise that the OAU failed? I mean that constitution was probably written by doctors and then you have a bunch of chemical engineers, lawyers, economists to try and put it into practice. Where were the political diplomats? The professional negotiators, the professional civil service, the political administrators of the continent if you like? (I can feel a post on the amateurisation of politics coming along!)

Without us, who study peace and war, who study man and his thoughts, who study political systems, who study governance, who learn how to run countries, the political technocrats, the professional government administrators, without us my friend everything will go to the dogs. Want proof, look around Africa.

Yes I know this sounds like I am trying to justify my life.
Yes I know we have brilliant political minds in Kenya even in SDP, LPK and DP.

Rant over. Let’s all go look at a pictures of a cute giraffe! Ahhhhh!

When I first started studying politics I was amazed with how much corruption exists in all political systems, African and non African. Pork barrel politics, jobs for the boys, Mr 10%, “consultancy fees”, special interest re-election committees, call it want you want, it exists everywhere. In some countries it is claimed that corruption is ingrained in the system to such an extent that if it was rooted out and the black market shut down, the economy and in turn the political system would collapse.

What is it then about corruption in Kenya? Corruption in Africa? Why is it so devastating? Why does it cripple us, kill us, finish us more? Adrian, a fellow Kenyan blogger, quotes his Swiss colleagues as saying “You know, corruption is everywhere, even here in Switzerland. It’s just that here the ordinary person is still able to get by”.

In that sentence I believe lies part of the answer. The New Statesman devoted a recent edition to Africa which contained some frightening analysis. Highly corrupt societies in Asia, such as Indonesia, Bangladesh and Pakistan can achieve high economic growth because the corrupt elite keep their money in house. For example they invest in a new local mobile phone network; they set up private hospitals, the build new tourist hotels and lodges. Corruption in Asia is the buying of a service. The leaders take a cut in everything but things still get done. It may cost 10% more but the service is delivered.

Compare this with Africa. In Africa the corrupt elite steal money from the system and then to make matters worse extract it from the country. Anti corruption officials in Kibaki’s regime discovered at least $1bn stashed outside the country by Moi and his cronies before they were hounded out. The Economist estimates that there is $20bn of Africa’s money stowed in Swiss bank accounts. Between 1970 and 1996 capital flight from 30 sub-Saharan countries totalled $187bn. London’s banks hold $6bn from Kenya and Nigeria alone. If untrammelled corruption is bad enough, untrammelled corruption with capital flight makes for the most deadly of combinations. You steal from the country twice. You send the country backwards, you reverse development, you impoverish people.

The African corrupt elite spend decades stealing billions, yet educate their children abroad because there are no schools at home, get medical treatment abroad, because there are no hospitals at home. Have their babies at foreign hospitals; even have their clothes dry cleaned in the west. You have to wonder. If you do not want to build a hospital at least build a dry cleaners which will employ 5 more people.

This capital flight is borne out of an inferiority complex. A Swiss bank account, a flat in Knightsbridge, a penthouse in Manhattan, shopping trips in Paris all seen as the ultimate status symbols.

This has to change at the grassroots. Which is why I am grateful for the social aware Africans around me in the blogosphere, to name four out of hundreds Nehanda Dreams and her vision for clean water in all villages, AfroBlog! and her dreams for a socio-eco-politically aware African population, Ella and Kashata urging us to IBUKA. Everywhere you look the children of Africa are taking her destiny into their hands.

Clean water in every home; a clinic in every village; schools in every town; banks on each high street; transport links, electricity, energy; progressive political debate; engineering projects. These have to become Africa’s new status symbols. Would it not be fantastic if African leaders bragged about how every village in their country has access to a medical doctor rather that showing off their new presidential jets planes. Would it not be brilliant if African presidents were taking holidays in each others countries instead of doing the whole weekend in Paris thing?

My blogger code is:

B9 d++ t+ k+ s u- f i+ o x++ e- l- c

Find out what it means, or go get your own code.

The Grand National

1. Strong Resolve
2. Clan Royal
3. Forest Gunner

Bet your house and all your savings on this, you can thank me after you win big.