Ugandan newspapers

Don’t you sometimes wish that our Kenyan newspapers were as good, insightful, thought provoking and well researched as Ugandan newspapers?

|  Email This Post | 1 comment Wednesday, May 30th, 2007 at 6:50 PM

Get your smell on - Skunkworks Kenya

Know your WLAN from your LAN?
Know your Java from your XHTML?
Know your PHP from your CSS?

Ama the only Java you know, or care about, is the one that used to sell Death by Chocolate?

Want to dazzle us with your knowledge of networks?
Want to dazzle us with the libraries you have complied?
Want to tell us why Asterix rules?

Ama the only Asterix you know is that chap who runs around with Obelix?

Want to hang out with sexiest guys in Nairobi?
Want to find out the difference between comedy and comedi?
Want to look popular and clever?

Then get your smell on at Skunkworks Kenya, 6pm 29 May 2007 (TODAY), Wananchi, 1st Floor Loita House.

General info on the Skunkworks philosophy here.

(Don’t worry if you are not a techie, I am not one either, you will still enjoy. I don’t know what half that stuff up there is about to be honest. These Skunkworks guys are a nice bunch, techie but nice. If after a few minutes you don’t know what they are talking about and find yourself floating - like I found myself when I went for my first Skunkworks last week - just smile, nod your head and if someone asks you what you think just say “what are the parameters?” Then you look like you know what’s going on!)

|  Email This Post | Add comment Tuesday, May 29th, 2007 at 5:12 PM

Doing my head in

Generally I am as easy going as the next guy; just walking around, minding my own business, smelling the roses, being easy. Every once in a while, however, I am drawn into such a rage I wish I was Dr. Bruce Banner so I could unleash my anger as a big green monster.

Target number 1 - School van drivers

Anyone who does the school run or drives regularly during the Nairobi morning rush hour will have encountered a special breed of these characters. Usually matatu drivers who have received a ‘promotion’ these guys pack a van full of school kids and then proceed to tear down the potholed roads of Nairobi at 100 Kph. They swerve in front of you, they cut in front of LORRIES, they overtake around blind corners and regularly break the side-view mirrors of other cars. I want to grab them, shake them and tell them, “LISTEN YOU MUPPETS those are people’s children, the future of this country, this continent, this world, innocent school kids that you are putting under unnecessary danger to cut 10 seconds of your school run. CALM DOWN!”
I have started recording licence plate numbers, school names, time and dates of incidents and I am going to start sending them to the relevant schools. I hope they take some action.

Target number 2 - People who scream into microphones/loud speakers

I have no problem with the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. I have no problem that he does it 5 times a day. I have no problem that this is a largely residential area but that doesn’t seem to bother him in the least. I have no problem that he uses a very loud PA system to get the call out at all times of day, sometimes very early in the morning. No problem with any of that. After a few years you get used to it I guess.
No.
What really really really irritates me about this muppet is that he SCREAMS into his microphone which turns the whole calling the faithful to prayer thing into extreme, very irritating, agony for any of us listening (including I suspect, the faithful he is hoping to inspire). And when I say he screams I mean he SCREAMS. The guy shouts and screams into that microphone of his so loud that all the dogs in the estate panic and start barking back loudly. This means that 5 times a day for around 10 minutes the whole estate is engulfed in the most annoying symphony of microphones and mongrels. I want to grab the guy and tell him, “LISTEN YOU MUPPET. The reason the benefactors of this mosque equipped you with the state of the art microphone and PA system was so you WOULDN’T HAVE TO SHOUT TO BE HEARD, CAPICE? Be easy man. Walk up to the microphone take a deep breath and do your thing in your normal voice, let the PA system handle the amplification that is required.” (If any of you think I exaggerate how terrible it sounds I urge you to turn up in Golf Course 1, between Ngong road and Kenyatta Market, just before 4pm today or any other day for that matter.)

Aii!

|  Email This Post | 1 comment Tuesday, May 29th, 2007 at 1:34 PM

10 days to TEDGlobal

10 days to go before TEDGlobal kicks off and the anticipation is building like crazy. I’ll say this about these TED guys, they look like they sure know how to organise a conference. Well that’s easy to say 10 days before everything begins but if their organisation on the day is as good as it has been thus far then things will be great.

This conference is unlike any I have ever been to before in that I have no idea, absolutely NO IDEA, what kind of conference to expect. There is a wealth of information on the conference but it just highlights that I should expect the unexpected.

One thing I do know for sure is that I will be rooming with one crazy dude called Hash a.k.a White African. Now really it does not get any crazier than that. I wonder what TEDGlobal Program Director Emeka Okafor will do once he realises that he has put two techie and blogging members of the Front Row Union in the same room. (Hash, I hope you play tight head because, bruv, I’m a loose head!) If we don’t blow up something while trying to plug in all our gear into the one wall socket in the room, we’ll probably be busy forcing encouraging all kind of interesting people to talk to us. I notice that Yvonne Chaka Chaka has stopped organising her calendar to take in my conference dates instead Youssou N’Dour will be doing his thing.

Other KBWers who are representing are:

• Afromusing
• Bankelele
• Kenyan Pundit
• Ndesanjo

Any others out there (I’m sure they’ll be a couple attending chini ya maji a.k.a undercover)

I’ll post some more details on the proposed Madaraka Day (June 1st) KBW, Tedsters, Skunkworkers, techies, wanainchi, anybody, everybody meet up over the weekend. Come one, come all.

(Isn’t it interesting how many of the people who branded us traitors/sell outs/neo-colonial appeasists for going to the Digital Indaba in South Africa in September last year because it was “white” are happily gobbling up all that TEDGlobal can throw at them with not even a little sense of irony? Hmm the contradictions, the contradictions )

Tags: TEDGlobal

|  Email This Post | 7 comments Friday, May 25th, 2007 at 4:05 PM

Reuters Newsmaker Debate on Darfur

From 13.30 GMT today (16.30 Kenya time) Reuters will be holding a Newsmaker Debate centred on the crisis in Darfur. There is still time for you to submit your questions and comments for the panel. Have a look at Ndesanjo’s post on Global Voices for some background information. Bloggers have played a vital role in keeping the Dafur crisis at the top of the news agenda.

The panel (Ann Curry, NBC News, Mia Farrow, Actress & UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, Jean-Marie Guéhenno, Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, United Nations, Lauren Landis, Senior Representative to Sudan, U.S. Department of State, Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem Mohamad, Sudanese Ambassador to the United Nations and John Prendergast, Senior Adviser, International Crisis Group) does not have a large African presence to say the least. Let us be heard through our blogs.

|  Email This Post | 1 comment Thursday, May 24th, 2007 at 10:48 AM

Walk on

Well done to Milan, worthy champions. Koppites, we’ll meet in Moscow.

The way Gattuso was wandering around after the final whistle like a mad man I wonder what he would have done had they lost again hehe.

Silver linings and all that:
The good thing about nights like last night is that you get to meet real fans. Sitting in Crooked Q making noise long after the final whistle was brilliant. People were walking to us and saying, “Didn’t you guys lose?” Yeah yesterday we lost, but tomorrow we will win, so today we will sing.
(By the way I have final found out the reason CrookedQ exists. Still have no idea what the point of JKs, Tamasha, Sohos etc is.)

Looks like the foundations for a official Nairobi (or indeed Kenya) branch of LFC Supporters club are all here. Watch this space.

Surreal moment of the night was being stopped by police with various Liverpool flags hanging from the car and YNWA blasting from the stereo and then being escorted, flashing lights and all, to Nairobi Safari Club because they decided that we were part of the Burundi delegation in Nairobi for the COMESA summit. HEHE. Yani one look at us and they were like bilaz these nutters can not be Kenyan!

I would post pictures but let me not push my luck.

Walk on, the Rafaloution year 4.

|  Email This Post | Add comment Thursday, May 24th, 2007 at 10:33 AM

Safaricom website attacked

If you check out the Safaricom website today you get a message saying:

Click here for a screen shot.

This is probably in response to the website getting hacked/cracked/defaced by some person calling themselves Mambo Yoye.

I first heard about it when Asim left a comment on my blog. Click here for a screenshot of the first attack.

Yesterday M4 sent me a second screen shot which has the “Mambo Yoye”. Click here for the screenshot.

At Skunkworks yesterday the guys said that looking at the urls on the safaricom website which looks like:
default2.asp?active
it looks like they are using the default out-of-the-box settings for whichever CMS they are operating to run their website. If you know what the CMS is, with a little bit of messing around you could probably get in and cause chaos a la “Mambo Yoye”.

(May I just say that me I had nothing to do with this, kwanza the way everything sinister that happens on the Kenyan web quickly gets blamed on Mental! )

|  Email This Post | 1 comment Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007 at 10:21 AM

A tale of two Kenyans

One was Simon Matheri, whom we were led to believe was the gangster of gangsters. The Capo di tutti Capi of the Nairobi underworld. He was notorious for holding whole communities in terror seemingly untouchable by the authorities until he was gunned down by the police outside a flat in the early hours of one cold February morning. Kenyans rejoiced.

Even as whispers started about the police operation, Kenyans rejoiced. Apparently Matheri had surrendered once he realised he was surrounded; apparently he was interrogated for over half an hour after he surrendered; apparently then he was shot in the back of the head after this interrogation. So what, Kenyans rejoiced. FM stations were overwhelmed with caller after caller voicing loud support for the police action. “Pulling a Matheri” (shooting criminals as soon as they are captured) even entered local slang to join “pulling a Githongo” (secretly recording a person talking to you and later releasing the tapes). It didn’t matter the police did not reveal what he had alleged told them. It didn’t matter the illogic that a guy a year out of the maximum security Kamiti prison was able to assemble a criminal operation like has never been seen in Kenya before with no help at all. It didn’t matter that apparently the police had know his whereabouts for months but never moved against him. It didn’t matter the stories that Matheri had protection from some powerful indvidiuals. He was dead, that was all that mattered. He lived by the sword, he died by the sword, that was all that mattered.

The second Kenyan was Benson Mwangi Waraga, a tailor working in a building on River Road. Mr Waraga was among 17 people rounded up at Githaku Building after a gun battle between police and gangsters on Thursday last week. 10 hours later his family found his body at city mortuary with gunshot wounds to the neck and to the leg. His family want to know how a man who was arrested in the afternoon and taken to Kamukunji police station ended up at the mortuary dead.

What clouds the issue further is that on that same Thursday three police officers lost their lives as they were gunned down by criminals in Nairobi. Now if there is one thing that is guaranteed to boil the blood of any police force in the world it is when one of their own is gunned down. From New York to Nairobi, a cop gets killed in the line of duty, somebody somewhere is going to pay. I remember reading a story a couple of years ago when some bank robbers gunned down a police officer late at night as they escaped into Mathare, one of Nairobi’s oldest “informal settlements”. The police reaction was on another level. The cops practically woke up THE ENTIRE PLACE going door to door in a show of force and sending a message that no one kills a cop and gets away with it. Imagine that, waking up an entire slum.

Back to Waranga, the police do not deny they shot him, they claim that he was shot as he tried to escape when he was leading them to a large weapons dump where gangsters hid their weapons after the attack on police.

Now concerned people are asking many questions; why would one criminal surrounded by cops try to escape when it meant certain death? Why would the police move in on a weapons dump in the middle of the night? Even more fundamentally, Waranga was with four colleagues in the tailoring shop at the time of the shootings and they were released with out charge. How is it he is a criminal guilty of killing cops but those with him at the time of the shooting are completely innocent? etc etc.

Who knows maybe he was a criminal? Who knows maybe he was leading them to a weapons dump in the middle of the night? Who knows perhaps he was killed trying to escape? WHO KNOWS?

Every society has its laws and every society has procedures by which it is determined whether or not those laws were broken. In Kenya, as in much of the world, we have settled upon a judicial system through which the process of law takes places. This process determines if you are innocent or guilty. Actually the process determines if you are guilty. Innocent until proven guilty.

As the judicial process is the means by which we have agreed as a country to adhere to then this must be followed in all cases or else you get dangerous ambiguity as the law enforcement officers take matters into their own hands and become the law and indeed above the law. If we applaud and rejoice when they shoot a criminal mastermind instead of taking him to court then we are quickly going to fall down a slippery slope. It is because of all the “who knows” that we have a judicial system together with its procedure and processes to determine cases like this.

Waranga could have been an innocent slaughtered in cold blood by the police in their quest to get vengeance for their fallen colleagues, or he may have been a dangerous crime lord, even more dangerous than Matheri. But if you agree with me that at the very least Waranga should have had his day in court, then you should also agree that Matheri had that right as well.

|  Email This Post | 3 comments Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007 at 9:43 AM

Afro Neo Soul Night at Blanco’s

You know how you always end up doing the same thing over and over again? It doesn’t have to be like that. Check this out:

I have eaten at Blanco’s, the food there is (in the words of a friend) “bloody good and out of this world.” You order Matumbo at a fancy restaurant and it comes looking so classy you just have to smile. If you do not trust my culinary opinions (perhaps because I nearly started an international diplomatic crisis over chevra) check out what the professionals are saying [PDF of Review of Blanco’s by Daily Nation’s food critic Gastro d'nom].

I’ve heard good things about Sauti as well although I have never heard the pleasure of hearing them do their thing.

I won’t be able to make this particular evening, I have a date with history but you go ahead and let me know how it was

|  Email This Post | 5 comments Friday, May 18th, 2007 at 11:33 AM

The BBC World Service - Alan Johnston

I am a self confessed radio fan. Indeed the only thing I miss about the UK apart from the proper broadband bandwidth at affordable prices is BBC Radio 5 Live a talk radio station from the BBC that focused on news, politics and sport, yeah it’s like they built it for me. 5Live is not broadcast outside the UK unless you listen online so I’ve converted to the BBC World Service.

The BBC World Service is, in my opinion, Britain’s best export. It is certainly one of the widest exports, in every part of Kenya you can catch the BBC World Service on a local FM signal although some people seem to only tune in for the football updates! This is one of the reasons why the BBC World Service is not funded from the compulsory license fee that every British household pays but instead receives direct funding from the British government.

If you have ever lived in a war zone where news is restricted or indeed anywhere that has a less than independent media or a single media source you learn to appreciate it more. In Ethiopia in the 1980s everyone had one of those short wave radios where you can catch radio stations from around the world and everyone started their day with the BBC World Service. It was a routine, 6am switch on the World Service for the news. Then after that some would turn to hear what Voice of America, Deutsche Welle, Radio France Internationale or Portuguese news stations had to say, but you started with the BBC. You also hear of many resistance fighters/warlords/revolutionaries that refuse to speak to anyone apart from the BBC because they believe that only the BBC will report what they say accurately.

For a few years I used to call CNN’s Inside Africa programme “Inside South Africa”. It seemed like every other story was on South Africa. South Africa economy, South African art, South African music, it seemed like the rest of the continent got around 5 minutes. These days things are different although to be honest I have watched an episode of Inside Africa or indeed an hour of CNN since I moved back. When listening to the BBC World Service these days I am sometimes tempted to call it the BBC Nigeria and India and a little bit of the rest of the world Service. I have learnt more about Nigerian and India in the last 6 months than I have in the last 20 years. But since a lot of the comments and calls seem to come from those two countries I guess it is only fair. Which came first eh? The chicken or the egg?

Alan Graham Johnston is a BBC World Service journalist. He was born just down the road and across Mount Kilimanjaro in Lindi, Tanzania. He was kidnapped by an unknown group of gunmen in Gaza on March 12, 2007. Some feel that with all that is going on in Kenya and in Africa it can be hard to give a toss about some mzungu journalist that was captured gallivanting across the Middle East. I however appreciate the work these journalists do bring us stories from many different places. I also appreciate that this world is truly becoming a global village, and what would be the point of me having a blog if I did not engage with issues outside my daily routine and life? I also remember how bloggers and activists from all over the world rushed to help the Kenyan blogosphere publicize the attack on the Kenyan media by official thugs led by the so called Artur brothers. The Alan Johnson button will go up on my blog, I hope you put it up on yours too.

|  Email This Post | 6 comments Thursday, May 17th, 2007 at 10:50 AM

Presidential debate to stream online

The Alpha Quadrant has just shared that the Kenya presidential aspirants debate scheduled for today is to stream online at Icecast at 14.00 Kenya Time (12:00 GMT) i.e/ right now.

Becky will also be keeping us up to date on her blog.

I have heard a lot of noise about how internet connections within Kenya are super fast, let us see!

Exciting!

|  Email This Post | 3 comments Wednesday, May 16th, 2007 at 1:58 PM

7

I was tagged by some strong willed people, to ignore them would be dangerous, so here we go with 7 things. Not 7 things you do not know about me which would just be boring especially as I shared 6 things you do not know about me just the other day. So instead here we go with:

7 random thoughts from that blogger called Mentalacrobatics

1. I find it amazing how many single women in Kenya wear a wedding ring on their ring finger. The few I know tell me they do that to scare away the seedy and slimy men that approach them. That doesn’t make sense to me. Seedy and slimy men will not be scared away by a wedding ring. In fact if anything that just increases your appeal to such characters. However, all decent, honourable and normal guys once they spot the wedding ring will keep a respectful distance in the courting game. A wedding ring is like kryptonite to single men, believe me. Then the same Kenyan women complain that there are no suitable men around to marry! Well remove the fake wedding rings and then see what happens!
2. It is unbelievably hard to get some people to put a simple and small piece of code on their blog. These are not the people who do not know how to upload the ringcode. Those ones usually ask for help. Rather it is mainly experience bloggers who for one reason or another can not be bothered to upload the ringcode yet want to be counted as a KBW member. The excuses they give are many, for example: I don’t have time (it takes less than 20 seconds), It is to big (the ring code is about 1 byte big) it doesn’t fit in with my template (you can format the font to your hearts content so long as it can be read and clicked) . excuses excuses excuses. I believe the reason they have this attitude is because it is so easy to become a KBW member. If we charged USD 50.00 per month and insisted on 10,000 word blog posts weekly to qualify for membership, they would probably have the ringcode up, with flashing lights, in an instance.
3. We all have our pet peeves, the little things that irritate us. One of mine is when people wrongly interchange the terms hacker and cracker. For those who do not know:

   A hacker is a person intensely interested in the arcane and recondite workings of any computer operating system. Most often, hackers are programmers. As such, hackers obtain advanced knowledge of operating systems and programming languages. They may know of holes within systems and the reasons for such holes. Hackers constantly seek further knowledge, freely share what they have discovered, and never, ever intentionally damage data.

   A cracker is a person who breaks into or otherwise violates the system integrity of remote machines, with malicious intent. Crackers, having gained unauthorized access, destroy vital data, deny legitimate users service, or basically cause problems for their targets. Crackers can easily be identified because their actions are malicious.

   At least have the decency to know what you are accusing someone of before you go banging on about it over and over again.

4. Every relationship reaches a point where you think, hmmmm, this could actually work, or alternatively, damn, this will never work. For me that point usually comes during an unexpected crisis and how the other person reacts to it.

   For example, having a puncture is inconvenient, having a puncture at 3am in the still of the night, is scary, having a puncture at 3am in the still of the night on a dark stretch of Thika Road notorious for muggings and carjacking is a bloody crisis, even more so when you are with a date you are trying to impress! There I was going through all the potential options in my head:

   • Stop and change the tire right there – ARE YOU MAD?
   • Stop and wait for help – From whom? This is not Gotham where you can fire up the Bat Signal and wait for Batman
   • Drive to a police station – HEHEHEHEHE yeah right “Kihjana ghucha gipande hii”
   • Drive on to a safer place, probably a petrol station and change the tire there, knowing full well that you will complete destroy the flat tire that is on the wheel. Sacrifice the tire to save your life – hmm ok

   While I’m doing all this thinking inside I’m saying all these reassuring things out loud, we’ll be fine etc, I’ve done this before etc, don’t worry. Basically just trying to keep things calm and give her no reason to panic.Then I realise that while I’ve been thinking she was saying the same things to me, as in her first reaction was not to panic but to reassure me in case I was about to panic.

   At that point I would start to think, hmmm this could work you know.

   As opposed to those who start shouting and sulking over something simple as looking for a parking space in town!

5. You know those guys who make a big deal of how much they hate football? The ones who say things like, “football just doesn’t make sense and I don’t follow it” you know those guys, the ones who go to the supermarket during the world cup final because, “it will be empty with everybody at home watching the game” you know those clowns right. Guys who come in when you are watching a game and try to change the channel to the MTV Base during half time when you are trying to follow the analysis? You know those guys right? Well every single one of them is now a Chelsea fan. That’s why we look down on you, you chelski muppets. I know 2, TWO, genuine Chelsea fans from East Africa, two of my bros who have been with Chelsea from back in the day, even before akina Viali etc were playing at Chelsea, which to be honest was the first time many of us even noticed that silly team. And those two bros of mine hate these new school Chelsea fans more than we do, hehe!




6. African society is governed by a set of rules which you learn at an early age. These rules come and go, one topic of conversation is always which tribe is more traditional than the other. But one thing we all share across the board are the terms of respect and indeed status that are given to the brothers and sisters of our parents.

   For example, in English my mother’s sister is my aunt and my father’s sister is my aunt. In our culture, my mother’s sister is Mamamti and my father’s sister is Senje. Dare you call a Mamti Senje, one of my brother’s did once, we haven’t seen him since!

   In a similar way in English my father’s brother is uncle and my mother’s brother is uncle. In our culture my father’s brother is Papamti and my mother’s brother is Khotsa.

   It extends, the husband of a Mamamti automatically becomes a Papamti etc.

   We really do not have a specific word for cousin. I call my male cousins, brother and my female cousins, sister. (That is why I always say, me and my brothers, we are many (see story 5 above). I like this. It means I have brothers who are Kisii, Luo, Kikuyu, Kamba, Swahili, Maasai etc. I got back up!

   This one doesn’t extend as automatically. I only call my cousin’s husband brother if I feel he is worthy!

   My friends are used to this arrangement now and so when I introduce them to one of my brothers they ask me, “is this your brother, brother ….. or just your brother?”

7. A so called friend who happens to live in the states sent me this picture the other day.
   
   
   

   They took it with the camera on their phone while watching the latest episode of 24 and sent it to taunt me because they know it will be at least 3 days before I get my hands on the latest episodes. This has to rank amongst the cruellest SMS I have ever received.

|  Email This Post | 6 comments Wednesday, May 16th, 2007 at 1:35 PM

Booty Call tariff

Mobile phone operator Celtel Kenya has launched the market’s lowest tariff, which retails at a low Sh6 per minute on per second billing.

The company says the new tariff, called Mambo 6, that begins on Monday, will cover between 11pm and 5am every day.

11PM to 5Am???

Forget Mambo 6 this is the Booty Call tariff.
You heard it here first.

(Just drinking Sprite, telling it as it is!)

|  Email This Post | 6 comments Tuesday, May 15th, 2007 at 5:45 PM

The three Gatekeepers

The words of the tongue should have three gatekeepers:
Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary?

Arab proverb

|  Email This Post | 2 comments Monday, May 14th, 2007 at 11:30 PM

National day of mourning

Today is the National Day of Mourning for all those who lost their lives in Kenya Airways flight KQ507. There doesn’t seem to be much going on in the way of commemoration apart from flags flying at half mast.

National flags at half mast at Jomo Kenyatta’s mausoleum, Nairobi

National flag and Nairobi City Council flag at half mast outside City Hall, Nairobi

COMESA national flags at half mast, KICC, Nairobi

There is an inter-denominational prayer service at KICC led by President Kibaki although when we walked towards the door we were told by a policeman that it was a COMESA event so not to sure what is going on there.

Then there are those who think having a national day of mourning is a joke.

More and more sides of this story are coming out now, including the information that two other planes from Cameroon Airlines and Royal Air Maroc opted to wait for the storm to die down while the Kenya Airways crew decided it was safe enough to take off.

However we would all be wise to heed the words of Kenya Airways chief executive Titus Naikuni who said investigators would have to make the final assessment. The probe was likely to take months.

“We don’t want to start speculating here,” he said Friday in Kenya. “So whether the pilot did the wrong thing or the right thing, I cannot answer that.”

Investigators said they cannot yet discount other factors, including mechanical failure, pilot disorientation or even sabotage.

Please visit the KQ507 tribute site to leave a message of support and sympathy.
Please link the KQ507 tribute site from your blogs and websites.
Please spread the word about the KQ507 tribute site.

|  Email This Post | 1 comment Monday, May 14th, 2007 at 1:22 PM