Just how much must a country stomach before her back breaks from the weight of DECEPTION? The politician may be grudgingly excused for expediency purposes but then how can you excuse one high court judge, the dragon slayer, KACC director Justice Aaron Ringera lying on oath through all spaces in his dental formula? NO, NO, NO. This is UNACCEPTABLE to have the troika of Ringera, Ndungu and Kimunya fleece Kenyan in broad day light.
It appears Anglo Leasing and the Goldenberg scams were not BIG enough to sink Kenya. And the Grand Regency rip off is just the tip of a massive iceberg. Maybe the contemptuous kindergarten rider that FISHY deal would deepen relationship between Kenya and Libya is all the deceptive therapy we needed as a nation to offer our back for eternal pounding. Throw in the equally FISHY SafariCON IPO and we have the potent aphrodisiacs concoction to keep us economically and emotionally hallucinating for the next many years.
This is day 2 of My 4 Hour Work Week Journey
Now, below I will mention 4 things I liked about the book, the 4 hour work week and won’t talk about any negatives because I’m sure those will become self-evident as I work through the book over the coming days. That, and I don’t want to psyche myself out too early in my 4 hour work week journey.
4 Things I Love About the Four Hour Workweek
1) He is Empirical: To name a book ” 4 hour workweek” screams:
Hyperbole! Hype!B.S. !
So when I began to read about Tim, I expected his writing and his work to sound like a circus director or a car salesman: a lot of sales talk with very little substance to back it up.
Boy was I pleasantly surprised. If I could summarize one of Tim’s oh-my-goodness-that’s-genius-approaches-to-life-it-would-be:
Test your assumptions
Don’t automatically assume the limitations placed upon you by society, your background or yourself are true. Instead, conduct small tests and see what happens. As a result of Tim doing this, a lot of what’s in the four hour workweek isn’t an abstract manual but rather:
2) A Fascinating True Story: I want to do a lot of great, oddball things with my life before I die. I think I have found a person with an equally quirky spirit in Timothy Ferriss.
The man has, and is, revolutionizing the Western approach to work. He is the Chinese National Kickboxing Champion. He has won international tango competitions. He is a break dancer. He has been on television in Hong Kong. He has done all this while running a multinational company.
He didn’t accept what others took as the norm or limitations. He lifestyle supersedes any limits society might have imposed on him and this is part of the reason that I’m so drawn to him. It’s also the reason that:
3) He Has Backup from Heavy Hitters: I became a fan of Tim when I heard an interview he did with my blogging go-to-mentor Yaro Starak.
Among his mentors are the man who has sold 130 million books worldwide, Jack Canfield. He has been invited to give talks to everyone including the numero uno themselves, Google-check out the video at the very top of the article.
He isn’t some marginal rebel who is hated by the greats in society. His work appeals to a broad spectrum of folks from lone contractors to CEOs of Fortune 500s. Lord knows I’m African and authority figures influence me big time.
Finally I like the fact that:
4) He Teaches Us How to Separate Hours from Income: Now many Africana will tell you that this idea is simply preposterous. I watched my folks clock in 8-12 hour days 6 days a week and that’s the only way that folks can make a living right?
When I interviewed David Kobia and he spoke about the way his mother couldn’t understand how he could not be working in an office and could be doing all his work online.
I think I kinda went through the very same thing when this idea was presented by Jay Abraham, Yaro Starak and Tim Ferriss that your income didn’t have to be linked to the hours you work but rather the value you provide. Now however, I have embraced that this in fact possible: Me likes and I want a piece of that.
Anyway, someone left me a comment saying that I should do more posts where I present the options available for immigrants in regards to economic stability and prosperity.
So here goes: the trial continues. I have spoken to a few of you who are trying and living out alternatives to the bread and butter mill that is the 9 to 5. Together let’s build a library full of options that future immigrants can use to thrive in so far as the dollar is concerned.
I’m rambling now, but I ramble because I’m excited. Anyway either:
i) Click here to buy a copy of the 4 hour work week from Amazon.com
ii) Pay a visit to his blog and learn a little more about the man and his great book.
And enjoy the rest of your day or night,
Mwangi

| Stock | Start price | End Price | % Gain | Other information |
|
AccessKenya Group |
13.35 |
35.00 |
+162.17% | The only post election effects survivor |
|
Equity Bank |
139.00 |
300.00 |
+115.83% |
Eminent split |
|
KCB |
24.00 |
31.50 |
+31.25% |
Issuing rights |
|
E.A.Cables |
46.00 |
41.50 |
-9.78% |
No known activity |
1,000 shares in each counter would have made you Ksh.185K richer, a whooping 83% gain. Who ever says last year was a bad year is a speculator. Considering the little effort it took to analyze the stocks I picked for the green list, then only a speculator could have made losses last year by buying stocks blindly. All an investor need to do is understand the counter he intend to buy in – management, business strategy and numbers (though I’ve discovered that historical numbers don’t count that much)
Soon I will post "the 2008 green list" after some analysis. I feel that after the Safaricom IPO there is a small ‘breath’ in the market that may lead to a correction like the one experienced in 2007 March. But no cause for alarm, I could be wrong.
{Disclaimer - this is a personal market opinion and list of my preferred stocks. It does not indicate certainty and anybody reading this should consult their investment advisor/ broker before making any investment decision}
I had been noticing it much too often for a while, and so when I saw another blind man, I asked the business man from whom I was making a purchase, “Am I the one who is seeing too many blind people or is it a fact that there is an influx of blind beggars in town?” The business man straightened and walked towards me from the back of his shop as he said, “You are right that there is a sudden increase in the number of blind beggars in the streets.”
If you live in Nairobi, you must have noticed the blind beggars being dragged by hand from place to place by young school going children. The beggars usually have a small plastic container with a few coins that they juggle periodically in order to attract the attention of any sympathetic well wisher. Perhaps you might even have been bothered by the fact that the young children seem to be wasting their school going days after being forced to accompany their ageing relatives on begging missions from street to street, inside businesses, and from drivers stuck in traffic jams.
As he smiled, he added, “Begging has become a business just like this one I run.” And as he laid down the merchandise I had requested on the counter he continued, “Don’t be fooled into thinking that the children are relatives of the beggars. The are usually hired for the day to accompany the baggars.” And on seeing the bewildered look on my face he added, “There is a place where the beggars pick the children every morning for a standard fee, and so you see, both that boy and that blind old guy are in business.” He finished as he made a gesture with his lips towards the duo that was disappearing down the corner. With that, I made my purchase and walked in the direction opposite the one that the blind beggar and the boy had walked. Without a doubt, I knew I would be seeing many others in the course of the day. In Kenya if it is not business as usual, then it is business as unusual.

I am at the Global Voices summit, regarding citizen media, democracy and technology.
I will be covering the following sessions using the live blogging tool CoveritLive on this blog and also on the GV summit blog. Please bookmark the event homepage [summit08.globalvoicesonline.org]
- Twitter feed is [twitter.com]
- The timezone for the live sessions is GMT+1
June 27, 2008
11:30 - 13:00 Session 2: “Citizen Media and Online Free Speech”
MODERATOR: Mary Joyce.
SPEAKERS: Ory Okolloh (Kenyan Blogger), Wael Abbas (MisrDigital, Egypt), Mehdi Mohseni (jomhour.org, Iran), Amine (digiactive.org, Morocco), Oiwan Lam (Global Voices, Hong Kong), Au Wai Pang (Singapore)
Citizen media allow for more active and open participation in political processes, but threats of censorship and oppression discourage citizens from expressing their own opinions. This session will present case studies from Kenya, Iran, Egypt, Morocco, Singapore, and Hong Kong.
15:30 -16:30 Session 4: “Frontline Activists meet the Academy: Tools and Knowledge”
MODERATOR: Ethan Zuckeman.
SPEAKERS: Roger Dingledine (Tor), Nart Villeneuve (Citizen Lab), Isaac Mao (Digital Nomads project, China), Robert Guerra (Privaterra, Cuba), Danny O’Brien (Electronic Frontier Foundation)
The tools to circumvent web filtering and other methods of online censorship exist, but they don’t always reach the people who need them as easily as they could. How can we facilitate better coordination between the developers of these tools and the anti-censorship activists that need them? And how do we facilitate the flow of feedback from the activists back to the developers so the latter can design more appropriate tools?
June 28th 2008
11:30 - 13:00 Session 2: “The Wired Electorate in Emerging Democracies”
MODERATOR: Solana Larsen.
SPEAKERS: Daudi Were (Kenya), Onnik Krikorian (Armenia), Hamid Tehrani (Iran), Luis Carlos Díaz (Venezuela)
The rise of blogging, social networking and micro-blogging services like Facebook and Twitter, video- and photo-sharing sites like YouTube and Flickr, and the spread of mobile technology have given ordinary citizens the means, at least potentially, to participate more fully in the democratic process. This session looks at the impact these tools have had on recent elections in Kenya, Venezuela, Armenia and Iran and poses the question: is citizen media having an actual impact on democracies in transition?






This is San Fran at night... it beautiful...
I’ve written about handmade tools in Africa before, but it didn’t generate a ton of interest, so I’ve not followed-up on it very much in my travels. I was really happy to see that another person was intrigued by this though, Kevin Kelly has a post where Tom Ritchey, master bike frame builder, sent him pictures of hand-made tools he spotted at bike shops in Rwanda.
Fabrication is an important skill in developing nations. Along the whole process you see reuse taking place, even down to the tools being used to create the items in question.
A Kenyan micro-entrepreneur recently told me:
In the sixties, during the space race between Russia and the U.S.A the Russian Engineers, when told there was no more money for the budget philosophically said “now we have no money then we can think” and they were able to be tremendously creative when compared to the Americans despite the limited funds at their disposal. This is the same approach I use in my initiatives.
As I’m not the only one who thinks these are pretty cool, I’m digging into the AfriGadget Flickr Group to pull out a picture that I never published here on the blog. These are small engine repair tools built to work on motorcycles, generators and lawnmowers (among other things):
And finally, a video of Bernard, one of the local small engine repair guys in Nairobi (who’s shop has since disappeared) talking about how he makes some of the tools:
Jeff is of course an excellent journalist, one of my favorites and recently he did not disappoint because he had a rather “hot” guest on his show.
Esther Muthoni Rosana Passaris talked at length about her election petition against Ferdinand Waititu after the recent Embakassi by-election. Passaris alleges that the election was rigged in favor of her opponent. She further said that she was NOT moving to any other constituency and that she had pitched camp at Embakassi so to speak. The only other political office that she would be interested in, she said was that of a mayor directly elected by the people (apparently both the president and the Prime Minister are eager to change the law ASAP to make that possible.) Passaris called herself a “city girl” to emphasize the fact that she was interested in only this single city constituency or the city Mayor’s seat.
Dwelling at length about Kenyans having to elect “quality leaders”, she openly named most of the people who have been going out of their way to frustrate her every move. That was a little shocking because she even said that Deputy Prime Minister Uhuru Kenyatta had spent a lot of his own money at Embakassi to ensure that Mama Supu (as her supporters in Embakassi now call her) did not win. She even went as far as jabbing Uhuru under the belt so to speak by making a quip about “Uhuru Kenyatta and land.” She was of course referring to the rather thorny issue of the land that the Kenyattas own which is bigger than the size of some provinces in the country. Naturally this land was acquired under obviously questionable circumstances.
I am in total agreement with Passaris views on quality leadership if we are to achieve the change we all desire so much. However they say charity begins at home and Passaris did not bother to prove that she herself is one of the “quality leaders” she was referring to. Regular readers here know that I have a detailed dossier that talks about Ms Passaris' past and her real motivation for going into politics. Sadly Mama Supu’s reason for getting into city politics is too similar to the same age old reason why the current dinosaurs got into politics in the first place. That is a much bigger problem than the question of her character (although the two are related) which most readers here seem to believe is a non-issue. Incidentally “Supu” is the Eastlands slang for a “beautiful girl,” a clue as to why Passaris seems to love this nickname so much. Admittedly for a woman in her 40s she is still strikingly beautiful.
Quite clearly had retired President Moi and his associates had this information about some of the electorate’s controversial views on a politician’s personal life, there is a possibility that Dr Robert Ouko would still be alive today. Still unknown to most Kenyans is the fact that the slain foreign affairs minister (the best that Kenya ever had according to most people) did not die because he was working on some corruption dossier. Rather he died because of this information he had about the then president and some women. It was felt at the time that under no circumstances should the information which Dr Ouko happened to have get out to the public. By extension the long list of witnesses who were privy to some details on the Ouko murder who also promptly lost their lives, died because of this rather explosive piece of information.
P.S. There is just too much anger in the country at the moment and both sides of the political divide are much more interested in outsmarting the other side rather than in the cooling down of emotions and genuine reconciliation. For a long time now the raw anger and personal insults flying back and forth between the two sides that have been witnessed in the comments area of this blog have been a matter of great concern to me. Mainly because I am aware of the fact that they reflect the general mood and feelings in the country (despite the many NSIS planted comments mainly designed to divert attention and deal a blow to the credibility of this blog). But to make matters even more worrying, during the last two days that the Kriegler commission has held public sessions at the KICC, members of the public have almost come to blows over their differing views on what caused the chaos in the disputed presidential elections last December. At one point the rather elderly South African judge had to stand up and reminded the participants; “We are not animals.” Yesterday the poor old judge walked out at least twice, once as a scuffle ensued on the floor.
It is clear that national healing and reconciliation is not a priority of the current crowded grand coalition government. This is a deadly ticking time bomb that will go off in our faces sooner rather than later. Months ago I said in this blog that the IDP resettlement programme was going to badly flop and even result in loss of life. Some commentators retorted by calling my sentiments “rubbish” and asking me if I preferred that the IDPs remain in the camps in the inhumane conditions. I also pointed out the fact that the re-settlement was being forced on the IDPs. Readers of this blog who have been reading the news recently will have realized that they had the information that is coming out now months ago. Yet another good reason to keep it Kumekucha.
In the same way Kenyans need to push their elected leaders to address this serious national problem of emotions and the raw hatred that many Kenyans now have for each other over the disputed presidential elections ASAP before it is too late.
Interesting snippet on unsolved murder of Trent Keegan;
Some evidence suggests the attack was not a simple robbery. Although Keegan’s Mac laptop and cell phone were stolen, his wallet with 3,848 Kenyan shillings (US$62) was found on him. According to colleagues who visited the crime scene, Keegan’s body was carefully dragged into a hidden area in a ditch, concealing him for almost 12 hours, suggesting that the murderer or murderers did not flee the scene immediately. Read the rest of the post.
Kumekucha wrote all about the truth behind the hurried Grand Regency Sale about 2 months ago. Read the explosive story HERE if you missed it.
99 brilliant Online moneymaking ideas anybody can implement part-time/fulltime