Last month in a blog post called a “Tale of Two Kenyans” I wrote about how the Kenyan police woke up an entire slum when two suspected cop killers decided to hide amongst the residents. A couple of readers expressed doubts to put it politely. One of the emails I received even accused me of making the whole episode up claiming the Kenyan authorities did not have enough manpower to mount such an operation.

Kenyan police round up suspected Mungiki members in Nairobi’s Mathare slum. Click on the image to see the full size image.

Well, well, well. I get back from TEDGlobal in Arusha to find the world has gone mad back at home. Yesterday a combined force of 500 made up of regular police, administration police and the elite General Service Unit raided Mathare in a crackdown on the gangsters of the Mungiki Sect that is responsible for the deaths of at least 20 people included at least 12 who were beheaded in the last three months. So far the police operation, code named Operation Kosovo, has resulted in around 30 deaths and 300 arrests. Of course the police claim that they have good reasons to suspect that all those they have arrested and killed are members of Mungiki. Mathare is under siege. After months of harassment by Mungiki now they have another threat to watch out for, trigger happy police.

A policeman with a police dog rounds up suspected Mungiki members in Nairobi’s Mathare slum. Click on the image to see the full size image.

Another Kenyan blogger, Majonzi, writing on this story uses a powerful headline

Wananchi vs Mungiki vs The Police

I would change it to

Mungiki vs Wananchi vs The Police

The wananchi, the ordinary Kenyan citizen, is now caught in the middle of a battle between Mungiki and the police for the control of parts of Nairobi and parts of Kenya. Month after month, year after year this sect has grown unchecked, harassing, beating, killing and beheading ordinary wananchi going about their lives. This sect was seemed untouchable by the police. Well the authorities have woken up and as one policeman was quoted saying,

“Lala chini ung’orote. Unajua kuna serikali?”
(Lie down and sleep. Do you know there is a government in Kenya?)

Kenyan police round up suspected Mungiki members in Nairobi’s Mathare slum forcing them to lie face down. Click on the image to see the full size image.

Where has this “government” been up to now?

This is a clear example that we have to take the optimism, positive energy and empowering ideas from TEDGlobal and start making change in our society at a fundamental level. James Shikwati in his talk urged Africans to start panicking, to enter “panic mode”. We have to open our eyes to our society is breaking and in many ways in broken and perhaps if we enter panic mode we will start to deal with issues with the urgency they require.

Thanks M4 for sending me the images.

TEDGlobal2007 | TEDGlobal

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The presentations from the TED stage yesterday were fantastic. Thought provoking, opinion shaping, informing, and interesting. After day 1 it would take something special to blow us away again and to raise expectations again, they managed to do that.

The whole premise of TED is based around the principle of “Ideas Worth Spreading”. This sharing is an essential part of the TED experience. Our programme guide urges us to sit next to someone different at every session and at every meal. The same guide urges us to switch of our phones and leave our laptops behind in our hotel rooms. This is all in order to encourage us to build social networks, brain storm together, learn about each other, learn from each other. TED is to be a fluid and interactive process. What happens on stage is important yes, but what happens between us is even more important. Yesterday brought this home for me.

I was invited to the Google.org private lunch yesterday where the people at Google told us about the philanthropic side of the Google organisation. At the lunch we heard from Joe Tackie an entrepreneur from Ghana who was the first winner of Believe, Begin, Become Ghana’s national business plan competition sponsored by google.org. During the afternoon tea break a couple of us spent time talking with Joe about the programme and the challenges he faced, how he over came them, the business he started and how it is growing. A fantastic story.

During dinner I was lucky enough to share a table with Esther a Community Development Facilitator working for a NGO in Cameroon, Megan a director at Google, William a secondary school student from Malawi who built a windmill to provide power to his family home from old bicycle parts and the renowned primatologist Jane Goodall. The conversation around that table was full of world changing ideas and this was being replicated on different tables around the room. There are no seating plans here, you just go out there and network.

After dinner I ended up on table full of Kenyan entrepreneurs, the people changing the nature of their business sectors in our country. We covered everything, politics, economy, redistribution of wealth, the politicisation of the youth, the power of blogs and the internet, investments, humour. Network at it is most energetic within our own. We only stopped because the last buses to our various hotels were threatening to leave us.

Back at the hotel is when TED came home. I sat down to write my thoughts on the day when Harinjaka shared with us the crazy deforestation that is taking place in his country of Madagascar. That was the beginning of all night thinking, sharing, debating session. Two Kenyans, one Madagascan, one Nigerian, one Italian, one American. We had never met before TED, all but one of us are at our first TED conference and we had our own TED session then and there. We talked about HIV/AIDS, about social disempowerment, about colonial legacy, about Nollywood, Bollywood and the Chinese film industry, about music, about deforestation in Madagascar, about the creation of Israel, about sports, about whiskey, about family, about the world economic market, about our experience in the formal job market, about starting businesses and creating jobs, and on and on and on. That is TED, TED 2.0 maybe but that is what all this is about, people from all around the continent and the world sharing and debating, engaging each others brains from a position of mutual respect.

TEDGlobal2007 | TEDGlobal

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In a CNN interview last year Emeka Okator, the programme director of TedGlobal 2007, was asked, “How do you shed light on the brighter side of Africa?”

He answered, “It’s coming from the bottom or primarily from the citizen media type, the bloggers, who are covering Africa to an extent it has never been covered before. There’s strong belief that the rest of the world will catch up as this process accelerates.”

Emeka understands the vital role that authentic, uncompromising, voices from Africa that are expressed through blogs play. Probably because he is a energetic blogger himself. It is wonderful that there is a healthy mix of bloggers amongst the TED Fellows. I’ll highlight the KBW members who are here apart from myself; Afromusing, Bankelele, Kenyan Pundit and White African. Ndesanjo is here as well running things on his home ground. Outside KBW Jea Brea and Andrew Heavens are here too.

There are couple of other Kenyan bloggers who have promised to send me their URLs and I will share them as soon as I get them. We also have a number of bloggers from other countries and I will do the same with the links.

KBW members let me assure that your blogs have a wider readership then you may imagine. I have met some people here that have never been to Africa before but read the KenyaUnlimited aggregator regularly. Many of the other Africans here talk about the power of the Kenyan blogs on the internet and are inspired to go out and start their own blogs and aggregator. Perhaps we should look out for NigeriaUnlimited, MaliUnlimited, etc soon!

At some point in the next few days we will sit down and brainstorm about the African Bloggers’ Conference. Please feel free to share any thoughts you have on this with us.

TEDGlobal2007 | TEDGlobal

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