Editors: Keguro Macharia and Angus Parkinson

We lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex individuals, in a word, queers, have had the distinct un-pleasure of being told we don’t exist—in official government statements, historical documents, and contemporary statements. Well, we do.

We want Kenyan stories by Kenya-based and Kenya-born queers. About everything. We want writing about the dailyness of our lives, the good, the bad, the weird, the indifferent. If you have lived it, we want to hear about it. We especially want to reach beyond Nairobi, Mombasa, and other cities to all corners of the country. And we know the rest of Kenya, Africa, and the world wants to hear these stories as well.

Formats

We have three distinct formats. Choose what appeals to you.

1. Interviews: Tell us your story. Get in touch with us and we’ll arrange an interview. We value your time and your confidentiality. Not sure you want to meet us directly? We have phones and email and all manner of ways to make this happen.
2. Letters to Kenya: Write (or unearth) a 500-1,000-word letter. To whom? Parents, pastors, the government, best friends, former friends, present lovers, former lovers, the person you really want to tune. Get personal, get intimate. Say what you really want to say!
3. Personal narratives: Write (or unearth) a 2,500-3,000-word narrative about the dailyness of being queer. The high points, low points, the endless plateaus, the quick glances, indrawn breaths of desire, domestic thrills, sexual boredom, beginnings and endings. If you write it, we’ll consider it.

All submissions should be typed, double-spaced, and submitted electronically to queerkenya@gmail.com. If you can’t type, don’t want to, or can’t get hold of an email program that functions, get in touch with us. We can help.

How You Can Contribute

1. Get the word out. Convince your friends with hidden manuscripts or stories that must be shared to un-closet them.
2. Send us encouraging emails. We need your good wishes, your fabulously good wishes.
3. Volunteer time! We need all the help we can get.
4. Take ownership. We’re editing, sure, but these are our collective stories.

Important Dates

April 30, 2009: Deadline to Receive Submissions
June 30, 2009: Selected Contributors Contacted
Publication: December 2009.

Questions? We’re glad to answer. Please contact us at queerkenya@gmail.com

See the website for registration details and more information. Kudos to the Kenya Film Commission for sponsoring this.

If anyone reading this attends, please come back and report on how it went…

AOB: For more on the current state of animation in Africa, see this article.

· Hon. James Orengo- Minister for Lands

· His Excellency Mr. Julio César Gónzález Marchante -Ambassador, Embassy of the Republic of Cuba

It is possible, with Mama Mikes….you HAVE to watch this video!

People are truly creative.

They have been released on Kshs 20,000 cash bail.

The t-shirts were protesting the Kenyans MPs recent rejection of taxes (No taxes for MP’S - No taxes for Us’on their allowances) and the DVDs were urging Kenyans to push for the implementation of Waki. The DVDs and images of the t-shirts can be viewed at Marsgroup.

Ah Kenya, last week we had a day off to celebrate the triumph of change in America…this week we are arresting people who are peacefully advocating for change. Where is the outrage?

The UN’s procurement task force recently unraveled a procurement corruption scandal at the UN offices in Nairobi. You can now read the full report here: un. I just skimmed over it…boy is the process bureaucratic or what? I’m sure there’s lots more stuff going on under the radar if this is what it takes to investigate corruption within the organization. Apparently UN staff have not been happy with the taskforce’s work because it “does not respect their rights” and the task force will soon be disbanded…don’t mess with the gravy train I guess.

And speaking of a reading culture in Kenya, I’d be curious to see your thoughts on this post about promoting reading in Kenya (hat tip Dipesh!).

24 Nairobi “is intended as a showcase of a modern African city through the eyes of its own photographers. A lot of times cities in Africa are viewed through the narrow lenses and stories of missionaries, career war photographers and aid workers. 24 Nairobi brings together local, regional and international creative professionals to evolve powerful and realistic images and narratives that would reflect the working-life diversity, cultures, energy and dimensions of cities in Africa. This is an alternative, innovative, realistic and professional African perspective. All the photographers reside in Nairobi and grew up or now call Nairobi “home”. This aesthetic has now been captured.”

For those of us who grew up in Kenya, we understand that the KCSE (Kenya Certificate Secondary Examination) is one of the most important tests for all students in the Kenyan school system.The pressure, the frayed nerves, the ‘trans-nighting’. Imagine the test being 1 month away and you are being kicked out of school because the school fees have not been paid and you do not have means of raising the Kshs 43,000 ($615) so you can take the exam. This is the situation that Gladys finds herself in. We have a short time, and I believe we can get her fee paid so she can sit for her exam. Josiah - The Alpha Quadrant got the ball rolling and has provided all the info we need in order to fulfill this through the remittance service Mamamikes, with the money going directly to her school. For Glady’s privacy kindly email jmugambi at gmail dot com or myself afromusing at gmail dot com and we can give you her full name and details to enter in the mamamikes page for fee remittance. Might change the post to include all the info, but for now lets just err on the side of privacy. Lets get Gladys back to school now shall we?

Kshs 5530 donated already, Kshs 37470 ($535) to go.
Update 9/25/08: Amount remaining is Ksh 27400 and pledges from the community total Ksh 20,000

Read more.

The only country that is worthy of a seat next to Kenya is Jamaica. As for the rest of you, you can steal our athletes with PetroDollars, LegoDollars and MacDollars but until you start eating ugali you haven’t got a chance.)

In other news

our dear (younger) brothers from Uganda, this is what we meant last time. Hehe ati dethrone Kenya in Nairobi. Never talk badly again!

(Balanced, non jingoistic, rational coverage continues after the Olympics etc)

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For example the smokescreens usually contain something completely ridiculous which leads us to wonder what planet members of our government come from. This was the favoured tactic of the Moi regime. Here is an example. Did you notice how when there was a negative and potential very damaging story about the government dominating the news agenda one of Moi’s ministers would stand up and give a speech in which he would make some ridiculous claim? My favourite one was that Kenya was about to bid to host the Olympics. Predictably we would all get outraged and froth at the mouth and spend the next month partaking in debates with our friends and colleagues, remarking to each other that there are other priorities for the government to focus on, we would chuckle at the idea of the creaking Kenyan infrastructure being asked to host such a large event, and we would write articles to display our intellectual fortitude informing the minister that Olympics are hosted by CITIES not COUNTRIES so Kenya could not bid for the Olympics but Nairobi could. Of course by the time we had exhausted all this energy we would have forgotten what issue we were discussing before the minister made his ridiculous statement. And as we laughed all the way to our bars and coffee shops content that we were smarter than our ministers, our self proclaimed Professor of Politics was laughing at our constant ability to be played.

More recently we have seen another smokescreen deployed occasionally. When difficult questions started surfacing about what we now call “Anglo-Leasing type contracts” the First Lady would go out and do something totally ridiculous, such as raid a private party at the World Bank country director’s house in her pyjamas. When the questions about corruption would not stop the First Lady would either storm a police station and demand the cops arrest somebody or storm a media house by herself in the dead of the night and proceed to slap reporters – an act that is 110% guaranteed to dominate the media’s new agenda. Where was Kibaki, we would ask, why didn’t State House intervene when the First Lady’s security detail first reported her irrational and illegal actions?

Well maybe State House did not intervene because they had just deployed their smokescreen. And soon afterwards whispers about medication being deliberately withheld from the First Lady to ensure her irrational behaviour continues started to surface. These days whenever the First Lady does something outrageous I check the newspapers from the previous week to try and figure out what they are trying to hide.

In June 2008 we have been thrown yet another smokescreen, this time by the Minister of Finance, Amos Kimunya. This smokescreen, brilliant deployed it must be said, centres around Budget and the issue of whether Members’ of Parliament should pay tax on their salaries and allowances. Of course they should. That is obvious and indeed it is ridiculous that in 2008 we can still debate this. Of course Members’ of Parliament should pay tax on their salaries and allowances. Predictably many MPs are resisting all attempts to pay tax and that is the debate that has dominated the Kenyan news agenda in the past couple of weeks.

This debate about MPs and taxation is a smokescreen which Mwalimu Mati the CEO of MARS Group Kenya has exposed with his usually thoroughness. If MPs paid tax the Treasury would save between Ksh. 600 million and Ksh. 700 million. That is good money. However, Kimunya’s latest budget is full of waste, which runs into the HUNDREDS of BILLIONS of shillings. And that is even better money. And all this is probably going to pass unscrutinzed by a parliament full of MPS whose only point of concern in this Budget is whether or not they are to be taxed.

Please download [pdf 48 kb] , read, blog and circulate widely Mati’s article. You can download [pdf 48kb] it here.

Some shocking statistcs:

1. Last year the Government of Kenya budget for entertainment of its guests amounted to Ksh 5.7 million per day for EVERY day of the year.
2. The Governemnet of Kenya spends Ksh 3.995 billion on rents per annum and only receives Ksh 239.368 million per year from property income and rent.
3. Last year, the Government of Kenya spent over Ksh 6.7 million per day every day of the year on foreign travel. This is set to increase in this budget.
4. Did you know that State House Nairobi has 149 cars? Did you know that this year Minister of Finance wants to buy Ksh 73 million more worth of cars for State House? Did you know that last year a similar amount of money was spent on cars at State House? Did you know that the Government budget for cars for 2008 has gone up by 1 billion shillings, even as public attention is consumed by the debate on MP’s allowances?

And the best one

5. Every year the Minister of Finance presents lump sum budgets for the National Security Intelligence Services, the Armed Forces and the Kenya Anti Corruption Commission. This year their collective budgets will pass the Ksh 47 billion mark – and yet they will be no debate on the budget items in them because the Minister of Finance has helpfully provided none.

Ksh. 47 BILLION!

Kenyans let us demand that our MPs accept that they have a duty to pay taxes but let us not allow this debate on MPs allowances to distract us from the bigger picture. Do not be fooled by the smokescreen! Demand equally that your MP take his or her constitutional responsibility seriously and scrutinise Amos Kimunya’s ridiculous Budget.

Please download [pdf 48 kbs], read, blog, and circulate widely Mati’s article. You can download it here [pdf 48kb].

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Screen shot from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Noticed that the city ‘Kisangani’ in DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo) is displayed for afew seconds the spinning globe graphic at the beginning of the show.

Is Kisangani a place in the coastal province of Kenya too?

However, the blessing of being so involved in the response to the post election crisis that engulfed Kenya is that for all the nonsensical, narrow minded views that I encountered, for every person I came across who was hell bent on stirring up hate, I would find ten people who would do anything to pull the country back from the brink.

Patriots would put careers on the line, friendships on the line, family relationships on the live and others even put their lives on the line to stand up and be counted as an agent for peace not for division. While some bloggers would announce that they could never take someone from another tribe home to their parents, other Kenyans were busy organising a media event where couples with each partner from a different tribe would publicly declare that they will not be part of any nonsense which insisted they leave their partners to show their loyalty to tribe.

Apart from the personal relationships another trend which warmed my heart was that professionals would rise up and find ways through which they could utilise their professional services to help save the country. A group of writers gathered and formed the Concerned Kenyan Writers coalition which aims to use writing skills to humanise the crisis, the techie community such as Skunkworks offered technical IT and ICT support to the relief efforts, the legal fraternity came up with similar initiatives, the top musicians and producers in the country got into the studios, journalists as well. Bloggers usually wear more than one hat and in each of the other groups mentioned above you will find bloggers.

Some initiatives are blog driven, they were born in blogs and grew in the blogs, were lead by bloggers and publicised by blogs. They are blogger lead and blogger dominated. One such project which I am honoured to work on is the Ushahidi project which was born out of Kenyan Pundit thinking out loud on her blog and Hash hearing those voices and running with them. The site was born on the blogs and brought in to existence by David Kobia, a guy who has been a huge supporter of Kenyan blogs and bloggers, in JUST TWO DAYS. I am yet to hear of another project that launched so successfully, that proved to be so ground breaking that was launched in such a short period of time. Kenyans across the globe showing what can happen with cooperation and commitment.

Ushahidi is the Kiswahili word for witness.

From Hash
Ushahidi.com is a tool for people who witness acts of violence in Kenya in these post-election times. You can report the incident that you have seen, and it will appear on a map-based view for others to see.

From Kenyan Pundit

So what’s Ushahidi.com about… (for those who don’t know Kiswahili, ushahidi is the Swahili word for witness). The website was mainly set up to document incidents of violence, lotting etc. during the crisis (and soon to follow - information about ways to help on a micro-level). The website is still very much a work in progress and will be updated as we go along.

We believe that the number of deaths being reported by the government, police, and media is grossly underreported. We also don’t think we have a true picture of what is really going on - reports that all have us have heard from family and friends in affected areas suggests that things are much worse than what we have heard in the media.

From Afromusing

We want to continue mapping not only the violence, but also the ‘doves’ or peace efforts happening in Kenya. The last two months have been traumatic to our collective psyche, and we would like to be well equipped to continue this important project. While we will not hide from the trauma of the events; we want make Ushahidi even more relevant to other countries in Africa.

Since the launch of ushahidi the support from within the blogging community and from the main stream media as well, has been phenomenal. I have lost count of the number of radio and print interviews that have come my way because of interest in the project. Now Ushahidi needs your help again. Ushahidi has been entered in to the $100,000 Netsquared Mashup Challenge for further development. This is big in very many ways. It helps secure the future of the project and it helps secure the independence of the project, it allows the project to grow beyond Kenya, it give the opportunity for a powerful and increasingly necessary tool to achieve its potential.

Please show your support for Ushahidi by voting for the project on Netsquared you have to register to vote, registration takes less time than it took you to read this sentence and voting takes even shorter. Help us to drive this project forward. Please read and link Hash’s post on the Ushahidi NetSquared challenge and remember to VOTE!

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As the Mamamikes blog updates, the amount is exceeding $1900.
May i reiterate the thanks to the following people….

Omolo, Kuria, Kimura, Nyokabi, Miaud, Edgerton, Monyo, Kimeria, Dsouza, Kangethe, Muthoni, Coseac, Barbieri, Patel, Jabbar, Mann, Warungongo, Wairimu, Juergen, Njoroge, Laurance, Wanja, Wambui, Romanos, Lutz, Popplewell, Walsh, Kamau

Thank you to the following Kenyan Bloggers for committing their time to volunteer on the 17th.
M of Thinkers Room
Bankelele
Josiah Mugambi of Skunkworks and Mission Driven
Mentalacrobatics
The list is growing, so if you are a kenyan blogger/blog reader in Nairobi, please leave a comment if you can make it. we understand the situation might be tenuous but we hope it will be calm on Thursday. If you have any questions please feel free to send me an email, afromusing at gmail dot com

Date: Thursday January 17th 2008
Location: Mamamikes office - Kingsway Hse opposite Nairobi Outpatient Center on Muindi Mbingu Street
Time: 5pm

PS: Ushahidi Update: Local number to report an incident is +254 711 862 149 6007

This is the time of the whirlwind

The coming of uncertainty

The establishment of arrogance

The occurrence of intransigence

The naming of indifference

The institution of the indefinite

The creation of the unknown

This is the time of turmoil

The beginning of the end?

kenyaelection07+poetry

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*Sat in on an interview with Martin Keino of Keino Sports Marketing and Tim of Reuters. Martin had just come back from a meeting to make arrangements for the funeral of Lukas Sang. The funeral will be next saturday the 12th at Kuinet farm. This post is based on the information from the interview.

Lukas Sang was an olympic sprinter who represented Kenya in the olympics in 1988 and 1992, he retired in 1995. He was a tall imposing man, well known in Eldoret for his role in Administration of Athletics as an official, and also as an influential member of the cereal growers association.
What Happened: He was in a car with other people when they went to help a colleague. He was caught up in the rioting that was reported yesterday, and he was hit by a rock on the head. His driver was badly hurt but managed to get away, and later Lukas’s body was found in a slum - Burned. Part of how they were able to identify that it was indeed him was a piece of his tracksuit on the ground. Even worse, is the fact that a dog partly ate his arm.
With the fracas happening at night, no one knows who is who, and it appears he may have been at the wrong place at the wrong time.

The deaths of people around the country is senseless. Its costs are inumerable and the sooner the leaders resolve this crisis, the better. When Kenya loses an athlete, we lose a piece of our face to the world.

Any message of condolences left on this post will be forwarded to the family. Thank you.

… a forum for the web community of UN agencies, and international development civil society organizations interested in using their expertise to show how the Internet can promote development.

So Web4Dev is like a BarCamp where UN and government bigwigs turn up. You have a bunch of techies doing brilliant things in techie world, you have a lot of activists, development people, concerned citizens doing brilliant things in the development sector and you throw them together and see what they come up with together. Should be very interesting and informative.

Last night a bunch of us from Skunkworks met with a group of Web4Dev delegates at Pizza Garden. It was one big idea exchange. I heard many innovative ways on how to get more people involved in our online conversation, new exciting things you will soon be able to do with RSS, cooking with grandmothers! Oh and I got to mess around with an iPhone for the second time in 4 days.

Today’s programme at web4dev is full of the usual opening ceremony formalities and expert panel discussions. Tomorrow we dive into the code and projects.

Aside:
Apparently the UN complex in Nairobi is actually in Italy!

web for development

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The short talks cover a wide range of issues (as you would expect at a BarCamp!) so far we have:

• Alex Gakum – Protecting Innovation
• Wesley Kirinya – Schools working with companies
• Edgar Okioga – .net innovation
• Nathan Eagle – Mobile Epemology Apps
• Riyaz Bachani – Demonstrating the One Laptop Per Child laptop
• Valentine Wambui - Call Centre set-up (using Asterix technology)

this list will grow as more people turn up. If you are in Nairobi and reading this, get to Strathmore University NOW (Ole Sangale Road, off Langata Road, in Madaraka Estate. If using public transport, take matatu number 14, which leaves town from the corner of Ronald Ngala and Mfangano Streets and goes directly to the entrance of Strathmore University (the last stop).

We are recording as much of the sessions as we can and will upload them as podcasts.

barcampkenya

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The Show lasts one week, each day has a guest of honour, for example the Chairman of the ASK, the Minister of Agriculture and the Vice President. Wednesday, however, is when the real action takes places as this is the day that the President, in his role as Patron of the ASK, is the guest of honour.

The Show is unlike other big presidential events in that it is not a public holiday and it is not a political event. This means that the usual entourage of political cronies conveniently find something else to do. This gives the military space to put on a show at the Show and they do!

Here are some clips from President’s Day at the Nairobi Show this year featuring All Kenyan uniformed forces brass bands encompassing Kenya Army Band, Navy Band, Air Force Band, Police Band, Prisons Band, GSU Band, NYS Band and the Administration Police Band. These clips are from the military tattoo at the end of the day.

The first clip features the lowering of the National Flag and the Playing of the National Anthem. We have a very beautiful, majestic, powerful anthem. The drum major then requests permission from his Commander-in-Chief to lead the bands off the field and they start marching off.

The second clip shows the band starting to march off the field. When the camera moves to the right you see half of the presidential motorcade, moving into position waiting to rush in. When camera moves to the left (with the band at the far end of the field) you see the other half of the presidential motorcade waiting to reverse into the field.

The final clip features the Mass Bands giving the President their final salute and with all the ceremonial details dealt with the Presidential Escort Unit swings into action.

The main part of the motorcade drives into the field, the lead cars reverse into the field from the other end.You can even see the Presidential Press Service cameraman rushing to get his tripod into the PPS Benz station wagon. The President then walks down from his seat and says his goodbyes gets into his stretch Benz and the motorcade starts moving.

The Presidential Escort Unit jog next to the car incase any muppet decides to do something crazy. And then they are off. Being the Show all the top military brass are there and you can see number plates like CGS (Chief of General Staff – the head of the Armed Forces) 00KA01 (Head of the Army) 00KN01 (Head of the Navy) and COP 1 (Commissioner of Police) all joining in the motorcade. Civilian leaders are there you can see a Benz with SNA (Speaker of the National Assembly) and cars with the National Flag which carry Ministers. (The Presidential Limo has the National Flag and the Presidential Standard.) Anyway check out the clip for yourself below.

(Apologies for the running commentary during the final clip – my bro and I tend to get a little bit excited about things like this oh and it took me ages - bleeding ages - to upload these clips on to YouTube! Like 3 weeks!)

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For one reason or another Kenyans find me tribally ambiguous. That is to say when they meet me they find it hard to determine which tribe I belong to. Many times it even goes further than that as people automatically assume that I belong to THEIR tribe. This has led to some ridiculous situations in the past.

For example, when I was a teenager, before mobile phones and txt messaging, back in the day when you actually had to go up to the door or – if we are being honest here- the back door (or neighbours door even) of the house of the girl you were courting in order to let her know that you were there and ready for your stroll around the estate, before you even got to her door, or even the gate of their compound you would have to get past the main gate of the estate usually manned by 3 or more watchmen, from different tribes, all of whom would hustle you for a little this or that as they know they stand between you and the most beautiful girl in the world.

• Watchman A would address me in Maa
• Watchman B would address me in kikisii
• Watchman C would address me in Kalenjin

Then we go to buy chips the guy talks to me Kikuyu; we head to the movies the girl selling tickets would unleash Dholuo and on and on.

In November 2007 this tribal ambiguity means that every once in a while an acquaintance or even a complete stranger will lean in and start sharing with me about how WE need to keep strong because THEY are after US. Or how WE are under attack from THEM and need to come up with strategies to protect OURSELVES. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it) when they really want to unleash the latest tribal conspiracy they revert to their vernacular language and I am left nodding away seriously (I play along because I am fascinated at this massive smoke screen of ethnicity that blinds our country). If you want to know what the latest tribal nonsense is just ask me.

Observation 2

There is a copy of a Memorandum of Understanding floating around the internet which claims to be a legitimate copy of that signed between ODM presidential candidate, Odinga, and the National Muslim Leaders Forum (NAMLEF). MOU’s have become notorious in Kenyan politics ever since Kibaki tore up the one he signed with coalition partners before the 2002 election days after he moved into Statehouse. ODM were quick to point out that the MOU circulating on the internet is a fake but honestly you do not need them to tell you that. I refuse to believe that whoever came up with this fake MOU expected it to be taken as seriously as it has. (If you haven’t seen it get it here - PDF 280 KB) (Thanks M4!!).

Section (v) of the fake MOU is pure comedy.

(a) Coast Province shall be henceforth known as Jimbo La Pwani.
(ouwwwwww kinky!)

(i) Impose a total ban on open air gospel crusades by worshippers of the cross in Coast and N. Eastern province.
(Throw in no preaching at bus stops and most Nairobi commuters would sign immediately).

(j) Outlaw gospel programmes on KBC.
(WOOO HOO no more “Brother Paul” and his fake sermons!)

(k) Impose a total ban on the public consumption of alcoholic beverages in Coast and N. Eastern province
(NO BOOZE AT COAST? Wololololololololo. That sound you hear is tourists downing their pints at Voi! Set up a Kiosk on the Coast Province border with a big sign reading, “Last Booze Before Mogadishu, Yemen, Mumbai.”)

(l) Quash the recent legalization of mnazi, busaa, muratina, kaluvi.
(How about Kumi-Kumi, isn’t Kumi-Kumi haram too? And Muratina was legalized? I did NOT get that memo jamani!)

But the best one, the absolute best one, drum roll please:

(m) Close down Farmer’s Choice in Jimbo La Pwani.
(HEHEHEHE seriously this is apparently one of the conditions of the MOU. That Raila would have to close down Farmer’s Choice in coast. LOL. No sausages in coast! Hehehe. Come on now come on!)

But don’t laugh too loudly. There are some people out there who are taking this MOU very very seriously!

Observation 3

Julie Gichuru is my new heroine, not because she lights up news every day, which she does, but because last night when she was interviewing the thief and crook (and parliamentary aspirant and KENDA party boss) Kamlesh Pattni on NTV about halfway through the show she looked like she’d like to do nothing better than punch the muppet in the face. She looked very irritated with “Brother Paul” sitting there talking about, “let he who has no sin cast the first stone.” There are two people in Kenyan public life that make my blood boil every time I hear their irritating voices. Kamlesh Pattni is one. The other is Kibaki’s Envoy of Peace, Moi. I do not know Julie’s political stance but I have a feeling she will not be voting for KENDA. And really it has to be said when you have Kamlesh and Moi rooting for you to win an election there must be something wrong somewhere.

Observation 4

There is an advert which has been airing on KTV during prime time which bangs on about, “wacha domo, fanya kazi” kiswhaili for, “stop making noise(in a time wasting kind of way), get to work”. The ad features no people. You have a black screen with words pop up. Every time a negative word crops up on the screen, such as domo in this context, it is in orange. Every time a positive word turns up it is in blue.

“Kazi Iendelee” is the official campaign slogan for Kibaki’s re-election bid and blue and red are his official campaign colours. So even though no one claims responsibility for the ad during the airing and even though it does not mention any names or political parties, it does not take a rocket scientist to figure out the ad is Pro-Kibaki and Anti-ODM. I noticed the ad because it is very clever and also because it is the first negative ad I have seen aired on Kenyan TV. (Because something is clever does not necessarily mean it is good).

Earlier this week as I was driving into work at the Ngong Road/Mbagathi Road roundabout I noticed a suspiciously looking characters lurking behind the car. Just as I was driving away he placed something on the back of my car. Again it was cleverly done in that it was placed just as I was moving away which meant that had I not been paying the man special attention I would not have noticed it, and even if I had the flow of traffic behind me would have kept me moving forward. Anyway I decided to follow the roundabout and parked the car further ahead to check what he had put on the car.

A sticker!

With the word DOMO written on it and crossed out (and placed upside down)!

Now I am as easy going as the next fella, but sticking political messages on a car I am driving without my permission in such a charged political environment is just not on. So I took out my camera and decided to go and have a chat with the gentleman in question.

As I approached him I noticed he was handing out stickers to pedestrians so I got a couple off him. I asked him what the stickers meant. He said the stickers were for a campaign. I asked what campaign (this is when he started getting nervous and started looking around). He said it was for a peace campaign. (OOOOOK!) I asked him if he was affiliated to any political party. He said absolutely not. He stressed this. Then I asked him how come his T-Shirt had the Kiswhaili word WACHA in Orange. (Wacha loosely translates as “leave it, leave it alone, don’t”, orange is the colour of the main opposition party the Orange Democratic Movement. Again the message is clear, negative words highlighted in the colour of the main opposition.) He did not reply and started walking away. I asked him who he worked for. He turned around and told me he worked for, The Electoral Commission of Kenya. Before this he was just a guy giving out stickers for a candidate, after that statement he was masquerading as an employee of the ECK on official business. That is a crime.

That is when I decided to pull out my camera and inform him, not ask him, that I was going to take a picture of him doing his work. He told not to take any pictures. I replied that he is in a public street, and claims to be a public official on official business as part of a Peace campaign for the ECK, why would he object to having his picture taken. I also informed him that he had placed his political sticker on my car without my permission and that posing for a picture was the least that he could do. This line of argument did not win him over. Instead he gestured to his colleagues on the other side of the roundabout and they started running away quickly, but not before I took a picture of the back of his t-shirt.

I’ve been timing them every morning since but they seem to have relocated. So if do come across them, let me know!

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Tragedy is…running out of Kenyan tea. What to do? Get some English breakfast tea from the local grocery store and dream of pushing a cart in Nakumatt soon. This diaspora life sucks, especially when the weather becomes surly.

Reasons why I am resisting the urge to get an Iphone
1. In the US it means switching to AT&T. I am happy with T-mobile and I am not switching to a network that has less than stellar coverage (just my opinion, the last time i tried AT&T I was in college and couldn’t get signal around my Uni, which was smack in the middle of the city) An aside, why isn’t there a text message plan or package that includes international text msgs? Gosh its 2007 and didn’t Friedman say the world is flat? Why aren’t service plans getting cheaper in the US? As a consumer I don’t really see much competition in that arena…prices are just about the same across the board and It wouldn’t make much sense to get the Iphone without the data plan anyway.

2. I would want my Iphone unlocked, free and ready to roam to Kenya or any other place in the world with a GSM network…which is pretty much the whole world. I do not shy away from tinkering with phones, but I don’t think I want to brick an expensive bit of tech then go through a 19 step recovery process
. If it was 5 steps sorta like the grief process, I might reconsider…NOT! Even if you sign a contract with AT&T and ask for unlock codes when you are travelling, something that carriers do for you without batting an eye…not happening, not possible, no way Jose, *hapana (not to be confused with the amazing Bryan Habana!).
I think I would be wiling to pay extra to have an Iphone that i could use in any network though.

3. Why buy it when it doesn’t have 3G capability now, and when tested against the RAZR and even the T-mobile sidekick much favored by rappers and a certain Hilton progeny, took forever to open a page in a download race? (To be fair, the comments indicate that it may be faster than reported, but everyone has a reality distortion field around them). Oh as with apple products that are shape shifting, paradigm blasting, fat burning and calorie free there are always rumors. The rumor/confirmed fact masquerading as a rumor is that the Iphone in 2008 will actually have 3G capability and on the horizon the Iphone could even be Wimax capable.

4. The wi-fi capability is nice, but when traveling, good luck finding open networks that wont charge you an arm, a leg and kidney to connect. Special offenders - some airports like O’Hare in Chicago. I do not like paying for wi-fi esp. when its almost 10 bucks for just a few hours. Perhaps i should try Fon again.

Via 69Mb:The Iphone is Kenya bound in November apparently, which network will it be chained to and how much will the data plan for that be? Not clear from the BDAfrica article, probably in the 5000Ksh range like the Blackberries? Carrier specific phones are not a good idea in Kenya, I enjoyed the freedom to pick which carrier i would go with depending on their rates, and I think the Kenyan consumers and all consumers for that matter need to be able to make the best choice of data plans regardless of the hardware.

All this…and i still ogle at the thing each time I see it! Ok, that is the end of my little screed for today.

Btw, Liz Henry is tweeting the ‘She’s Geeky’ UnConference.

DMKW - Diary of a Mad Kenyan Woman is back!!!!!!!!

Blogged with Flock

Although you may stumble across a few good individuals in the 9th parliament, collectively they were a big disappointment. More interested in their salaries, interest free Prados, health insurance, than they were in the building the nation.

Good riddance.

Let us work to make the 10th parliament worthy of our great country.

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The 1st of September was the day Kibaki was due to have a presidential campaign fund raising lunch with 1000 people who would each pay KSH 1,000,000.00 (EUR 10,450.00) for the privilege of eating with the president. In response to this civil society under the banner of the Kenya Human Rights Network (K-HURINET) decided to hold a counter event at Jeevanjee Gardens in heart of Nairobi’s CBD to remind the president that most of his fellow citizens would have to work for decades to earn KSH 1,000,000 and can hardly afford to spend KSH 100.00 for lunch amongst other things.

The format of the public meeting at Jeevanjee Gardens was empowering. Instead of having one or two people dominate the gathering it was all very inclusive and equal. In the days before the meeting members of K-HURINET had gone around to various civil society groups to ask them what issues they wanted to highlight on the day. They then printed posters with each of those messages.

At Jeevanjee everyone picked up the poster that represented their position, we all then stood in a circle and people spoke in turn highlighting what they felt was important.

As the representative from the Kenya Human Rights Commission said civil society was not there to speak for people but to give people the opportunity to speak for themselves.

Many more full size pictures are on my Flickr page.

After Jeevanjee I walked across town to the Kenyatta International Conference Centre, a building at the heart of the establishment. In the days of the Moi dictatorship it held the headquarters of KANU, then the ruling party, today it hosts several government institutions such as the Office of the Government Spokesman. On this Saturday it was the venue of Amaranth Awareness Forum organized by the Poverty Eradication Commission.

Amaranth is a fantastic crop full of nutritional and medicinal goodness. It also enhances soil fertility and the stock can be used as livestock feed. Equally as important, it is economically viable.

Amaranth takes three/four months from planting to harvest. That means in one year you can get three harvests. From one harvest from one acre you can earn KSH 25,000.00 – KSH 30,000.00. This means in one year you can earn KSH 75,000.00 in profit from one acre of Amaranth. Compare this with maize and sugarcane. Maize takes 8 months from planting to harvest. From one acre most farmers will earn KSH 25,000.00 which after they have paid their costs comes down to KSH 15,000.00 from each acre per harvest. In one year you will have made KSH 15,000.00 from your acre.

Sugarcane takes 24 months from planting to harvest (theoretically it is meant to take 18 months but in reality it usually takes 24 months.) After those 24 months you will make KSH 90,000.00 if you are lucky. KSH 45,000.00 per year. Once you reduce your costs it comes down to KSH 30,000.00 per acre per year for sugarcane.*

From this it is clear to see why the Poverty Eradication Commission is pushing Amaranth. However, Amaranth is a delicate crop so measures have to be employed to ensure a successful harvest. The commission invited expert farmers to share their experiences and tips with other farmers who were considering planting amaranth or those whose crops had performed poorly. PEC also invited commercial partners to illustrate to farmers that there is a market available for their crop if they did choose to grow Amaranth. PEC was providing an opportunity for people to transform their lives.

Two groups, K-HURINET and PEC. One outside the establishment, the other working under the Ministry of Planning. Both have their critics, both have their supporters. Both working to build the country. Encouraging both groups have embarked on tours across Kenya spreading their knowledge.

There are good people in our country doing fantastic things.

(*These are average figures, yes there are some people who earn a lot more, but they are many more who earn a lot less from their maize and sugarcane.)

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Kenya’s burdensome debt to developed countries is partly the product of theft on the part of “previous leaderships,” Foreign Minister Raphael Tuju said in a prepared statement distributed prior to his address to the UN General Assembly …
“I discovered that some of these loans were actually shady schemes, unnecessary pseudo projects whose only objective was to steal that money.” In the case of legitimate projects, Mr Tuju added in his written remarks, “some of the procurements were terribly flawed, and they cost double, triple or many times more than they should have cost.”

Tuju would be referring to the “previous leadership” of Daniel Arap Moi.

The same Moi he offered the job of regional peace envoy.

The same Moi he welcomed into Kibaki’s re-election camp as chairman of NARC-Kenya.

The same Moi at the heart of Kibaki’s re-election campaign.

Tuju must think we are cabbages or idiots. Or perhaps he thinks we don’t care either way.

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In December 2003 I wrote that by hiring Kroll Associates to trace the money looted by Moi and his cronies the Kibaki government was showing that it was taking the fight against corruption seriously. These noble anti-corruption efforts were lead from within the Kibaki team by a guy you might have heard about, John Githongo, who was at the time the Permanent Secretary for Governance and Ethics in the Office of the President.

In February 2005 John Githongo travelled to the UK to receive a report from Kroll. Shortly after receiving that report Githongo resigned his position as Permanent Secretary giving no reason and stayed in the UK stating concerns about fears for his safety if he returned back to Kenya. At the time I wrote that whatever Kroll told Githongo must have been explosive, explosive enough to make him resign. In February 2006 Githongo released his report, a copy of which you can download on Mentalacrobatics here.

Earlier today part of the Kroll report on corruption in Kenya was leaked to the whistler blowers’ site WikiLeaks.

Some of the information in the report focusing on Moi:

• Assets accumulated included multimillion pound properties in London, New York and South Africa, as well as a 10,000-hectare ranch in Australia and bank accounts containing hundreds of millions of pounds.
• Mr Moi’s sons - Philip and Gideon - were reported to be worth £384m and £550m respectively
• Moi’s associates colluded with Italian drug barons and printed counterfeit money
• Moi’s clique owned a bank in Belgium
• £4m was used to buy a home in Surrey and £2m to buy a flat in Knightsbridge.

The Kibaki government never acted on the report. The Kenyan government official spokesman, Alfred Mutaa, dismissed the report stating, “We did not find that the report was credible. It was based a lot on hearsay.” He said the leaking of the report was politically motivated and insisted Kenya was working with foreign governments to recover the stolen money. “Some of the money is in UK bank accounts. We have asked the British government to help us recover the funds, but so far they have refused.”

Well he would say that now wouldn’t he. Earlier this week Moi endorsed Kibaki for a second term in statehouse.

You can download the Kroll report from WikiLeaks. You can also download it from Mentalacrobatics here (PDF doc 3.8 MB)

Hat tip Mshairi!

(Disclaimer for the conspiracy theorists amongst us: This is my analysis of the situation. I do not have any inside information on why Githongo resigned and he has not shared his reasons with me.)

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However, the worst, absolutely worst idea ever, is this KSH 1 Million (USD 15,000.00) per plate lunch affair that Kibaki’s re-election team is planning for Saturday which is expected to attract 1,000 people. What were they drinking the day they came up with that idea? It is hard to think of a more stupid idea at this time in Kenyan politics? If that wasn’t enough, reports have also emerged of the purchase of nearly 200 four-wheel-drives, the formation of a 300-member team of co-ordinators each earning more than $1,000 a month, and the existence of an ICT team that will see the president’s re-election message flood mobile phones. The only conclusion I can come up with is that there is someone at the heart of the Kibaki camp deliberately sabotaging his re-election efforts and they are very good at it. It serves absolutely no purposes.

What about the money? Kibaki needs the money! Of course Kibaki needs the money. This is going to be the first campaign in Kenyan history where each serious presidential candidate (sit down Dr. Ojiambo) will spend at least KSH 1 billion in the run up to the election. No clever politician campaigns with his own money. So they have to raise money. But anybody who is willing to turn up to a KSH 1 million a plate lunch in support of Kibaki would have given him the money away. It is not like there are hundreds of undecided millionaires in Kenya who were swayed by the quality of warus on the Statehouse menu. So why have the lunch and make a public show of such gluttony? Why deliberately antagonise the 30+ million Kenyans who will never ever see KSH 1 million?

Secondly, because of the nature of Kenyan politics, I can confidently predict that guest list will be dominated by members of one tribe. So after this lunch Kibaki will not only look greedy and completely out of touch, he will also look like the supreme tribalist, which is sad as the vast majority of Kikuyus will never see KSH 1 million in their lifetime. Wasn’t it that patriot Josiah Mwangi (JM) Kariuki (who happened to be Kikuyu) who warned Kenyatta decades ago about creating a country of 10 millionaires and 10 million beggars?

Thirdly, just how out of touch with the man on the street do you have to be to even suggest an idea like this to the president? And how out out touch do you have to be to accept the idea as good? doThis administration’s lack of realists would be comical if it were not so serious. It is easy to see now how these guys believed the draft constitution would sail through the referendum the day before the Kenyan voters told them where to stuff their draft. Just like that arrogant, self belief undid them then, it will undo them here. They basically do not care what anyone thinks and they think that is fine. They move from Ivory Tower to Ivory Tower and never take time to stop and listen.

Meanwhile back in the real world, at the same time as Kibaki and his friends are having their KSH 1 Million lunch, a bunch of us will be at Jeevanjee Gardens, snacks will be served to about 1000 people, although feel free to bring your own, KSH 1 million is purely optional Karibu!

Press release from the indefatigable MARS Group on behalf of the Kenyan Human Rights Network:

PRESS RELEASE ON 29TH AUGUST 2007 - A MILLION FOR LUNCH?OR ONE MILLION LUNCHES?

“Those with money have access to the president … those without have the votes to elect the president”
Civil Society, Nairobi Kenya

The Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC) has today (29th August 2007) given the OCS Central Police Station notice, under the Public Order Act, on behalf of the Kenya Human Rights Network (K-HURINET) of a public event to be held at Jeevanjee Gardens on Saturday the 1st of September 2007. KHRC has also obtained the necessary consents from the Nairobi City Council and the Friends of Jeevanjee Gardens.

The meeting shall be held from 10.00 am to 3.00 pm. Activities will include a public forum where snacks will be offered to an approximated 1000 people.

Please note that the function shall be preceded by a procession from the Globe Cinema Roundabout to the above mentioned venue. We shall assemble at the Globe Roundabout at 8.30 am and start the procession at 9.00 am

Mars Group Kenya
Media Laison for K-HURINET
Contact Jayne/Fiona
020 3533230
info [@] marskenya [dot] org

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All this makes me excited about the launch of dorothyduncan a business that sells a dare to live attitude and lifestyle though unique and exclusive pieces by independent fashion designers from various parts of the world. Co-founded by Kenyan Dorothy Ghettuba and Mandy Duncan from Guyana, dorthyduncan’s clothes are fantastic.

Equally important is that dorothyduncan seems focused and committed to the simultaneous pursuit of return on investment in three areas - financial, social and environmental, the triple bottom line. It is no longer acceptable to make money at the expense of the community and the planet.

dorothyduncan are currently featuring the Kenyan based design house Kimila Afrika who specialize in making outstandingly beautiful and comfortable Afro-Urban pieces with bold prints and bright colors from the leso/kanga fabric. The challenge for many African designers is the logistics that comes along with selling their clothes. There are limitations like shipping, payments methods etc but dorothyduncan is bridging that gap by being a one-stop shop of African designers.

They are out to build a company and build their community through that company. Social entrepreneurship at dorothyduncan through fashion! (They are also bloggers and members of KBW which makes them amongst my most favourite people!)

Have a look at dorothyduncan and let them know what you think.

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(Inspired by one of the best headlines of all time.)

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I have never been so jealous or impressed in my life.

All those bars of Weetabix for one guy? What a hero; what a show-off. My mother reassured me that he probably was not going to eat it all himself but was most likely buying stock for his shop but I preferred my vision of him surrounded by boxes of the stuff and having it for every meal.

Back then the most popular kid amongst us was a guy who not only OWNED a proper football but used to dish out free Weetabix if his team won. Unsurprisingly my brothers and I (although on the opposing team) regularly ensured that his team always won in the end. Hey, you gotta do what you gotta do! I loved the stuff.

A few years later when I got home and proudly announced to my older brothers that they were looking at the new captain of the school under-13s rugby team I was promptly informed that I can not call myself a rugby captain unless I could eat 8 bars of Weetabix in one sitting using only one packet of milk (around 0.4 litres).

I made it. Just.

I am not sure why I was so obsessed with those brown bars of cereal. I have my theories but that is for another post another day. The strange this a few years I thought back one day and realised that I had not eaten any Weetabix in over 5 years.

I am not sure when I stopped, I just did. Basically I had grown up and, in a way, out grown the obsession. It used to be important, it no longer was.

The point behind my Weetabix story is that as a 10 year I never fathomed that a time would come when my thoughts wouldn’t be dominated by Weetabix. In fact the sole motivation for becoming an adult was so I could eat Weetabix when I wanted without having to ask anyone. At the time it never occurred to me that that would be unreasonable.

That contrasts sharply with my flirtation with “Gangsta Rap”. From the very first time I heard a Gangsta Rap song (probably around 13 when NWA were busy telling us to “Fuck the Police”) I knew in my heart that although I loved this new, brash, in-your-face type of music at the time, a day would surely come when I would look at it with disgust. In fact I used to excuse it to myself as one of the excesses of immature youth. I was young, I was growing up, I was immature and thus, I was allowed to like it. But even then I knew that one day I would just have to recognise it for the nonsense it is. Till then I could go around singing along to Snoop’s DoggyStyle from start to finish and feel only slightly guilty.

And it wasn’t just me. At times it looked like the whole of Kenya had this fever. Every estate had a guy who would could describe the geography of Los Angeles like he was born and breed there, “you drive though Compton, pass Inglewood, and get to South Central” and of course us muppets who had never been to the USA would nod our heads wisely like we were talking about Ngummo, Ngong Road and Kenyatta Market.

I must admit that falling out of love with Gangsta Rap took a lot longer than I anticipated when I was 13. In fact although Gangsta Rap songs were quickly out numbered in my collection by the time I started university it wasn’t until much later the ridiculousness of the whole situation slapped in me in the face.

Live8! Concerts around the world to fight for Africa, MAKE POVERTY HISTORY, wear a white band. Woo Hoo! Simultaneous concerts around the world with the blue ribbon event in London. Now there were many ridiculous things about Live8 and especially the London concert. One was that the organisers constantly turned away African artists who wanted to perform. Instead they were, belatedly, give their own little concert miles away in the Eden Project, as my pal T said, they threw us in the only jungle left in England. OK it is their country. But when even brilliant black British artist such as Lemar were turned away things were thick. So a look at the line up to check out the black artists and who do you come across.

Our good friend Snoop Dogg.

Now as Lola rightly says it is obvious to any rational person that Gangsta Rappers do not speak for African American community, leave alone Africans and all black people on the planet. But when Snoop got on stage at Live8 he had an opportunity to do something, to be somebody. Of course he didn’t. All he did was show case just how stupid this whole Gangsta Rap thing is.

For one he was the ONLY artist as far as I can remember who did not mention Africa at all when he was on stage. Not a word on AID or Trade on injustice, nothing. Perhaps he needs to attend TED Global Secondly he was the only artist (apart from Madonna I think) who could not refrain from swearing on stage. Fuck this, fuck that, motherfucking this.

What makes it even more disheartening is that some of these guys have brilliant minds. You do not pull yourself up from the floor of society to make millions without engaging your brain cells. I just wish they would engage them productively. I was listening to Chuck D talking on the BBC a while ago and he was talking about how he happened to be on the same plane to Australia as 50 Cent and spent a while talking to him. According to Chuck D, 50 Cent is one of the most intelligent people in the rap game today. Yet a few hours later 50 Cent was in front of a large crowd of 50,000 plus people and urging them to all shout, “KILL THAT NIGGA” as he (50 Cent) asked what he should about some of his rivals in the rap game. Now having a stadium full of kids shouting KILL THAT NIGGA is, as Chuck D pointed out, not healthy.

However Gangsta Rap especially in an African context is full of illogic. For one Gangsta Rappers want us to believe that they live the hardest lives ever. Now I am not one belittle another man’s experiences (and having seen inner city Manchester close up for many years I know that “developed country” means a different thing for a crown prince who flies in a private jet to Argentina to play polo than it does to the young kids of Moss Side who do not even have a playing field in their school) but KM has a great quote from a K’naan the rapper born in Mogadishu, Somalia,

If i rhyme about home, and got descriptive/
I’d make 50 cent look like limp bizkit.

Mogadishu –v- Compton = no contest.

Secondly, Gangsta Rap sells itself as ghetto/street music but Gangsta Rap as far as Kenya and the parts of Africa I have been to is not the music of the street. That is reserved for reggae a.k.a freedom music a.k.a revolution music a.k.a Roots a.k.a Dub. Call it what you want, that is the sound of the street.

Thirdly, and in many ways the most serious, the disrespecting our sisters. That this has somehow come to be labelled a black thing is the biggest disservice that Gangsta Rap has served on us. In fact the disrespecting of women by Gangsta Rap is one of the biggest signs of male disempowerment in society this world has to offer. Again on the BBC a few weeks ago when this topic was being debated I heard another Gangsta Rapper who apparently is meant to be quite articulate, Xzibit, give the most nonsensical and ridiculous justification for using NIGGA and BITCH/BYATCH etc in rap music. Luckily for the sane amongst us the BBC also had the great Fats Domino in the studio to talk about proper music as well as share some thoughts on just how misguided the youth of today are!

Luckily we have gurus of very good music amongst our midst and even more so good music is everywhere around us in every genre including rap. Personally I have had it with “Gangsta Rap”. I should have stuck with the Weetabix.

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The following are the details from the Inter-media committee:

The Silent Demo is on!

The Silent Demonstration will take place on Wednesday August 15, with the blessings and the support from the majority of media houses and associations as well as myriads of well wishers.

We shall assemble 8:30am at Freedom Corner at Uhuru Park. We will then march to the AG’s Chambers (via Kenyatta Ave- Moi Ave- Harambee Ave) where we will present a petition to the chief legal adviser to the Government and ask him to advise the President against signing the proposed law.

We shall then proceed to march around Parliament two times before breaking the demo at Freedom corner. The whole programme should take about two hours maximum.

The demo is silent for there will be no chanting nor singing.

We will actually be quiet through out the march and our mouths gagged with black cloth or duct tape. We can also adorn black scarves, head bands or arm bands.

So please bring along a gag, dress in your organisation’s branded wear [if available], AND remember to put on some comfortable walking shoes.

We are looking forward to your participation and your organisation’s support as we SILENCE this bad law.

NB: Watch out for a spectacular media showing on that day.

Standing as one,

Inter-media committee

Forwarded by Mars Group Kenya

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Experts say one of the main reasons is the emergence of an entire industry of financial services catering to immigrants.

Ecuadorians are the biggest group of Latin Americans in Spain. And in Madrid and Barcelona, there are shops where they can pay for appliances and have them delivered to an address in Ecuador. One company is test-marketing ATMs that allow users to pay for grocery purchases, medical treatment or cell phones in Ecuador.

Lucia Jimenez recently visited a branch of Mundocredit, an immigrant bank set up by one of Spain’s largest banks. It offers no-commission money transfers and the option of getting a mortgage in Spain for a home in Latin America.

Jimenez said that she is thinking about getting life insurance that she can eventually take back to her native country, Paraguay.

I found this very instructive to Diaspora because remittances to developing countries are constituting a growing percentage of GDP, as evidenced by figures from around the world. Specifically about kenya, from Next billion, some stats

Kenyans in the diaspora are contributing an equivalent of 3.8 per cent of national income through remittances.

In the year 2004, for instance, Kenyans living and working abroad remitted about Ksh35 billion ($464 million), which overshadows the net foreign direct investment (FDI) of Ksh3.6 billion ($50.4 million), which accounted for 0.41 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product.

Point is, there is an opportunity to cater for immigrants in the financial services like the Spanish government is doing for the Ecuadorian immigrants. Its a powerful incentive to bank with a specific bank over another if a line of credit specifically for investment in one’s home country, and portable life insurance is available. There are myriad financial products for sending money but i am not aware of similar products for purchase of homes, cars etc in one’s home country. I have heard of people accessing the equity in their houses and using that to purchase homes in Kenya. I am not a finance wonk, but would appreciate input from those in the know.

COMMUNICATION

As noted by KP, Mama Mikes is running a campaign where you send airtime for $2.49 to Celtel, Safaricom and Telkom Wireless too. You can also pay for an electricity bill right on the website. It cost $9.99 - Decent price in my opinion.

CIVIC PARTICIPATION
If you aren’t checking mzalendo.com for information regarding your constituency, i am tempted to call you a bootleg Kenyan. I am just kidding of course, but seriously, there is lots of information there to stay informed even if you are miles away.

The Kenya Community Abroad issued a press release regarding the issue of Dual Citizenship and absentee voting, which you can read more about here. The world as we know (sorry to extend the much used cliche’) is increasingly flat. Dual citizenship and absentee voting IMO would be beneficial if not integral to Kenya. The inflow of remittance shouldn’t be the only welcome development, civic participation should be too. Mid last year I do recall Kalonzo Musyoka saying that if he were to become president of Kenya, that he would pass a presidential decree to allow for Dual citizenship. He even joked that if the Artur’s had Kenyan passports in addition to their Armenian ones, then really, isn’t it about time Kenyans got dual citizenship?

MUSIC, BOOKS AND ART.
There are still concerts happening around the US by African musicians, you can check if there is one near your city here. Ladysmith Black Mambazo is touring in September and Hugh Masekela’s remaining dates are:
Aug 31 2007 Tanglewood Festival, Lennox, Massachusetts
Sep 1 2007 Planet Arlington Festival, Arlington, Virginia
Sep 2 2007 African Festival of the Arts, Chicago, Illinois

Chris Abani, whose TED Talk is posted and highlighted by Hash, has several upcoming events in NY, Chicago, Vegas, DC, Minneapolis, Vermont, Miami etc. Check here if there is an event near you. I am hoping to read one of his books before i go for one of his events. His talk was very powerful. I recall just being transfixed by him when i listened to him in Arusha and again online. Particularly the part where he says that we as Africans need to explore what it really means to be African. I am simplifying a bit, but what i got from his talk is that we Africans also need to read our own literature in our exploration of who we are. I recall a post by David Seruyange about how some, if not most of us are mashups (David Seruyange has moved websites btw, so if you are a fan of his writing like I am, this is his new home), there is so much competing for our attention, but i think in order to be fully African (if there is such a thing) African arts, books and music help reconnect your being to that which is immutably you.

Move over Lion King! The Invincible Lions are the new game in town (scratch that…jungle).

Some great animations from Africa, click here for a post by Mweshi, highlighting some cool ones in the pipeline. I can’t wait to see these!

Last week civil society activists were harassed, beaten, tear-gassed, arrested illegally and almost killed in a car crash involving the police vehicle they were being transported in (after being arrested illegally) when trying to present the petition to parliament. I am happy to say that none of those things happened yesterday as the peaceful march passed as it was meant to, peacefully! A Member of Parliament (and ODM-K presidential candidate Joseph Nyagah) accepted the petition from us to take to parliament.

Below are the pictures from a day in which the Kenyan police respected the law they ask us to upload and let Kenyan citizens exercise their constitutionally protected right to petition their parliament. The full set (103 photos) is available on my Flickr account. Click on the images below to see full size picture.

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Monday, August 06, 2007

A Petition to Parliament on MP’s Gratuities, the unconstitutional Media Bill 2007 and other matters of urgent national importance – invitation to a Civil Society Briefing on Tuesday August 7th 2007.

Civil Society will be holding a press briefing at the Grand Regency Hotel, Magadi Room commencing at 11am on Tuesday 7th August 2007.

The briefing will be on a March on Parliament that will take place on Wednesday 8th August 2007 to present the first ever petition to Parliament by the people of Kenya. The right to petition Parliament is provided for under the Constitution of Kenya and the Standing Orders of Parliament.

Amongst the issues Civil Society is protesting are the proposed gratuities by parliament, the unconstitutional Media bill, police brutality on Civil society and the inhuman conditions in which the Police Force live and work.

contact:
Jayne/ Fiona
Tel: 020 - 35 33 230
Mars Group Kenya
Civil Society Media Liaison for the Petition and March on Parliament

www.marsgroupkenya.org
Watching out for You

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Civil society and activists in Kenya, as in the rest of Africa, and indeed the rest of the world, are by default tuned to check the excesses of the executive branch of government as it is usually the one with the most power and where the majority of corruption originates.

Kenyans after decades of systematic wide spread corruption under the Moi regime and the less than rosy record of the current leadership have good reason to be wary of the executive. However what is becoming increasingly clear is that the legislature, the very body mandated to keep the executive in check, is becoming THE MAIN CAUSE of systematic officially approved corruption in our nation.

A change on focus is required. Let me be clear, I am not talking only about MPs who support the government or MPs who stand in opposition. I am talking about the whole lot, the legislature as a body, all of them, together, as a collective, are symbolic of greed of the highest order. The latest example, the disgusting pay rises MPs are threatening to award themselves.

Where do we even start with these Members’ of Parliament in Kenya? These days I rarely get shocked and angry about Kenyan politics, not because there is nothing to get shocked and angry about but because we have seen it all before. This parliament, the most educated parliament we have ever had, is a disappointment beyond words. This latest proposed pay package they are threatening to award themselves is disgusting. Nothing more nothing else.

From The Daily Nation

At a time when Kenyans are being told to tighten their belts; when urgent development projects are on hold for lack of funds; when workers in key sectors in the public service are being denied the pay rises they deserve, it becomes not just heartless, but criminal, when MPs award themselves hefty sums at will.

Criminal indeed.

For a comprehensive view of just how disgusting this is read the following excellent post on the Mars Group blog.

Our view is that it is criminal for 222 MPs in the 9th Parliament to conspire against over-burdened Kenyan taxpayers by plotting to award each other Ksh 1.4 billion - an amount equivalent to the annual disbursement under the famous Youth Fund; which was intended to raise 79.1% of the population of Kenya who are youth out of poverty. 222 MPs want to award themselves an amount equivalent to what they gave to 21,248,984 Kenyan youth. A shocking example of raw greed.

Yes MPs want to award themselves the same amount of money they felt fit for ALL the youth in Kenya.

What is even more disgusting is the underhand way in which the government (as it is the one which proposed the bill) tried to sneak this past us hiding it us an amendment to an existing Miscellaneous Amendments Bill. Disgusting and underhand. What was even more disgusting was how our MPs, having heard that their allowances were to be voted on, all trooped into the chamber, and when then realised the Attorney General was not present and the matter could not go to the vote, all trooped out. Did it not cross their minds that they could actually sit and contribute to a debate that was not centred on their pay packages?

MPs MUST reject this proposal if it ever comes up in parliament. It will be impossible to take seriously ANY MP who supports this proposal; leave alone complete muppets like Madoka who thinks it is too LITTLE!

He said the commission had gone around the country and that Kenyans had given their views, saying their MPs’ pay should be increased and that they should receive a gratuity so that they could live a good life after Parliament.

LIES! Which Kenyan today, who knows how much these MPs are paid, thinks MPs are paid too little? Disgusting lies!

Yesterday lobbyists Ann Njogu, Okoiti Omtatah, Mwalimu Mati and Vicky Mbeca were arrested when police intercepted the demonstrators on Parliament Road and fired three tear gas canisters at them. Release them now.

A national conversation needs to start immediately on how to protect our country from our parliament.

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But first I have to post The rules:

1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
2. Players start with 8 random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are tagged need to write their own blog and their 8 things and post these.
4. At the end of your blog post, you need to choose 8 people to get tagged and list their names (scared yet…..you better be!)
   Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they are tagged, and to read your blog.

And my list of 8 things:

1.) KenyaUnlimited is rocking a brand new spanking aggregator. Have a look and let me know what you think, how fast it loads where you are, and any problems you may encounter. I am especially interested on those who’s posts should up on the old aggregator but do not show up on this one.

2.) Related to number 1 above, KenyaUnlimited has a new aggregator help page. If you have any questions about the aggregator and aggregator policy, please read the help page. We have answered the most frequent questions we receive about the aggregator on this page. If you still have any questions drop the Admin Team an email.

3.) Facebook rocks! There is a group for Kenyan Bloggers on facebook. Other notable Facebook groups include the Afrigadget group and the Free Oiwan Lam group amongst others.

4.) The Digital Citizen Indaba blogging conference is on again at the Highway Africa Conference this year. Registration is open and it is free. You can also apply for a scholarship to attend. (Warning: this conference may actually require you to think and participate.)

Coming soon to a town near you an African Bloggers’ Conference and a Kenyan Bloggers’ Conference. Watch this space and get involved! Ask not what bloggers can do for you but what you … etc etc

6.) I feel like registering a group called the “Do More Collective” (DMC). Increasingly I hear Africans telling other Africans, to get up and, “do something”. I admit even I have been guilty of that. I feel that is wrong and here is why.

In the online world in general and the blogosphere in particular, just as in the real world, there are people who get up and decide to contribute and get on with it without a fuss. Because of their nature they end up taking more and more on and usually excel. This is not new, if I think back to my school days, my sports captains were usually amongst the brightest students, and were usually also prefects and probably sang in the choir and headed the school community projects as well. The Americans have a term to describe these characters: All Stars.

I find that instead of asking people to, “Do something”, to be fair I should recognise that they are already doing a lot and instead should be asking them to, “Do more.” Take the example of my brother Ndesanjo. This guy is the force behind the Kiswahili blogosphere starting it AND putting it on the map in a big way, he is also is pushing the Kiswahili Wikipedia, is Sub-Saharan editor of Global Voices, was one of the wise heads that formulated the Tanzanian Bloggers Association, is passionate about citizen media and developing tools to allow people to share their stories and still finds time to run his own collection of blogs (and I haven’t even mentioned his “real” 9-5 job).

It is ridiculous to walk up to someone like that and to tell him to “do something” what you really should be saying is, “we need your help to do more!” I am sure this is true of many of us online and I have many more examples I can throw at you.

We need to recognise that even though someone way not be working on our pet project or on what we may personally feel is THE most important thing around, they are probably already contributing in a big way to the empowerment of The Continent and Her People. Forget asking people to, “Do something” instead ask them to “Do more”.

7.) Since I moved back to Kenya a year ago the number of people reading my blog has gone up, but the number of comments has gone down. That in itself is not news. What is interesting is that some people who used to write comments before now send me SMS instead. They SMS within minutes of a post going up on the blog. I would say around 80% of the comments on my blog posts come via SMS. The Skunkworks team at the University of Nairobi Tech Day reported that a programmer was developing software to blog (and I guess comment) through SMS. Now that’s what I need! I tried the Email2SMS service by Safaricom but that died after a few days.

8.) The number one question I get asked by new bloggers is: How do I get more comments?

The easy answer:

1. Write original, good, content
2. Visit other bloggers and leave original and intelligent comments
3. Link to other blog posts in your posts
4. Use tags to get picked up by blog engines such as Technorati.
5. Be patient, it takes time to build up an audience

The less obvious answer:

Do your thing. Write your posts. Make your blog a reflection of you. Forget chasing comments. They are not a true indication of how popular, how widely read or how influential your blog really is. For example, if the first five comments on your blog are

1. I got here first
2. Damn I got here second
3. Boy oh boy number 1 and number 2 are fast, how did they get here first
4. hehe fast rhymes with first - written by number 3 above
5. I swear I was first but blogger ate my comment

And no one has commented on what you actually wrote or what issues you raised in the post, how do those comments add value to the price of oranges really? OK sure some people love getting those comments and it can be said they add to the sense of community, sure. But really, you should be chasing after those. However, this after all is my opinion.

At the other end of the scale check out Ethan’s excellent guides/blog posts/transcripts of the TED Global conference. Every blogger, journalist, columnist, researcher who writes about TED Global consult Ethan’s posts. They are an authoritative, well written, accessible online resource. Because so many bloggers link back to his blog, these posts are essentially the blogger equivalent of a peer reviewed professional article in a professional journal. Yet the posts do not carry a ridiculous amount of comments. The posts do carry a lot of influence though.

Forget chasing comments. Do your thing. Free your mind!

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The first type of gym most of us would find familiar. They are mushrooming all over Nairobi in a pattern that is repeated in any big city in the world. These gyms have rowing machines, exercise bikes, a wide variety of pulley driven machines with digital interfaces informing you of your heart rate and exactly how many calories you have burned in the last 60 seconds. MTV Base on one flat screen TV in one corner, CNN on another, local news on the third. Chargers for mobile phones and iPods are available if you ask nicely. They carry a selection of free weights, starting from 0.5 Kgs (which you are encouraged to hold as you “power walk” on the treadmill). These gyms offer a dazzling amount of extras outside the immediate gym room such as aerobic classes, massages, power showers and complimentary towels, a sauna here, a steam room there and of course a hefty membership fee. Examples of this kind of gym, to name just two of the hundreds across Nairobi, are the gym at Silver Spring Hotel and the one at Sarit Centre shopping mall. Those are gyms.

Then there are gyms. If you ever find yourself in the NEWA part of Ngummo in the late afternoon or very early morning and are feeling brave, stop any of the young men and ask them for directions to The Jungle. A walk down one of the side alleys, a quick side step around some dogs and you will find yourself in a backyard which has one gym bench (refurbished), a barbell (welded), and many many free weights, usually made from pouring cement into paint tins and chipping away to ensure the weights are balanced. No rowing machines or treadmills here, if you want to warm up, well that’s why the government is laying tarmac on the roads, get your jog on.

For the most famous, or perhaps infamous, example of this kind of gym in Nairobi you need to get yourself to Ololo better known as Kaloleni and ask for Big Boys. Have you ever wondered where those gorilla bouncers, gorilla freaks, muscle bound nutters you bump into work out? Most probably Big Boys. I remember being taken there by one of my bros, who is one of those Gorilla bouncers, and sitting outside listening to a bunch of muscle bound nutters talking about beans. Beans and beans and beans, the poor mans substitute for those crazy and very expensive muscle supplements.

Big Boys was what people in the gym trade call Chuma (chuma is Kiswahili for iron/metal). You don’t say you are going to the gym, you say you are going to Chuma (usually holding both hands in a fist around your chest and saying, “Chuma daddy!”. It certainly lives up to that name. A look around the room and you will see many weight lifting benches, many barbells and dumbbells and the craziest collection of free weights you have ever seen. We’re talking about 100 kgs dumbbells here and the like. (Although I understand that these days Big Boys has become gisty!) Want to warm up, forget treadmills and the like, grab a skipping rope. Apart from the numerous mirrors everything else in there is basically hard, cold, no nonsense metal. CHUMA daddy!

So what has all this got to do with presidential motorcades? True, Moi’s motorcade when he was president and Kibaki’s motorcade now share a lot in common. Both are packed full of brand new, armoured plated, dark blue Mercedes Benz. (Moi’s guys tried BMWs for a year or so but I do not see them around now, I wonder what happened to them.) Both motorcades are packed full of the crème de la crème (or total nutters depending on your point of view) of the Kenyan police force, the Presidential Escort Unit. Both motorcades are extremely secure, both are extremely lethal if you have the audacity (or stupidity depending on your point of view) to cross them.

There are some notable differences between the two.

Moi’s motorcade was like Big Boys. Big, powerful, no nonsense, hard, get-out-of-the-way-now-if-you-want-to-live and fast. Very very fast. Very very very fast. You never ever got a good look at Moi’s motorcade. To be honest you probably didn’t even see it coming. You would driving along, minding your own business, smelling the roses and all of a sudden you have a powerful police motorcycle next to you and police man shouting in your ear, his face so close you can smell the Embassy Kings on breath, telling you to pull over NOW. Usually by pointing a finger off the road and saying “huko” which is Kiswahili for “there”. It didn’t matter if “huko” was a bush, a ditch, a rock, just get off the road and do it fast. A couple of seconds later a big Mercedes, dark blue on the bottom and white on the top, with a single blue flashing light and constant high pitch siren, with no number plates, a big red sign which reads “Presidential Escort” would fly past, windows down with four scary looking “Echo Charlies”, as PEU are known, staring out, then a flurry, a blur, of motorcycles, Mercedes, Range Rovers, and 504 station wagon Peugeots carrying the Presidential Press Unit would fly past. Then another motorcycle and then, suddenly

silence.

Just like Keyser Söze, they are gone.

It may not have been pretty, it may not have been fancy, but damn, it was scary, efficient and effective. CHUMA daddy.

Then there is Kibaki’s motorcade.

First difference, everybody knows when Kibaki is going to pass. Why? Because these days they close roads almost TWENTY BLEEDING MINUTES before he turns up. You sit and you sit and you sit, people switch of their engines, get out of their cars and lean against the bonnet, newspaper vendors make a killing selling copies of those weeklies no one ever buys, and everyone is on their mobile phone saying, “I’ll be late, Baks is passing.”

Second difference, when the motorcade finally does turn up, boy oh boy, those guys must be listening to “Summertime” by Fresh Prince and DJ Jazzy Jeff

Every moment frontin and maxin
Chillin in the car they spent all day waxin
Leanin to the side but you can’t spead through
Two miles an hour so everybody sees you

Whereas Moi’s motorcade would constantly break the land speed record, Baks motorcade, after making you wait for 30 minutes, drives past moss moss like they don’t have a care in the world! Two miles an hour so everybody sees you!

Third difference, Kibaki’s full ceremonial motorcade is like whoa! I’m not taking the everyday, working-at-state-house version. I am talking about the one they unleash for state occasions or big events. The first time I saw the “full” motorcade was on the way to Nairobi Show on Wednesday which as we all know is “President’s day”. (What do you mean you didn’t know!). I was on Ngong Road when we were pulled over by the cops for the now customary 20 minute wait.

And when it came, my goodness. I like to think I am not easily impressed but I will readily admit that motorcade made the hairs on the back of neck stand up. Unfortunately it is illegal to record or take pictures of the motorcade otherwise I would have been snapping away. There was a row of brand new Rav4 Police SUVs, the PEU Recce team Mercedes and Range Rovers, then came the Presidential limousine flanked by six big, armoured plated S-Class Mercedes and they were flanked in turn by a squad of around 20 big BMW police motorcycles. Remember that Peugeot station wagon 504 that was used to ferry around the Presidential Press Unit in Moi’s days? We’ll they’ve upgraded it. A brand new Mercedes E Class station wagon, they stuck a metal rack on top of the merc and the journalist climbs on top with his video camera tripod and video camera. On top of a Mercedes! Have a look for yourself!

Click picture for a larger image.

Yes, this motorcade is impressive, 878 Million Kenyan shillings (12 million USD) impressive.

It is like there are two different philosophies at work here. Moi’s motorcade is a big no nonsense bouncer saying, “Do not even think about it” Kibaki’s motorcade is a bouncer saying, “Come on, have a good if you think you are hard enough.”

Moi’s motorcade – hard, no nonsense, CHUMA gym.
Bak’s motorcade – hard, fancy, Hilton gym.

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Atieno Ochieng' on a discussion about decriminalizing abortion. Read here.

However I am using FireFox and this blog runs on WordPress both of which are open source so perhaps that is enough to balance things out (what is the verdict Skunkers?)

This is my first proper Skunkworks lecture. How Skunkworks Kenya works is one week they have a lecture on something IT related and the following week they have a more relaxed social gathering at Kengeles or some other spot in town. I seem to have only made it to the social gatherings thus far, skiving the lectures.

Today’s lecture is on ADSL and the format is quite interactive. Kip is at the front sharing his knowledge, most people are sitting back and listening, a couple a taking notes, and some, well they are messing around on their blogs. Questions are encouraged and are flowing. The range of questions is quite wide, some are purely technical, “How does this whole model change with the introduction of CDMA?”, to the practical, “We have tried ADSL in our office and now our ISP is suggesting that we try DSL. Is there any difference between the two?”, to the basic, “what does ADSL mean?”

If you are interested in IT, ICT, computers or simply want to learn something new every week that is IT related then you need to come to these meetings. Techie or not, geek or not, IT graduate or not, feelanga free like a fly in a fanta bottle.

Now let me get back to trying to understand what these guys are talking about!

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(*Ask Riyaz about the penguins)

Aside: It is hard not to laugh nervously when a professional photographer is taking your mugshot in one of your regular cyber cafes! That may (or may not) explain why I look strange in the photo!

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I was sitting in a cyber café when the lady on the computer next to me, a complete stranger, turned to face me and pointing to her screen asked, “Excuse me, what does this word mean?” One of her friends had forwarded her a joke which had the word “heterosexual” in it; this was the word she wanted me to explain to her.

Easy peasy right?

Not quite, just try it now, how would you explain, in a couple of sentences what heterosexual means?

I fell into the trap of immediately going down the sexual route as I blurted out, “People who have sex with people of the opposite sex”.
“Ah you mean prostitutes?” she replied.

Ok clearly I wasn’t getting my point across. So I embarked on the opposites approach, employing the Law of Contradiction (or Noncontradiction if you prefer). I asked her if she knew what homosexual was. She wasn’t sure. Damn.

So now I am digging deeper, because she wants to know what homosexual is and I am not going to fall into the trap of defining everything by sexual intercourse again.

Forget sexual intercourse I had bigger problems as I now I found myself using words like “normal” as in, heterosexual are normal. Now do I really want to go there? Heterosexual as the definiendum and normal as the definiens for that definiendum? Or ‘normal’ as the prima inter pares in a series of definiens on heterosexuality? That implies, by extension, homosexuals are not normal. Isn’t that an abuse of the Law of Identity? Besides I feel that is not for me to decide for her, whatever my beliefs on homosexuality and heterosexuality are. One of my brothers told me, “The fact that you hesitated and resisted to using the word “normal” when describing heterosexual highlights that you have been living outside.” (Outside = outside the country and indeed the continent). Now that sparked of a whole new debate, but I digress. This lady and her question was threatening to take over my thought process for the rest of the month!

So try it now, explain heterosexuality without using the word ‘normal’ or referring to sexual intercourse.

Now you see what I mean about filling a term’s worth of lectures of philosophy, religious education, political science etc.

Later in the day as I shared this story with a friend she gave me her solution, I should have just told that lady to Google it. Now why didn’t I think of that!

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Blogs, email and text messages, while lending themselves to informing, also lend themselves to abuse.

… in his post that argues it is irresponsible for us to report the blast in Nairobi as bomb or indeed suicide bomb unless we have official confirmation from the police. Agreed, it would be irresponsible for us to report the blast without checking the sources of the stories.

When I first heard the story on local radio stations I turned to Reuters which is a reliable news outlet and generally has an impeccable record as far as the accuracy of its reporting goes.

Reuters report now reads (bear in mind these reports are constantly updated):

A senior policeman at the scene said the explosion, which also left a mangled corpse in the street and sent passers-by flying through the air, seemed to be a suicide bombing.

My own blog post on the topic is full of qualifiers, apparently this, apparently that. I even put a paragraph at the end of the post cautioning that this is all speculation at the moment as we await the facts.

A quick look at the KenyaUnlimited Aggregator shows many other Kenyan bloggers qualified their reporting too.

Let me bring in another angle. The most common complaint I have heard today from Kenyans abroad is that the the Daily Nation and East African Standard websites had almost no information for a long while. The most frequently updated Kenyan news website these days is the KBC website, however earlier this morning when I checked it was down.

I would argue that it is stories like this that rather than showing the danger of blogs, HIGHLIGHT the importance of blogs and other citizen media. While the MSM was stuck in its procedures, bloggers wrote about what they had heard, seen or were told. There is nothing wrong with quoting primary sources. The historians amongst us can confirm the importance with which primary sources are regarded on any historical event. The eyewitness account, the man on the street as it were.

If you wanted to know what Kenyans were thinking and feeling at the time the blogs were a very good place to start.

As for waiting for an official police statement before commenting on this blast, to that I would ask: where is the lengthy police statement on the Mungiki crisis? Where is the lengthy police statement on the Mount Elgon clashes? Both were major incidents in the past month which claimed more lives that the blast this morning, yet we haven’t seen the same coordinated response to dishing out information as we have on this blast. Are we to await the official statement on those events as well before stepping in with our take on events? How long are you prepared to wait?

Isn’t it telling that Police Commissioner Hussein’s lengthy statement appears on the website of the Office of Government Spokesperson (OGS) and not on the Kenya Police website which carries a 3 sentence press release by the Police Spokesman?

Why would the OGS jump in on this story when Mungiki and Mount Elgon were much more serious events yet he restrained himself? I would argue it is because the OGS quickly realised that this was an international story which would generate interest from around the world.

Their intention was not to inform, their intention was damage control. I will agree with the Commish on one thing, however, in my opinion, the disaster management procedures worked well, after the initial shock everything seemed to click.

I firmly believe that the take up of the story by Kenyan bloggers helped generate this international interest. Don’t believe that bloggers have that much influence? Then explain why the “Blog Search button” is next to the “Advanced News Search” button on Google News or why Reuters has started featuring African bloggers prominently on its news site. In a round about way, the noise bloggers generated about this story is one of the reasons The Commish and the GOS rushed to get out that press release.

Hopefully if Kenyan bloggers keep the noise up on Mungiki, Mount Elgon et al and the Commish and the GOS will rush to release a lengthy press release on those stories as well.

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As you can imagine details are a little sketchy so far.

What has been reported so far is:

1. An explosion hit central Nairobi near Ambassador Hotel around 8.30am this morning
2. Apparently by a suicide bomber
3. Witnesses say they have seen six bodies although only one death apart from the bomber has been confirmed.
4. Witnesses also mention pages of the Koran strewn all over the place, whether these were carried by the bomber or one of the victims is not yet known.

Again this is all speculation at the moment. I’m sure the news teams will have some more information soon.

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Past Finance Ministers, including Kibaki himself had comparatively easy task of achieving popular acclaim. All they had to do was as simple as fixing the prices of certain class of consumer items at lower prices. Kimunya's hands however, are tied by both the liberalized economy and a question of balancing expenditure priorities. While it will be easy to reduce taxes especially on basic food items to influence price reduction, he will be required to off set the foregone tax revenue with a hike elsewhere. And that is where the complications will start to arise. Arbitrary tax transfers have their own risks including potential disruption of current economic buoyancy.

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 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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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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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!)

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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!

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The Safaricom website is temporarily unavailable.
We apologise for the inconvenience.
You may reach us at the address shown below
Thank you for visiting Safaricom - The Better Option

Safaricom House, Waiyaki Way, P.O. Box 46350, Nairobi
E-mail: customercare@safaricom.co.ke
Land Line: 254-20-427 -3272

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! )

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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.

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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

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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.

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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!

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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!)

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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.

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I am an information junkie. I used to be one of those people with a million different email subscriptions flying into my email inbox each day. News lists, global security information lists, sports, technology, you name it I had it. One day last year I revolted and unsubscribed to all of them except two. Why? First of all it was information overload! Secondly the growth and wide availability of RSS feeds and other ways to get information means I no longer need to fill my email inbox to get the information I want. Now I am signed up to only two daily email lists on my main email account and both are vital reading and if you don’t have them you should get them!

One is The Global Voices daily digest (blogs) written by David Sasaki and his bunch of merry men and women. The other is The Fiver (football) written by a bunch of nutters in Fiver Towers. (OK I admit I do have one or two other weekly email subscriptions that such a pillar of society such as myself has no business reading, step forward Holy Moly!) What lists out there are worth a look.

So which RSS Feeds am I reading or do I think are worth reading, or do I feel I should be reading? All is revealed on the MentalGator. Yeah I noticed some of you noticing my site pulling your feeds and was bound to oust me before long so I might as well publicise it. It is quite small, I will try to keep it under 30 feeds, unlike the monster that is the KENYAUNLIMITED AGGREGATOR! It is rough around the edges, needs a serious css over haul and some options need changing but it will do for now. If this all works out then, I’ll change the software that powers the KenyaUnlimited aggregator to this one.

It’s been a while since I shook with laughter while reading a blog post but Greg Black got me laughing and holding my head at the same time while I was reading this.

The guys at Very Sawa Technology Studios are on to something with the launch of Jahazi. When you have White African, Kobia, JKE, and the Skunkworks crew all ooohing and ahhhing over one of your products its time to start thinking about an IPO.

And finally

KBW exists. And KBW exists primarily because its members want it to exist and contribute to help it exist in various ways, not because Mentalacrobatics started it or the KBW Admin Team helps sustain it, although those are factors as well. If KBW members do not want KBW to exist it will not. It really is a simple as that. That is why, at the end of the day, my opinion on each and every attack on KBW is not that important and why I will not comment on each and every blog post that mentions KBW negatively.

If KBW loses credibility then bloggers will simply leave KBW and no others will join. In the same way, if the Admin Team can not be trusted then KBW members will simply stop conferring with, contributing to and indeed trusting that Admin Team.

I can tell you honestly that when I fire up Thunderbird each morning the KBW admin email address is the most active of all the email addresses and of those messages new member registration and new members requesting assistance take up a healthy number. Do not take my word for it, look for yourself.

KBW does have its share of yahoos. What is healthy is that we all have different opinions on what constitutes a yahoo, and believe me I have my opinion as well. I can take the personal attacks, they stopped bothering me a long time. (When cartoons email your parents to inform them that their son is confusing the youth of Kenya on behalf of StateHouse and should be arrested – you learn to laugh at life – otherwise you can go mad).

This does raise interesting questions on the issue of ownership of the Kenyan blogosphere. Methinks I have just found the right topic for my next podcast.

I was talking last night with another veteran of Kenyan online communities and we were reflecting about the back-in-the-day days. If it is beef and “online war” you are after let me tell you right now KBW is the wrong place to look. We are but a bunch of amateurs.

In 1997 as an innocent 1st year undergrad I joined an online community called KenyaOnline. Walalala. VITA! This was just before the 1997 general election and I tell you MPs, aspiring MPs, their cronies, even MINISTERS (apparently writing anonymously – remind you of anything) were all throwing, what the KOL community called, online rungus at each other. I must admit I found it brilliant to start of with.

By the time 2002 had come along and those same wazee, wabunge and wamweshimwas were still throwing insults at each other it had become tiring. However things mellow out and KenyaOnline is still going strong in its current incarnation on yahoo groups.

Any of you who were around for the drama on mlevi.com, rcbown.com – remember when rcbowen was THE Kenyan page on the internet – if you weren’t in his guest book then you basically didn’t exist online – and even at the height of drama on mashada.com then you know that KBW is a relatively stable place and actually quite quiet in comparison.

There many who like to cultivate a them and us mentality about this whole online thing. The KBW Admin Team is always accessible, if you have any concerns then you know where to find us.

With our numbers growing and our membership diversifying, with the power or blogs increasing and recognition of bloggers growing day by day I am confident, as I always have been from that day 1 when I was the ONLY member of KBW, that this project that we are all involved in, is here to stay.

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I have ranted before about driving to western Kenya. The roads are terrible, car breaking, and dangerous to drive on and that’s just the tarmac. The parts that are not tarmaced are not just car breaking but body breaking too. After that 8 hour drive you step out of the car and your spine feels like it is going to snap. (Spare a thought for the commercial vehicle and public transport drivers who do that route several times a week some even twice a day.)

And then there is flying. You get into your seat, you take off, and half an hour later you land in Kisumu! It still boggles my mind to this day at how simple and easy that trip is compared to the alternatives! Once when we called my brother who had dropped us at JKIA to tell them him we had landed in Kisumu safely we found that even had not even reached the Nyayo Stadium round about!

As soon as the plane touched down in Kisumu on Thursday I heard something I have not heard in a plane since the late 1980s. Applause. The whole cabin broke out in applause. KQ507 has re-awoken the appreciation, constantly taken for granted, for a safe trip.

A big thank you to everyone who has left a tribute, linked to, and help spread the word about the KQ507 tribute site. A big thank you to Fareed, Vincent and all guys and gals at the Capital FM Breakfast Crew for responding. Thanks to Ndesanjo and Global Voices for spreading the word. An extra big thank you to the family members and friends of the passengers and the crew who have left tributes, man, they are moving.

One thing this tragedy has brought home to me is just how connected we all are. I have had emails from Nigerian, Ethiopian, American, British and Indian friends all telling me how they have been personally affected by the flight. We live in a global village.

As a kid it really used to irritate me that the call signal for Kenya Airways was KQ and not KA as Dragon Air had got to it first. I used to feel we were dissed being sent all the way down to KQ what happened to KB KC KD etc I would ask. But now in my old age, KQ has a regal almost mystical tone to it. Kaaaay Kyooou. Nice!

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The page can be found here.

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.

It would be brilliant if we could deliver a big bundle of messages full of heartfelt tributes.

If anyone out there can create a button we can put on our blogs to show support that would be brilliant too.

Our brothers and sisters from outside Kenya and Africa please feel free to leave a message as well.

Let us stand together, united, to honour those on Kenya Airways KQ507. Pamoja.

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The airline

IOSA is the global benchmark for airline safety management. It is designed to assess airline operational management and control systems based on internationally recognised standards. Any airline wishing to join IATA must be IOSA registered. By the end of 2007, all IATA members must successfully undergo the IOSA audit in order to retain IATA membership. Carriers must achieve registration by the end of 2008. IOSA is open to all airlines. Four African airlines already have IOSA registration; South African Airways, Kenya Airways, Comair, Royal Air Maroc and Egyptair. Kenya Airways is a safe airline.

The plane

The plane involved in the incident today was a brand new Boeing 737-800. The plane was collected from Boeing in October 2006 and went into service in November 2006. No ramshackle plane this. These Next-Generation 737 are the newest and most technologically advanced single-aisle airplane in the business today. It flies higher, faster and farther than previous models and competitors. In addition, its flight deck features the latest liquid-crystal flat-panel displays and is designed to accommodate new communications and flight-management capabilities.

Africa’s skies – the real story

Last year the IATA Director General Giovanni Bisignani said, “Africa is our biggest concern. While the continent represents just 4 percent of total air traffic worldwide, it accounts for 25 percent of the accidents.” All this following a decision by the European Commission in March 2006 to publish a “blacklist” of 92 airlines, dominated by African airlines, that it banned from European skies because of poor safety records. The “blacklist” includes 50 airlines registered in the Democratic Republic of Congo, 13 from Sierra Leone, 11 from Equatorial Guinea, 6 from Swaziland and 3 from Liberia. (Yes that was FIFTY from the DRC!)

As Christian Folly-Kossi, secretary general of the African Airlines Association, which is based in Nairobi, says in the same article, he was worried that shaming a handful of African countries would damage the reputation of all the region’s airlines, including those that have made significant strides toward improving their records … Folly-Kossi criticized the EU’s blacklist, calling it “inappropriate” because it names dozens of carriers that are not operating or do not fly internationally … “The reality is that, with this list, the public perceives all African carriers as potentially very risky,” he said. “I take it as a kind of unfair competition because the message implied is that you should fly on a European airline if you want to be safe.”

Africa is a big place. You lump all the countries into one category you are going to have problems no matter what you are talking about.

How does Africa compare globally?

Not very well to be honest. But the stories that Africa’s skies are the worst in the world by a mile are incorrect.

Image soucre: IATA Safety Report 2006

According to The (annual) IATA Safety Report’s Regional Results, Russia and other members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) had the highest accident rate of all the regions in 2006, with 8.6 Western-built hull losses per million flights—13 times the global average. IATA is actively working with the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), States and operators to improve the situation.

In Africa, improvements have been made to enhance safety. However, the accident rate remains the second highest in the world at 4.31 accidents per million flights. IATA is working with relevant organisations to further reduce it with a focus on upgrading onboard systems and navigation databases.

Hopefully this post will inject some sense of perspective when we debate this issue.

© Mentalacrobatics for Mentalacrobatics, 2007. | Permalink | 11 comments

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Update 1:
Almost all the visits to this post are coming from people Googling “KQ507”. Please read my follow up post on Kenya Airways and safety in the African sky. You may also want to read a round up of what Kenyan bloggers have been saying about this tragedy and keep an eye on the KenyaUnlimited aggregator for the latest thoughts from Kenyan bloggers.

Following the disappearance of Kenyan Airways flight KQ507 that has gone missing after losing communication with the control tower shortly after takeoff on Friday night from Douala, Cameroon, Kenya Airways has set up crisis desks at the Panari Sky Center and at the Intercontinental Hotel in Nairobi.

Kenya Airways have also set up the following emergency crisis number to their “emergency centre”: +27 11 20 71 100 (South African number).

Why don’t KQ set up a local number and route calls through to the South African centre? Making people in KENYA dial an international number to find out information about a missing KENYAN flight is just not on.

Why is the KQ “emergency centre” in South Africa anyway? The Pride of Africa has some work to do in handling situations such as these.

And why aren’t the people who answer the JKIA information lines (0722205061) ever polite, instead of transferring you mid sentence to another person?

© Mentalacrobatics for Mentalacrobatics, 2007. | Permalink | 13 comments

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In the words of Marcus and Chris of The Jam on Capital FM, is true or is it bullcrap? Let me know what you think.

Dandora, Kenya - In a strange turn of events, would be burglars got the shock of their lives when they broke into what they thought was an empty house only to stumble into the home’s owner who was getting a midnight “valentine” present from his wife.

John Kamau, 29, got an ipod from his older brother who lives in Kansas, USA as a christmas gift last December.

Lacking a radio set or receiver of any kind, John was lying next to his wife in the darkness of his living room and was holding the ipod in his hands while his wife had the headsets on her ears listening to romantic music that John’s brother had also sent from the US.

John had used the ipod to get his wife into a more loving and giving mood and was smiling from ear to ear when the wooden window behind him was suddenly smashed into pieces.

One of the pieces landed right next to John’s head on the floor almost popping his right eye out.

He says he turned and looked up from where he was lying on the floor with his wife to see a man’s gigantic foot rise up and almost crash his face in.

It was at that moment that John’s held his hands up as a sign of giving up.

But before he could even say anything, the two thieves, not knowing that the owner of the house was lying on the floor with his wife, got scared and ran back out via the window apparently thinking that the light from the ipod was a ghost.

John immediately put on his clothes, left his wife and trekked the 12 miles to the nearest police station.

The cops, who’d never seen an iPod before, confiscated it and sent John away calling him a liar and rich with imagination.

John’s brother later sent him another ipod, calling it “better than those Kenyan cops”

Thanks M4 for the link!

© Mentalacrobatics for Mentalacrobatics, 2007. | Permalink | 5 comments

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