Exclusive With H.E The President As He Opens Up About Recent Cabinet Appointments

I recently sat down in State House to discuss with His Excellency the President his recent cabinet appointments. After toasting with tots of excellent scotch, despite the fact that it was a morning program, we soon got down to business. The following are excerpts from the interview.

Me: Mr. President, there has been a lot of criticism, especially on social media regarding your recent cabinet appointments…

H.E: What kind of criticism?

Me: For example the sporting fraternity cannot understand how you settled on Rashid Mohammed as the CS for sports and heritage

H.E: Look, Rashid lost in the recent elections, it has also been reported that he has been caught up in hooliganism manenos. Now think about our football heritage for example, always losing and fans always resorting to hooliganism, I fail to see how people don’t see this as a perfect match.  Who else are they complaining about? Dr. Margaret Kobia might be old school, which makes her the perfect candidate to be in charge of a docket that handles the youth…  we do not need someone who can understand modern young people and their issues but rather someone who can beat…spank…instil discipline the old fashioned way… Peter Munya brings his experience dealing miraa issues with Somalia to the wider East Africa Community, a ministry where we need someone vocal, someone who cannot keep his mouth shut

Me: What about Farida Karoney at the Lands ministry from a broadcasting background…

H.E: That one ask the Deputy President

Me: Kenyans are also concerned that you have created new positions, those of Administrative Secretaries to reward cronies and election losers…

H.E: To reward one crony and election loser. The post was created for Ababu Namwamba, primarily to carry Monica Juma’s purse in the corridors of Foreign Affairs as we don’t think he can do anything else but since we cannot have it in only one ministry we thought we might as well have it all round…

Me: His Excellency, were you not concerned about the rising wage bill?

H.E: A new round of Eurobond is coming, let the next president worry about that

Me: The appointment of failed Cabinet Secretaries, especially that of Cleopa Mailu to serve as Ambassadors and heads of foreign missions seemed to have also rubbed many Kenyans the wrong way…

H.E: They failed, right? The idea here is to let them go and fail outside the country. Kenyans do not want to see them holding public positions here so what better way to kill two birds with several stones than to have them go abroad?

Me: There has also been uproar about appointing only 6 women to the cabinet thereby falling short of the constitutional threshold

H.E: My brother, 7 out of 22 is already 30 percent, no?

Me: But they are 6 women cabinet secretaries, not 7

H.E: It looks like people are forgetting to count Honorable Tuju…and remember she’s without portfolio so we can count her as two or three persons, right?

Me: Err, Mr. President, I still think…

H.E: I think we have had enough for this morning. You media people don’t give us the credit we deserve. To take this county from where Kibaki left it back to the glory days of Nyayo is no mean feat.  Kibaki had basically stopped borrowing and we have brought it back in a big way, anyway my time is up. Look at what we are doing with the media, shutting them down when they misbehave, aren’t we taking us back to the golden Nyayo era? Give my administration a break please! Care for a Scotch?

#Satire

Monday Reflection: On Maraga's Courage and The Cowardice of the Kenyan Media

On Friday, Kenya's Supreme Court made an unprecedented decision in declaring the 2017 Presidential Elections null and void based on the fact that the constitution and electoral laws were violated. In his ruling, the Supreme Court Judges (there were two dissenting judges in a six judge bench) opined that presidential elections is a process and not an event thus affirming the principle that the product is only as good as the process that produces it. When NASA decided to go to court, I was relieved but at the same time felt that the best they were going to get out of the process was maybe a declaration that the election was marred by irregularities that were not enough to affect the votes. At most, an audit of the votes could be ordered. The President's election would be upheld and we would be asked to move on -- and in less than a year, politicians would begin to jostle for 2022.

My belief was not based on the fact that I believed the President actually won or that NASA had a weak case but rather on the fact that often when push has come to shove and big decisions need to be made in this country, we have often erred on the side of caution and gone with the status quo. After the bungled 2007 elections, we opted for a coalition government rather than go back to the polls, even if it was after taking one year off to heal from the violence. In 2013, despite the fact the IEBC were unable to account for all the votes, the Supreme Court opted not to upset the apple cart and upheld the election result. It was therefore my conviction that this court, given that it had retained four of the judge from the 2013 bench, was likely to follow precedent and replicate their 2013 counterparts. 

On Friday I sat at home, working (in case my bosses are reading this) but keeping an eye on the proceedings. However, when the Chief Justice made his now famous opening remarks, about fidelity to the Constitution and adherence to the rule of law, I instinctively felt we could be in for something special. This feeling was slightly tampered by his announcement that they would not be giving the full judgment due to time constraints but would publish the full judgment within 21 days.  The 2013 Supreme Court did the same thing and when the judgment was finally published, it was a disappointment and criticized by many. It was, therefore, the most pleasant of surprises when I realized that for once, there are men and women in Kenya willing, and courageous enough to make tough decisions outside the borders of political expediency. 

Chief Justice David Maraga

Kenyans will be going back to the polls again. The Court has already demonstrated that it will not entertain processes that do not adhere to the law. However, there is one important institution that has continued to demonstrate timidity when it comes to accountability. The Kenyan media. That the irregularities happening went about unreported by the media, who preferred to bury their heads in the sands and instead rely on word from the IEBC without seeking to authenticate its veracity is puzzling. Yes we know they do depend on government advertising revenue for their survival and have faced threats of shutdown from government forces but one hopes that the courage demonstrated by the Supreme Court will now rub off the media in their coverage of the upcoming elections. The Kenyan media has the wherewithal to cover all constituencies, report on results announced in all constituencies and provided parallel tallying to those of the IEBC and political parties. 

The elections will once again be hotly contested, and there will be lots of propaganda flying about from both NASA and Jubilee operatives. Whichever party will lose, we shall be told that the elections have been rigged once again. We therefore need and independent and robust coverage of the elections, including vote counting and tallying, by the media to help us decipher who is telling the truth. The money invested in the boring, poorly dressed, inarticulate and endlessly parroting panels / manels during the election is better invested in polling station result announcement coverage that will help us decide whether the elections have indeed been free and fair. By doing this, they will help reduce possible incitement of the public by election losers, regardless of the political side in which they will be found  

Forgetting the Neat and Organized

It has been a long while since I was here. The reason is that I did move the blog to a separate domain. One those blogs whose design is customized to suit your fancy, and you host it on a domain that you pay for so that it feels like it really does belong to you. You also feel that you are now on a different level, or that you have become "professional" enough, putting yourself under pressure to write "better" to keep up with your new "style". I then found myself struggling for content (my mind prefers the haphazard way)...of course, I did publish some stuff but then I realize that the joy is gone. I am struggling to think in the compartmentalized way that the blog has been designed, and to make it all clean and neat as supposed to the random mumblings I had here. Mmm.

I am not saying that it was a bad thing. Just that it was not the same. And after some time I realize that I don't really dig the new different. I don't have to evolve the blog like the others have. I stopped visiting the blogosphere frequently, and that meant I started missing all those blogs I use to follow, the ones that would automatically appear on my list here. This meant missing all the wisdom, knowledge and funny stuff I would interact with. I long for how stuff was before.

But then maybe it is just that the world and everything that's in it eventually evolves. Maybe stuff would have remained the same had I opted to stay here anyway. Maybe guys just get bored and want to try something different, and then later you realise the something different was not much fancy anyway. To cut a long story short, I have decided to come back here and see it will bring back the joys of blogging I use to enjoy. Maybe it will not. If it does not then I will know it is time to shut everything down and move on...

I was trying to be all neat and presentable 

But I prefer the old cheekiness and spontaneity

Moved to a New Home

Dear Friends,
This is to thank you for having been a regular visitor to this blog but also to let you know that I have moved to a new site http://reflectionsanddeflections.com
I hope we shall continue having conversations on the new site, and let me know if you like. I also hope to have your links on my new site as soon as I can.

Charles

On Friendship and Death

This morning I thought about someone I had not seen or communicated with for some time. I hesitate to use the term 'friend' as it is the word under scrutiny in this post. Well, we had been what one would call childhood friends. We grew up together, from around the age of seven or eight, till when I was twenty when life sent us our different ways. We played together, went on childhood adventures together and flirted with girls together. I recall him having kissed some girl in the estate and he came to tell me about it and describe how it was. I resolved to also kiss a girl and experience the feeling. As we grew older we even shared some drinks together. So yes, he was my friend back then. 

When I was twenty I packed my stuff and went to India - to get an education, it was said. This was in the 90s, before mobile phones became a gadget for the hoi polloi, this was before the age of the internet for the masses (at least in the third world) and social media was unheard of. Those days when you went away, and had no friends ready to commit to writing and licking postage stamps, that was it, you never saw or heard from each other until fate (or graduate.com or Facebook years later) would conspire to bring you together. And that is how it went with my friend Peter. 

This is how I looked like growing up in the 80s, how my childhood friends might remember me

I never saw or heard from Peter until 6 years later when I was back in Kenya. Of course there were the occasional updates from mutual friends or acquaintances who had run into him -- stuff like "Peter is still in Nairobi and doing well...", stuff like that. When I came back to Kenya from my studies...well, three years of studies and two years of partying and figuring who I was, he was among the first guys I inquired about. About a year later I traced him and we were able to catch up on the good ol' days. We met several times over the next couple of years, had a chit chat here and there and when Facebook finally took over the world, we connected on Facebook and occasionally had the FB chat. 

But we were busy people with our own lives to live and promises like "we should link up and catch up over a beer..." were never fulfilled. So it has been several years since I last saw him. Occasionally I told myself that I need to make contact with him but that's all there was to it, telling myself. So this morning I thought about Peter. And because I did not have his number I thought about posting something on his Facebook wall. I always never have people's number because somehow I have never mastered the art of back-up, or I am not just disciplined at it. So I did not have his number and when you don’t have a friend’s number you look them up on Facebook. So I checked Facebook this morning.

What I saw on his wall were RIP messages. Messages dating back two years.  

At the beginning I put the word 'friend' under scrutiny because your friends don't pass on and you don't know about it for two years. That just sounds wrong. But maybe the essence of "friendship" changes over time, no? I mean, we meet at the workplace, became close, even share secrets, embed ourselves in each others' lives and when one get another job, moves to a new city or country that relationship starts to become faint and fainter until it is no more. Does friendship then end? Does a childhood friend cease becoming a friend because you no longer talk or see each other frequently? Or should friendship be judged on the experience you had together and be frozen for eternity regardless of what will become of you later in life? Someone once told me you only walk through life with one or two friends, that when you look back, you will only see one or two people who have walked with you through the different "epochs" of your life. That the rest have just been mere acquaintances through different stages of your life. The supporting cast, not the main actors. I choose to disagree. If Peter had not been my friend I would have not felt the extreme sadness I felt this morning.

I feel a sense of guilt that I never grieved him when it mattered.