Sunday, 28 July 2013

A LIE REPEATED MANY TIMES WILL BE TAKEN FOR TRUTH
The recent cases of bestiality being reported from some areas of central province are stagemanaged.They are the work of a certain politician who hates the region. He and his henchmen want to paint the community in bad light and turn all the other tribes against one community. This will lead to a revolution of sorts so that he takes power.
When I had this from a friend of mine, I had to stifle a burning temptation to strangle him. I haven’t heard somebody insult the intelligence of Kenyans in such a gross manner.
The central Kenya region has been conditioned to think that any problem in the area is caused by a certain politician out there. From the poor economy to the zoophilia attacks to the jigger epidemic….name it.This has been hammered down the throats of the hapless citizens such that they swallow the idea hook line and sinker .Such a sad state of affairs.
Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister for Propaganda (yes, the Fuhrer had such a docket) posited that a lie repeated many times will eventually be taken for truth. It doesn’t matter how ridiculous it is. And it doesn’t matter how educated the listener is-I hasten to add.
Central Kenya has some of the most beautiful women around. No doubt about it.When men from the region prefer our dumb friends, it’s time we ask ourselves when the rain started beating us. The sooner we accept that the central province man is an endangered species the better. He is a stranger in his own home where he has lost his voice. His ego is more battered than his rickety bicycle-such that he can’t make a pass at one of the village lasses. Years of empowerment of the central Kenya women has relegated him to the fringes of society.
For the keen observer, at any given time, central region is always hostage to some social problem that points to some dysfunctions in the society. Some years ago, it was the runaway crime. This was followed by increasing suicides cases especially among young men. Then out of the blues came the sporadic cases of bestiality. Not to mention the consumption of illicit beer which has been a perennial problem all along.
It’s time the region woke up from this cheap but effective propaganda churned by some leaders and addressed the enemy within. It’s time the central Kenya region addressed some of these social problems holistically and looked for permanent solutions to them. Otherwise life for many men from the region will remain Hobbesian- nasty, brutish and short.
©All rights reserved
Gilbert Mwangi
28/7/2013

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Tuesday, 23 July 2013

THE SELF IMPOSED DUNGEON

THE SELF IMPOSED DUNGEON
In the town of Florence, Italy we have some of the best ever human sculpted figures ever known. One of them is a life size sculpture of the Biblical David-an imposing fine work that seems so real that a nudge would make him come back to life. The sculptures were made by Michelangelo-one of the foremost Renaissance artiste. It’s said that sometimes, he would work madly on a sculpture on inspired days, and then leave it unfinished for reasons unknown. The people of Florence call those sculptures ‘the prisoners of Michelangelo’. This is because they believe that if he was to come back and finish them, they would come alive because they are so real.
Across the sea in the majestic Germany floats some sweet cantata from one of the most gifted classical music composers-Ludwig Beethoven. Beethoven was a mad genius and even today his works are considered ahead of their times. Their sheer beauty, tour de force and skill still stir many hearts to date.
The talents of the above artistes are enjoyed by people across the world. What is not known to many is that Michangelo was almost blind from the age of 37, but went on to live to ripe old age of 89 and produce more works of art. He could only sculpt based on the forms he felt with his hands. Beethoven, on the other hand, was stone deaf from the age of 26 and thus orchestrated symphonies he could only hear in his mind. The pieces he composed when he was deaf are considered even better than his earlier ones.
Napoleon, one of most spectacular war generals the world ever had-was awfully short.Infact he used to wear a strange long cap and shoes with longer soles to create the impression that he was taller. His men used to call him ‘le petit general’ or ‘the little general’. However, they still held in awe this man who conquered almost all the continental Europe and Russia at one time.
What do the lives of these three men teach us? That disability is a self-imposed dungeon- an excuse not to exceed. Nature always knows how to balance stuff. It may deny us the legs to be fine sportsmen, but it will compensate us with linguistic skills to be the best sports commentators. We may not have the thunder hips of some tinsel town sex goddess who rules the world from the silver screen, but nothing prevents us from ruling people’s heart through music, poetry or any other occupation where looks are not paramount.
Nature always equips us with all that we need to leave footprints on the sand of time-only if we break ourselves free from the self-imposed dungeons of doubt and fear.
All Rights Reserved.
©Gilbert Mwangi
24/7/2013
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Monday, 17 September 2012

ROSES FROM MY GARDEN: WANTED: A MARSHAL PLAN FORKANGEMA CONSTITUENCY‘’By...

ROSES FROM MY GARDEN: WANTED: A MARSHAL PLAN FORKANGEMA CONSTITUENCY‘’By...: WANTED: A MARSHAL PLAN FOR KANGEMA CONSTITUENCY ‘’ By some mysterious happenstance, Kangema may have the highest concentration of billion...
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WANTED: A MARSHAL PLAN FOR KANGEMA CONSTITUENCY
‘’By some mysterious happenstance, Kangema may have the highest concentration of billionaires of any constituency in Kenya outside Muthaiga and Parklands.’’
Gitau Warigi,Sunday Nation,February 26,2012.
Growing up in the mountainous hills of Murang’a in the 80’s, my most vivid memories include chasing after tough Chevrolet pickups trucks laden with coffee cherry headed to the local factory. One of my dreams was to own one one day. This was because every little hamlet had several of them, bought mostly during the coffee boom years of the late Seventies. The villages and market centers were abuzz with activities revolving around coffee, and villages lanes were always full of busy people. The coffee benches could as have well been paved with gold.
Fast forward to the current times. Most of the former bustling market centers are poor images of their former selves, with derelict buildings long gone into disrepair. Lanky dazed young men laze about, looking forlornly at the passing newcomers, hoping one of them will toss them a coin for their next high. Despite being hardly out of their youth, their faces are full of bruises earned from many liquor brawls, and thus look like a road map to every dirty shebeen in the area. These sad images are replicated in almost all the shopping centers in the District.
So, when did the rain start beating the people of Kangema, and Murang’a in general? Needless to say, people from the County are famed for their entrepreneurial spirit, especially in the informal sector. It’s an open secret that most of the buildings and business in the older parts of Nairobi, are owned by people from Murang’a.Infact,Nyakamakima,that hub of business in the River Road area, is a small village in Kangema but the name was transported to Nairobi as most of the businesses are owned by people from that area. The region has also produced some of the best entrepreneurs in Kenya, something that Nation journalist Gitau Warigi alluded to in the above lines picked from an article in which he was eulogizing the Hon John Njoroge Michuki, the late illustrious MP for Kangema.
Despite the affluence commanded by people from the Murang’a in the metro, the County lags behind in most of the social-economic indicators. The rural folk only come to enjoy the largesse of their well-endowed kin during Christmas when they invade the rural homes in their intimidating gizmos. Poverty levels are alarmingly high. Youth unemployment and runway alcoholism are some of the major problems affecting the area.
Kangema and the County in general, is a replete with contrasts. While one part of its populace is busy setting new business trends in Nairobi and other towns, the other is living in abject poverty back in the villages. While some feast on dainties, others are dirt poor, living on conditions that may make their lives, to borrow from Thomas Hobbes,’nasty, brutish and short’. Little wonder that the jigger menace is a real problem in the area. While some of the best sons are leading business magnates in the country, others are into organized crime groups like Mungiki which is rampant in the area.So,why does this region suffer this contradictions? Why does it express this Dr.Jekyll and Mr. Hyde personality?
One doesn’t need to be a nuclear physicist to get to the root cause of the problems afflicting this region. For a start,the collapse of the rural economy that was based on coffee and tea farming has been one of the enduring problems.True,coffee farming may not go back to the lucrative coffee boom years but the leaders of the region need to come up with ways of reviving it. Tea may not be doing as bad, but sadly it’s not widespread as coffee to have a large impact in the area’s economy. Farming in the area has been left to aging pensioners who do not have the energy to pursue it productively. This is because most of the youth have migrated to the urban centers to look for greener pastures or worse are too drunk to bother about it.However,if it has returns, the runaway rural to urban migration will be checked.
Murang’a County has also been mentioned in the same breath with rampant alcoholism and high levels of crime. Various efforts steered by the Provincial Administration and the clergy have been made to curtail this with little or no fruits. The people of the region need to address the dysfunctions in the society that produce young men who thirst more for liquor than water. It’s not enough to go around pouring these liquor from every shebeen for tomorrow more will crop up.
Almost have a decade after independence, most of the people here live in abject poverty and the villages are full of people trying to break from the bonds of mass misery. Its a crying shame that some cannot afford the most basic wants, and Jawaharlal Nehru’s ‘unholy trinity’ of poverty, ignorance and disease stalks most of the locals. Come every election time, the region is awash with money as the contestants dish freebies to the impoverished locals to sway their voting.
True, flinging a coin to a beggar is a compassionate act but it has never removed beggars from the streets. To end this culture, the rural folk have to be empowered. It’s the system that produces beggars that needs restructuring.The tycoons in from Nairobi won’t achieve much by throwing money around every election time as this perpetuates a cycle of dependence. The rural folk need efforts to help themselves, not freebies. Efforts must be made to tap the regions entrepreneurial spirit even in the rural areas so that jobs can be created for the large hordes of angry unemployed youths roaming the village paths.
Thus, it can be argued that the major problems afflicting Kangema are unemployment, failing rural agriculture, crime and alcoholism and the gaping chasms between the rich and the poor. The society needs a leader who will will galvanize the people of the region around this burning issues of the day. A leader who will not chart some agenda for the constituency not from a posh Nairobi hotel, but involve locals from even the remotest hamlets hidden in the chilly hills of Tutho near Aberdares.
Its only by doing this that Kangema Constituency will come up with its home-grown Marshall Plan to set its development agenda.

Gilbert Mwangi
Freelance Writer
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Friday, 1 June 2012

ROSES FROM MY GARDEN:

I AM NOT MY MAMA’S NAME-THE SINGLE MUM’S CHILD’S DILEMMA


Of late, so much has been written and said about single mothers, the hard life that they go through and the negative social perceptions towards them.  This has been done to the point of sounding cliche’.The reason for this raging debate is because the single mother phenomenon is relatively new in Africa. It has been occasioned by the rapid breakdown of tight traditional social fabric that would prevent or limit its occurrence. For example, in most traditional African societies, a single woman, a divorcee or a widow would be placed under the custody of a man-either a relative or close associate of their late husband to ensure that she had a father figure for their kids, a husband to warm her marital bed and a provider to bring the bacon home. However, the latter- day missionary demonized this wife custody as wife inheritance and it has been looked with disdain since then.
Needles to say, single motherhood has ever since then been viewed with contempt. Single mothers are labelled husband snatchers by their fellow women. Their morals are viewed as questionable and equated to those of an alley rat. As if that is not enough, their off springs are subjected to the same prejudices. They are crucified at the altar of prejudice because of being children of single mothers-something they had no much choice over. The overzealous Bible thumbers will even call them children of sin. Then along comes this brand of people, mostly young, proudly using their mothers’ names as surnames.
What’s in a name? The Bard of Avon may have asked. The upshot of these often quoted lines from Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet is that any name will serve for any object. There is no logical connection between the lovely pink flower that we call a rose and the four letters that denote it. It’s only by convention that we call it so. However, human language does not operate in a vacuum and thus human beings are bound to attach some value judgements to some names. For example, I am yet to meet a kid baptised Hitler several generations after his death. In the same vein, I can bet my payslip that you won’t meet a chap called Lucifer in the entire Christendom in your lifetime. And the next time you are in downtown Manhattan and loudly hail your long lost friend called Osama, you’ll be whisked to Guantanamo faster than you can say Bush. Anyway, that’s human nature.
Our naming systems are quite different from the Western ones. In most Western societies, most families adopt a family name that’s handed over from one generation to the next. In our setup, my surname is derived from my father’s name and my name becomes my kids surname ad infitum. Therein lies the problem-what about those children without fathers? Or put in another way, as there is no child without a father, what about children born of single mothers? Do they take the name of their maternal uncles or grandfathers and seem like products of incest? Will the uncles agree to have them using their names, knowing the implications in these days when every other NGO is talking about parental responsibility? And of course there is the dreaded Children’s Act 2001 which most don’t understand and think that letting their single sisters’ children use their surnames will mean that they will be entitled to their estates.
Among the Kikuyu, for instance, children born out of wedlock would be taken  like kids of their eldest maternal uncle .Their single mother, even if having a man on the side to meet some of her needs, would be under constant watch and care of his eldest brother, unless she thought of marrying. This avoided a situation whereby the kids would be without a name or a father figure. Thus the problem of children using their mothers’ names as a surname was solved and was in fact rare.
It’s interesting to note the increase in number of people using their mothers’ names as their surnames. You will also note that it’s more pronounced among the Kikuyu than in the other communities. In the classical Oedipus Complex pattern, Kikuyu men take a lot of pride in their mothers. Most prominent musicians from this community have always been known by their mothers name e.g. Kamaru wa Wanjiru, D.K. wa Maria, Rugwiti wa Njeri and so on. Old men who know each other very well will refer to each other as son of Njoki or Wambui almost reverently. And you can see the glow on the faces of these men when they are associated with their mothers’ names. Most of these men have fathers but just want to celebrate their mothers. Just tell them to flash their identification documents and you will be surprised to find none of the Wambui’s there.
However, that’s the far it goes. Growing up in the same community with your mother’s name as your surname is a different thing altogether. First, one is labelled ‘mwana wa muiritu’ which loosely translates to ‘child of a girl’. The label ‘child of a girl’ is pejorative just like, if not more than its English equivalent- bastard.It also denotes that the single mother  has never grown up since she has never been able to secure herself a husband. The upshot here is that it’s the husband who makes you a woman; you are not born one.
The label ‘child of a girl’ becomes the child’s master status. He or she is that first and anything else second. Right from childhood, the child is viewed from the narrow perspective of his or her mothers’ singlehood. His or her later success or failure is explained from this standpoint. If the kid is dressed well than the others with fathers, then there must be a rich man somewhere paying for this. If the kid excels in school, then most likely the class teacher is getting some ‘entertainment’ from the mother in order to doctor the kid’s marks upwards. And if the kid gets that plum job when his or her classmates are still tarmacking, then her mother must have warmed somebody’s bed for the sake of her child. Just like she did to get that post she’s having now. Conversely, if the child fails in life, then this is a clear indicator than a woman cannot bring up successful children singlehandedly. Either way, it’s a lose lose situation.
A child who bears his or her mother’s surname is always treated with suspicion. Most parents will warn their children against associating with such children due to their presumed low morals. The girls are said to learn the ways of the family early and grow up to be very permissive. Perhaps this is wrongly attributed to the wrong influence of her mother with her many ‘uncles’ who would visit her. The boys are stereotyped as wimpy softies who, due to lack of a fatherly wisdom to guide them, are rudderless in life and will forever be attached to their mothers apron strings.
Thus the name becomes a source of stigma for the child. It becomes a kind of a Scarlet Letter, to borrow from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous classic by the same title, to be worn around the neck for the rest of child’s life. Going by your mothers surname is like announcing to the world that you are the product of a ten-minute hanky –panky somewhere in a coffee bush or smelly urinal back in the day. It’s paradoxical that a community where men will proudly call themselves sons of Wambuis or some other women names will discreetly warn their children against relating with kids having their mothers’ names as surnames.
Malcolm X, the late radical Black Civil rights movement leader, initially used to be known as Malcolm Little. He however latter dropped the name ‘Little’ and in its place adopted the’ X ‘to imply that nobody will ever know his real surname or family name. This is because, when the slaves from Africa arrived at the slave market, they would be given a baptismal name and then adopt the surname of the slave ‘owner’. The African surnames that the slaves used to have before they crossed the Middle Passage were lost forever. The’ X ‘was symbolic of the lost roots, the lost heritage, the lost past. This is the same dilemma that children who use their mothers’ surnames have to deal with-dropping their mothers name to disassociate with their past or sticking with the names and be damned. It is a lose lose situation.
Functional sociologists posit that any social institution will exist only if it serves certain functions in the society. The ubiquitous nuclear family is an example here. In addition, new institutions emerge if hitherto existing ones cannot meet some needs. The relatively new single mother family has emerged to serve some unmet functions, one of them being providing a safety net for children born out of wedlock. The traditional husband, wife and children family has had its own inherent problems and some will even argue that it’s even more dysfunctional than the single parent one. This is because it may expose the children to violence, abuse and exploitation. The single mother family also has its own shortcomings, but the sooner society allows it to take its rightful place the better.
The emerging trend of young people proudly using their mothers’ names as surname is a counterculture. The new kids on the block are rebelling against the negative stereotypes that exist towards single mothers’ children. They have made it look vogue. And by extension, probably unknowingly, they are castigating mainstream culture for its jaundiced view of the single mother. It’s a case of making lemonade from a lemon.
‘I am not my hair’. So sang the Grammy winning American acoustic soul singer India Arie. In this song she castigates the American society for judging women by what appears on their heads and not by what is in them. It’s high time that society stopped treating children from single mothers like children of a lesser god, and let them wear their mother’s names like badges of honor. By extending the stigma already attached to single mothers to their children, society is punishing the mothers twice. The children should be viewed as individuals independent from their mothers and how the society perceives them.
So the next time a person sneers at a kid because of bearing his or her mother’s surname, then the kid should rightly tell him or her ‘I am not my mama’s name!’
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Tuesday, 13 March 2012


FACEBOOK: THE NEW BRAGVILLE?

My egg headed Sociology professor, relying on his dog eared notes which he took back in the day at Stanford University told us there were two types of statuses-achieved or ascribed. Achieved status is the one gets through toil and sweat. Ascribed is the status that you get from your parents. Some will call it pedigree. It‘s coded in your parents social DNA which passes to you ultimately.

However, in the light of the new technological changes taking place, my Sociology professor will have to revise his notes are they are now obsolete. There is a new way of achieving status in town and it’s a click away-Facebook. The status that you lack in your dreary life can be achieved in cyberspace and be maintained easily. However that’s the far it goes.

Most girls have realized that no matter how many bleaching concoctions they use, they will always be drab Dorcases or plain Paulines.Thats the sad thing about life, some of us have to be plain in order we can  define who is beautiful, or not. Some of us are born ducks in order for the swans to look beautiful. Gorgeous Grace is defined as being cute depending on how far, beauty- wise, she is from Dorcas and so on. Mother Nature, on the other hand knows how to balance such that what Dorcas lacks in the facial department is compensated through some Halle Berry thunder hips or Tina Turner timeless legs. Or a backside that would make a priest rescind his celibacy vows faster than you can say hell. Incidentally, most of these strong areas happen to be fetishes for millions of men out there.
Having discovered her strong areas, say the killer legs, Pauline takes their photos. The other option is to take a full photo of herself and then crop (that’s to cut for the un- initiated) the photos such that the legs appear prominently. These are later touched with Photoshop or some of those applications so as to remove excess melanin, signs of acne or other undesirable traits. The photos are later uploaded into her Facebook page and her friends tagged along.

What follows is a tsunami of oohs and aahs of admiration from the entire United Republic of Cyberspace. Plain Pauline has now beaten Gorgeous Grace, a model, who usually gets ululations from a few people in a small hall where she serenades herself on the catwalk because here she is getting accolades from all the corners of the wind. Overnight she has become a diva (have you noted how the word is misused nowadays) to be envied by others. She’s now in the same class with Halle Berry and other rulers of tinseltown.And what a way of massaging the ego of a girl who has been treated like an ugly duckling for so long. However, the glory is shortlived.Some other likeminded girl is busy uploading her photos to raise her status and the moment those photos hit her page she becomes the next reigning queen of cyberspace. Thus the entire Facebook becomes a kind of a continuous virtual catwalk where girls strut their stuff from the privacy of their houses.

Also cropping (no pun intended) up is habit of pasting your photos in a famed rich man’s hideout to show the entire world that you have ‘arrived’. Esther lives in a claustrophobic ten by ten feet room in what they call in NGO-speak informal settlements. Her room is so small that the entry of one trench rat makes it overcrowded. Thus she can’t hold those glitzy bashes that her friends from upmarket Nairobi do. To make up for what she’s missing in life Esther organizes a two hour party in one of her friend’s glitzy upmarket address. Every moment is recorded, thanks to her digital camera and uploaded to her Facebook page as the party progresses. The ululations that follow the photos commending her nice house, the cute leather seats and son on can fill a whole tome.

The good thing about Facebook or other social networking sites is the facelessness. The pictures that   you post on your page become an indicator of how well you are doing in life and few will probe to know the truth of the matter. Thus that picture of a wanna -be yuppie leaning on the bonnet of  a sports Mercedes will have ladies falling over themselves to date him where in reality he has never owned a rickety bicycle all his life. He will be treated with reverence among his Facebook friends –the status he lacks in real life. The unholy marriage between consumerism and technology has reduced status achievement to an act that is a click away.


We are living in a very materialistic world where everything is taken at a face value. Where you live is more important than how you live. What you do with your leisure time, rather than working time becomes your identity. What you consume defines you. Welcome to the Age of consumerism. Houses are more important than homes and acquaintances more important than friends. No wonder in these (un)social networking sites one will have a thousand ‘friends ‘  who will send you many happy birthday wishes but won’t  even say hi in the streets.

To give credit where it’s due, social networking sites are meeting some purposes. They have extended the frontiers of human interactions beyond our imaginations. Never before, in the history of mankind, has it ever been so easy and cheap to catch up with friends scattered in the four corners of the world. You also realize that   personal interaction spaces especially in the urban places are getting less and less and these sites have come in to fill the void left by this. Thus we cannot dismiss them as just another case of technology for technologies sake.

But nothing could be more tragic than viewing a human being in small fragmented bits that are altered with modern gizmos to suit accepted tastes. When young girls start viewing their legs as themselves, then problems of identity are bound to arise. When young men start defining themselves by how well padded their virtual cribs are, then society is headed in the wrong direction.  A human being should be viewed in totality, not in small fragmented bits.

I hear they say in the IT world everything is possible. It’s high time some Silicon Valley techie came up with social networking program that captures values and ethics but not fleeting physical attributes only.


Gilbert Mwangi
@ All rights reserved
13th March 2012

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Monday, 12 March 2012


RAILA  ON JAILING OF UHURU AND RUTO: WHAT HE SAID(AND DIDN’T SAY)

Trust Hon Raila to cause a 100 Richter scale seismic movement anytime he opens mouths or better,  puts  a paid advert in one of our of local dailies. His recent statement that appeared on the Sunday Nation dated 11th March 2012 page 28 is no exception and –you can take this to the bank-will give him more political mileage than  the one G7 would get even if they put up an advert that run through the entire Sunday paper.
The said adverts’ headline- ‘Forged UK Dossier’- concealed more that it let away and one could have ignored it easily as just another communique from the Pentagon. In the statement, Raila states some obvious truths that most Kenyans share-that the Ocampo four will not be declared guilty by the ICC by holding quasi-religious prayers in every remote hamlet in the republic. Going to the agora everyday to say how innocent they are wont relinquish the yoke of ICC cases that hangs from their necks like millstones. The ICC has its procedures through which the suspects will use to prove their innocence, or lack thereof, when that time comes. You do not need a PhD in criminal law to know this.
The verbal deluge that has followed Raila’s statement is of Noah’s proportions-something that he expected. The entire Fourth Estate, right from mainstream media houses like Nation to the wanna-be radio station is abuzz reacting to this sentiments. Some radio stations even had to reschedule their programming to discuss the statement. One is wont to think that Hon Raila has pinned his 99 theses, to borrow from the Protestant Reformer Martin Luther, to the wall of public opinion in Kenya.
The capitalists  they are, the media houses have used the statement to gain extra shilling Some bright editor headlined yesterday’s Sunday Nation ‘Uhuru and Ruto ought to be in jail, says Raila’. This is the most alarmist headline I have come across in the recent years. I have gone through the previously mentioned blistering statement, as Nation calls it, with a toothcomb and I am yet to come across such sentiments in it. And the last time I checked my eyesight was okay. This headline, especially the juxtaposing of the words Uhuru, Ruto and jail, was intended to play on the sensitivities of the followers of the two politicians and thus boost paper sales. Am sure that Sunday Nation’s regional sales manager for Mountain region and Rift valley posted impressive sales yesterday. However, this tabloid journalism on the side of Nation reeks to high heavens of unprofessionalism and insensitivity. Our country almost came to its knees owing to fanning of tribal sentiments during the last elections. This is not the right time to play around on some fickle sensitivities like the ICC process. Journalists, being the sensitive tips of the society should be alive to this or else they are not worth their salt.
Hon Raila knew very well the kind of political deluge he would cause with his statement. That is why he put it up in the Sunday papers as they have the widest circulation in comparison with the other dailies. I have this feeling that the guy keeps a well –worn copy of Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power, which he flips through occasionally. From this treatise, Raila knows very well that for a good politician to be relevant, one has to be in circulation. Acres of newspaper space have and will be dedicated to Raila’s statement for this week and many to come. The usually disorganized G7 brigade united in shouting itself hoarse over the weekend condemning the statement. This helps keep him in circulation, which is a lifeline for every politician. Like they say in showbiz, there is no bad publicity after all. At the same time, he has deflected our attention from other burning issues of the day.
Raila did not say anything new: he only has expressed some feelings that some Kenyans may share, depending on their political allegiances. Hate him or like him but, this is a politician who does not fear to speak his mind out, however outrageous his words may be. The said statement is not blasphemous or treasonable and the acres of newspaper space its getting is uncalled for. In any case, Raila has made much more outrageous statements, especially during his days in the opposition trenches. His statement’s prominence is only driven by what the late Hon.Kijana Wamalwa memorably referred to as Railaphobia.
To say the least, the editors at Nation used journalistic license to whip up people’s emotions in order to boost newspapers sales. The nation is still to fickle and such sensational headlines are bound to make the situation worse. The last time I checked, the Aga Khan, not Rupert Murdoch, was at the helm of Nation Media but if the media house wants to borrow from that high priest of tabloidsm, which he perfected in Fleet Street, then the timing, and location is wrong.
Freedom as they say is a double-edged sword. Freedom without responsibility is worse than tyranny. We have made various strides in media law but when we misuse the same laws, we’d rather go back to the old days of media muzzling.

@Gilbert Mwangi
12th March, 2012

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Wednesday, 7 March 2012

LATE HON MICHUKI-A DRUM MAJOR FOR EXCELLENCE


MICHUKI: A DRUM MAJOR FOR EXCELLENCE
As naive  graduates straight from the university in 2002, we once paid a visit to our then MP,the late Hon John Njoroge Michuki with a very clear mission: to ask him that he agrees we campaign for him in the forthcoming elections in exchange for Government jobs that were hard to come by those days. In his typical way, he gave us one his characteristic piercing gaze that seemed to read our innermost thoughts and in a firm tone told us: Michuki does not carry jobs in his briefcase to dish out .That was the vintage Michuki: forthright and brutally honest to a fault. By the time we left his office, he had hammered enough sense into our young idealistic minds for us to see the naivety of our demand.
The passing on of Michuki was particularly hard for me, not because he was my MP for more than half of my life, but because he is a man that I admired a lot. For over three decades, be bestrode the political landscape of Kangema like a Colossus, not because of his towering physique but because of his towering moral values. He had this personal magnetism that is characteristic of leaders of men and when he spoke, you had to listen.
Michuki embodied a dying breed of men from the old order when a man’s word was his bond and nothing the less. This is a trait that is particularly very difficult to espouse in the murky world of politics where double speak is away of life. For me Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem ‘If’ which celebrates the value of being a real man could as well have been his manual that he strictly followed to the letter.
Contrary to popular opinion, Michuki had to conquer several odds to get to the pinnacle of his business and political career. This is because, despite having been born into a privileged family of a colonial Senior Chief, he had many siblings and the family’s resources were not sufficient for all of them. However, with sheer hard work and personal excellence, Michuki was able to build a business empire that is the envy of many. Wealth aside he will be remembered for excelling in any job that he undertook, from selling buttons as young boy in the 1940’s to taming  the chaotic Kenyan matatu industry by introducing the e(in)famous Michuki rules. Some wags are pointing out that touts and drivers in heaven have put on their uniforms on hearing that Michuki has arrived at the Pearly Gates!
Hon Michuki was beloved by the people of Kangema, not because he promised them heaven, but because he delivered what he promised. He was beloved by the people of Kenya not because he magical acts, but because he excelled in what he did. But again, I hasten to add, he was loathed equally because as a mortal, he had his own faults.
The late Dr.Martin Luther King Jr,in is Drum Major Instinct speech in which he alluded to his imminent death, asked the world not to list his numerous awards-numbering over three hundred by then- during his funeral. He even told them not to say in his eulogy that he had won the coveted Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 since that was not important. He asked the people to remember him as A Drum Major for peace, justice and righteousness. The rest of the worldly things were shallow and did not matter.
In the same vein, on Michuki was a Drum Major for excellence and the best way to remember him is to pursue excellence in all we do. Through his excellence, to use the words of the poet Henry Longfellow, he was able to leave footprints on the sands of time.
 In the death of Michuki, the people of Kangema and Kenya have lost   a man, whither comes another?
May God rest his soul in eternal peace.

@Gilbert Mwangi
KANGEMA
25th February, 2012

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