You kill me Kenya!

You kill me Kenyans; with your shameless double standing, with your selective reasoning; with your insolence and ethnic chauvinism. You are poor (just like me). You own no land (just like me). You will die poor (just like me). Your children will inherit nothing (just like mine). But you are rich in your ethnicity – you are Luo, Kikuyu, kalenjin, Kamba, Luhya, Gussii, Ogiel bla bla. If ethnicity were monetized we would be billionaires! But you will die for your tribesman; what he owns you own too right? When you go home to your humility, you dine with him right?

Kenyans hark my voice. What your president and his company want you to do (and he's sure you will), is resign to the cheap lazy conversation of chest thumping and ethnocentrism and forget the real issue. How the point shifted from the chronic land grievances in the Coast instigated by historical land injustices to the guilt of former Lands Minister James Orango for not detecting illegal allocations, I wonder.

The point that people want to bury their heads in the sand and wish never existed is how a group of people found themselves in the Coast, settled in land that never belonged to them, but to people who were originally there, born there, displacing and disenfranchising them.

Kenyans it happened, all these will not end until we acknowledge that these injustices occurred. They have been well documented in the Truth Justice and Reconcilliation Commission report and the Ndungu report - of the Commission of Inquiry into the illegal/iregular allocation of public land. They will have to be addressed my fellow countrymen.

We all love Kenya. If you are young, take note that these folks in high office today will tear down this country to dust and leave us and our children this filth that they call Kenya and we will have to live in it or die in it. Wake up, we all hustle today to own 1/8ths of land in Nairobi when people are talking of thousands of hectares of land. But you are willing to defend them on social media, abuse, and murder and kill your 'facebook friends' because they are your fathers? Your brothers? Your mothers? Your tribe? Painful indeed!

Uhuru and Ruto are doing a great disservice to this nation. If they had no interest in addressing the 'sensitive' land issue - they should have kept off it and let Kenyans deal with it like we always have - accepted and moved on. Not open up a dangerous conversation they are not willing to honestly engage in. 

I hope no one finds this - hate mongering'. Am poor, I cannot afford 5 million Kshs bail. I only got my voice, my mind. Those are free, bequeathed to me by Ochieng Okwaroh (who never owned land) - no law, no man, can ever alienate or take them away, so long as they are just. I got no land and am not obsessed with land.

I am Okwaroh Ja' Paprombe. Good day Kenyans

God help us, forgive us for we have sinned.

Deliver us from the yokes of shameless PR, waste & kleptocracy

Dear Uhuru, Jubilee and Co. 

Next time you feel inspired and fired up to take Kenya to the lord in prayer, please, just kneel down on your well manicured office floor and pray, or in the car, or in the gym or on the plane now that yours is an airborne presidency.

Spare us the extra expenses of prayers at 5-starred hotels. The spectre of Safari Park Hotel wont rocket the prayer items to the almighty. 

We pray every day for our beloved Kenya - on the jam chocked in dust fumes and noise; in the quiet of our humble homes; in the sanctity of the many shrines that we have built with our honest kind contributions. Some of them are actually spruced enough to suit the ostentations of your stature and honour. And we believe God hears our prayers, we believe God sees our tears. He does respond! 

This is how God commands us to pray sir:

 "Matthew 6:5-12 - But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, and when you have shut your door, pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will repay you. "And when you are praying, do not use meaningless repetition, as the Gentiles do, for they suppose that they will be heard for their many words"

"1 Timothy 2:8 - I will therefore that men pray everywhere, lifting up holy hands, without wrath and doubting"

I have hosted events in these starred hotels like you hosted prayers yester. A breakfast meeting like that costs at least 2000 Kshs per head. I saw on TV dignitaries well over 1000 sir, praying for Kenya at Safari Park. We spent at least 2million bob praying, even if we discount all the other costs of taking you and your convoy to Thika road and back, the time wasted on the jam for the rest of us lowlies.

I am hurt sir, that whilst prayer is good, and God asks us to pray and take all our tribulations (terrorism, Anglo leasing, ethnicity in public service etc) to him in prayer, we spent so much in a shameless PR exercise. I am not judging - I leave it to God! I am not righteous.

Amen.

Jubilee: too clever for counsel, yet too foolish

The folly of this Jubilee government is its overconfidence and false sense of importance. Folks are too full of themselves they wouldn’t listen.

I watched senate proceedings as Jubilee senators heckled down Senator James Orengo advising majority leader Kithure Kindiki to pursue Assembly of State parties if they genuinely wanted to help the President and his deputy William Ruto. Instead they thumped their chests because they control the Kenyan legislature. They went ahead to complicate matters with their withdrawal from the Rome Statute motion. Tragedy is, jubilee has some of the most brilliant attorneys in this country in Senate and National Assembly. But they reduced themselves to cannon fodder, spewing tirades at the international community that they shockingly didn’t appear to understand they would depend on when they went to the AU, UN Security Council (UNSC) etc.

Like the Swahili said – “Mwenda omo na tezi marejeo ngamani” - He who goes from bow to stern must return to the bilge

We are back to square one. It has now dawned on the spin masters in the Jubilee Kingdom that they won’t shout or bully their way out of the ICC. Folks are exhausting options. Amazingly, now they are pushing an amendment to the Rome Statute to allow Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto attend trials via video link through the same Assembly of State parties that Orengo advised them to pursue but they arrogantly told off.

We have come from "a sitting president cannot and won’t be humiliated at The Hague" to begging for amendments to help save face. The ICC is inevitable after all. Cool, the proposed amendment is backed by the AU (I elect not to comment on the toothlessness of the AU). But, the Assembly of State Parties isn't a club exclusive to African despots, so they can push and shove amendments at their whims.

Goodness me, the Assembly of States will also decide whether sitting heads of state should be exempt from ICC prosecutions. Why didn’t people think of pursuing this all this while?

Keep enjoying the pleasure of opinion without the discomfort of thought. Therein lies your downfall.

Sovereignty my left armpit, mscheeew!

The tragedy with us Africans is after we swindle our people, maim and kill them, we always search and dust the old tattered PanAfricanist card to play. Quite convenient isn't it? - blame it on the white man, blame it on imperialism, neocolonialism, globalization whatever you like to call it right. 

You can say a million but the US and those other countries you laughably attempt to compare Kenya to, for not being signatories to the ICC, scarcely need Den Haag. Their judicial systems (with their inadequacies) do not allow morons, coldhearted scumbags and chest thumping criminals, murders and rapists like the ones we got here in Kenya to commit atrocities and get away with it. I can say this - they do not need international judicial mechanisms so much as we do. Yes we 'moral high horse ridding' Africans. Their political systems do not allow even an adulterous CEO to keep office, let alone a politician to even contemplate running for political office with accusations of crimes against humanity hanging around their necks. Ask Herman Cain, Ask Dominic Strauss Khan ... 

Hate it or love it, the day you allowed clowns accused of grave violations on human rights and dignity to wear party colors, show up on national TV and gallivant the country campaigning to be president is the day you allowed the sovereignty of the so free 'Kenya' you are 'fettishly' obsessed with to be ridiculed molested and demeaned. 

People ran for office in full knowledge of the consequences of being answerable to the ICC and discharging state duties simultaneously. Kid only the naive, the captives of sycophancy and ethnocentric twaddle who like to believe that the President and his deputy sitting at the Hague answering to criminal charges (like any other Kenyan would at the high court away from their families or jobs) really should worry anybody.

After all, who eats sovereignty? How much sovereignty is served on dinner tables in the evening in Kenyan households? What have you done with the sovereign Kenya for the past 5 decades? How much foreign direct investment has sovereignty brought to our economy? How many jobs? uh? How many destitute kids has it assured food, clothing, good health? How many mothers has it prevented from still births and dangerous maternal illness?  

The sovereignty that Africans deserved over the past 50 years, they have gotten. What they have done with it is for you to judge. These same losers now cry-babying are the same busybodies that applauded and appended signatures to a law that they scarcely took time to understand, to interrogate its motives and to judge its merits. Today, fourteen years down the lane, when we sadly determine that the egg we naively fertilized is too big for our cervix to deliver, we suddenly have a sovereignty problem. A problem too great, so urgent and verily important that the escalating cost of living and the lingering unemployment, poverty and inequality in the country can wait.

Ha! I say go shove it up folks. You have more important things to worry about. The perceived danger to your sovereignty is a mockery of the hopes and aspirations of your people. Take that 'African Renaissance' balderdash to the bin Kabando wa Kabando. Fix the economy, give husbands jobs, assure young people of their future, allow women equal opportunity to determine their destinies (and some money to shop and enjoy womanhood YAWA), let children enjoy their childhood, allow families the economic freedom to live life and appreciate their culture, ethnicity and heritage. That, mes camarades, is how to build a sovereign nation. Not by shamelessly playing to the gallery of international politics where no one gives a rap about your act.

Let those who committed crimes face the full force of the law. Let those innocent, wrongly accused, be acquitted and apologized to. Let us ACCEPT and MOVE ON.