Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Corridors of Power



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A bus passenger who took to heart police commissioner Mathew Iteere's advise to the public to alert the police if they spotted anyone or anything suspicious found himself cooling his heels in a Thika police cell on Sunday evening. The man was in a bus which was coming from Dadaab to Nairobi when it was stopped by policemen manning a roadblock along the Garissa-Thika highway. He alerted the policemen at the roadblock about the suspicious behaviour of three passengers. The passengers were ordered off the bus and were taken aside for 'interrogation' for a few minutes before they were 'cleared' and allowed back on the bus. The poor passenger who had drawn the attention of the police to the suspicious passenger was instead arrested and put in a Thika police cell waiting to be taken to court for allegedly ‘giving police false information!
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A senior official at the Ministry of Co-operative Development official in Nairobi has been putting pressure on the police in Nyamira county to forcefully disperse people who have been camping at the Simbauti farm in Borabu district protesting the manner the land was allocated to squatters. The man is afraid that he will be put on the spotlight is it is found out that his wife was one of the beneficiaries and was allocated 20 acres. Police are resisting the pressure and have told the man they cannot act as the new constitution allows protects the public's right to protest. The over 1,000 protestor’s have vowed to camp at the land until the 5,000 acre farm is reverted to the farmers.
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A diplomat, frustrated by his experience while travelling from Johannesburg to Nairobi on a leading airline sent Corridors an sms chronicling his ordeal. He said his flight failed to take off and when he and other passengers insisted on being told what was causing the delay, they were given the following reasons: the airspace was too congested and they had to wait for one hour . They were informed of this after they had already boarded the plane. When it became too hot inside the plane, the passengers were advised that some of their luggage would be taken off as the plane was too heavy to take off. After yet another long wait, they were told their luggage had been loaded on the next flight and advised they had to wait for yet another hour. All this time, the passengers were not allowed off the plane allegedly for security reasons. Only much later after they eventually took off did the passengers realise that the airline had deployed a smaller aircraft than the number of passengers booked! The diplomat has vowed never to fly the airline again.

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