Sunday, January 15, 2012

May the best liar win polls


Edward Indakwa

Unbelievably, more than one year after the promulgation of the new Constitution, Muslims have not risen to turn Kenya into a state governed by Sharia Law. And yet listening to politicians ranting at public rallies in 2010, anchoring the courts in the Constitution was the most dangerous thing anyone would do.
That was not all. According to reports from a rally held at Kakamega’s Muliro Gardens, the new Constitution was a grave danger to family life. Why, according to an MP, men would turn into women – read homosexual – consequently denying their wives ‘rights’.
A year down the line, there has been no reports of men turning into women in droves because the Katiba allows it.
As one wag put then, women were denied those rights under the old Constitution, but only because their husbands were either too drunk or too busy looking for money or chasing other skirts. Naturally, proponents of the ‘No" vote had not figured that out.
At the same rally, a polygamous MP swore that the proposed Constitution was bad because it empowered women to refuse to cook for their husbands or something equally inane.
Campaigns
Somehow, it escaped his notice that women have been refusing to cook for their husbands since my grandfather’s days. It had everything to do with domestic cold war, not constitutions, but of course he wasn’t going to mention that.
The only saving grace is, that crowd at Muliro Gardens, perhaps fired by the spirit of the fiery and rebel politician in whose name the gardens are named, firmly shouted the politicians down and told them to take a hike because they were lying. Of course they were.
Many things were said about abortion. As a matter of fact, the Church is still enraged about some innocuous clause that could sneak abortion into the Constitution were a clever lawyer to put his or her mind to it.
Barely a week ago, the Catholic Archbishop issued a firm statement there is absolutely no way his Church was going to negotiate over abortion.
But the fact remains that women have been aborting since Biblical times. And they will continue so long as the same quarters are opposed to family planning (Only a celibate priest can dream that withdrawal is a family planning method). Perhaps, abortion will only stop when the world ends – and you can’t even be sure about that, but not because a group of men sit down at a table and scribble a small law.
So as campaigns gear up – they began in 2008 – politicians will feed Kenyans with similar tales. Much of the sloganeering from the political podium will be bereft of the slightest measure of intellect, or truth, but it will be met by singing, dancing and the stoning and murder of political enemies.
Money – a hell lot of it – will be poured. Writers will earn millions writing moribund party manifestos. Politicians will shout themselves hoarse. But at the end of the day, only the best liar will win.
 
Stealing to export coffee berries
The coffee boom is back but in a strange way. Those, whose eyes were open in the 1970s, the golden era when contraband coffee was the pillar of the Kenyan economy, will remember the heady days when Busia town and its environs were like Las Vegas.
Hotel and bar owners did roaring business. Money flowed like milk and those with the loot washed their hands with beer. For real. One sleepy market centre called Chepkube even had a song dedicated in its owner – Chepkube, the market of smugglers.
The only difference then was that coffee was smuggled in from Uganda because the then Pariah state could not access the global market. But now the tables have been turned. We are now stealing our own coffee and smuggling it across the border to Uganda.
The trade must be quite lucrative because we are ready to kill people in the process of stealing the red berries that make a beverage that the Kenyans who grow them don’t drink.
Urban jungles
I have no idea why coffee prices should be better in Uganda and I don’t care. What disturbs me is that we are busy turning coffee estates in Kiambu into urban jungles and mega cities, forgetting we need coffee as well.
And its not just coffee that we are stealing. Villagers no longer use their granaries. Instead, the maize is dried and stored in bedrooms, next to bows and arrows. Maize is even stolen from the cob, right in the field. We’ve been stealing cattle for ages. Now we have diversified to sugarcane poaching. The only reasonable conclusion to be made from this is that we are a nation that eats, but won’t soil its hands farming.

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