Kumekucha Daily: Home Page 16th January 2007

Kumekucha Today

Lead Story
Bishop Margaret Wanjiru: Will She Recover From Political Blunders?

i) The Tasteless Sugar Story.

ii) How Many MPs Will Make It Back To Parliament?

iii) Narc Kenya Scorecard On Corruption

iv) The Deepest Analysis Of Raila Odinga The Presidential Candidate

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Bishop Margaret Wanjiru: Political Blunders One Sunday Morning

Popular TV evangelist Margaret Wanjiru of JIAM (Jesus Is Alive Ministries) is fairly used to the glare of lights and the attention of cameras because that is how she records her rather popular TV shows several times every week.

But last Sunday the numbers of cameras in her church were many more than usual and included cameras from local media houses. This is obviously something that she is not used to, because she made some serious political mistakes.

Ms Wanjiru may not have realized it, but the minute she declared her interest in the Starehe seat, she was in politics. And politics is a very different ball game from what she is used to in her church circles. In Kenya it can be a rather dirty and sordid thing.

This whole saga should be very bad news to Kenyans because Ms Wanjiru's declared interest in politics really excited me and should have done the same for many Kenyans because these are the sort of "different" characters we need if we are to make a difference in parliament and have a fighting chance of getting in the sort of legislators who can change the direction of Kenyan politics. Bishop Wanjiru's track record is admirable. She has demonstrated that she can be selfless and that she can make a difference despite her gender, which tends to be looked down on in Kenya. And most of all she has demonstrated on several occasions that she can swim with the sharks and survive. Church politics is no picnic sometimes, especially for a single mother. Then there is the time that the sellers wanted to con her out of the prime property on Haile Selassie Avenue that houses her church when she had already paid a substantial amount of money for it. These are just a few of the many battles the evangelist has fought and won so far.

The no-nonsense-evangelist makes no secret of her poverty-stricken past and would make the perfect role model in parliament for many Kenyans who badly need to be convinced that it can be done. That just like a person can turn around their lives, the life of one Kenya can also be turned around.

The political mistakes that Ms Wanjiru made that now threaten her bid for the August house was firstly to lose her temper in public. Obviously this man who has come out of the woodwork touched a raw nerve in the evangelist. The timing and execution is such that ruling out a political motive is extremely difficult at this juncture.

For all we know, this could simply be a case of mistaken identity or even dirty political games, but whatever it is, the damage has already been done. The anger of the public was clearly illustrated in the sms poll carried out by KTN last night asking viewers if they read politics in Ms Wanjiru's woes, which clearly showed that most respondents (over 80%) were so angered at her reaction to the man claiming to be her former husband that they did not read politics in the whole saga. A curious assumption for anybody to have under the circumstances. But then angry people hardly reason, less so angry voters.

My hope is that the Bishop wins this latest battle and bounces back like she has so many times before. It will do Kenya a lot of good to have her in parliament.

The Tasteless Sugar Story

The mad genius who first came up with the make-money-from-sugar-overnight scheme has to date made billions of shillings. They were of course close to the Moi administration and they hailed from the Coast.

However somebody in the Kibaki administration seems to have outdone them.

This is how the sugar deal was executed during the Moi era. Using their influence in government, the sugar baron or barons would ensure that virtually all sugar companies in the country closed for annual maintenance at the same time. This would cause a temporary shortage, which would then be promptly filled by imported sugar. There is plenty of cheap sugar out there and even neighboring Sudan produces sugar at a much cheaper cost than we do in Kenya. However the sugar barons prefer to import their sugar from sources that are further away where it is even cheaper.

The mark-ups and profits earned from these deals are mind-boggling and are in the triple digit million figures.

Now somebody else (or is it the same people?) in the Kibaki era has done even better. They've managed to somehow cause a major shortage in the market which had the effect of doubling the price of sugar which at one time was retailing for well over shs 100.

From the time of the Kanu era, well-connected individuals including members of the Moi family made millions of shillings by importing cheap sugar.

It is interesting that a furious minister for Agriculture Kipruto arap Kirwa warned sugar distributors and accused them of unscrupulous business practices and went further and ordered government owned sugar companies to sell the commodity directly to traders and bypass distributors but these does not seem to have brought the prices down to the desired levels. It is strange that the minister expected this move to have any impact in the market since many major outlets in the country buy sugar directly from the factory. For instance supermarkets, which sell a substantial volume of the commodity, have been ordering directly from factories since the early days of the now troubled Uchumi Supermarkets chain in the 70s when it was the only major supermarket in the country.

The minister has now opted for the alternative, which is to allow some selected companies to import the commodity cheaply from the common market for eastern and southern Africa COMESA region in a bid to stabilize the prices.

What Kenyans are finding weird is the fact that the minister is now accepting that there is a shortage when only recently he had said that local stocks were enough and the problem was hoarding.

Kirwa who is among the ministers in Kibaki's government that have amassed large fortunes over a very short period of time has been investigated by the Kenya anti corruption commission but nothing much came out from the investigations conducted last year.

Stakeholders in the industry read mischief on the minister's part and claim he wants to make money from those that he will license to import the commodity cheaply.

Others suspect that the whole saga maybe a ploy to raise money for the forthcoming general elections.

Meanwhile ordinary folks are suffering because, unfortunately, majority of Kenyans cannot go about their business every day without taking a cup of tea in the morning while there are millions of poor rural women who can't get any sleep without a cup of the same at night and all have now been forced to dig deeper into their pockets.

The other alternative is to consume the liquid without sugar, making it as tasteless as President Kibaki's administration has turned out to be.