Tit Bits on Referendum Results

• Ministry of Lands banking hall was surprisingly empty this morning. A first time occurrence since 1963. No more brokers and no more grabbers of public land crowding the corridors in Ardhi House. One rumour had it that squatters (read human shields) are being invited to settle for free at one expansive farm in Laikipia.
• Eldoret North constituency will be electing a new MP come 2012. The incumbent is busy auctioning the Kalenjin vote to the highest bidder for purposes of landing the Deputy State Presidency in the new dispensation.
• As we auction ethnic votes and rent crowds, since when were uncast votes counted in elections? Can we be clear what democracy means. And in this case two thirds voted yes.
  
• Mwingi North constituency now joins Othaya constituency as the other constituency whose long serving member of parliament is soon to become a pensioner. Thanks to recent upward review of the V-P’s rosy retirement benefits.
• There's one Mkamba who has christened himself Obama Wa Wakamba. Green was too much for him. Cloning the son of Ko'Ogelo is no easy task, especially his vote winning ways.
  
• KADDU is now shopping for a new Party Leader following the dismal performance of the current Party Leader in his own constituency and in the larger land of Masinde Muliro.
• Cherangany constituency while voting strongly for YES, also wishes to have the recall clause fast-tracked, 2012 is too far. They have been assured of support from the nearby Lugari constituency.
• Imported voters from the other side still managed to sneak into the Langata constituency voter roll despite the recent fresh registration by the IIEC. Back to the drawing board, how can the incumbent be unseated?
• Green Alliance, comprising youthful YES MPs, is now a fully fledged political party in Kenya after was issued registeration certificate by the registrar of political parties this morning. This heralds the death of KANU, the independence party. They hope to replicate the abortive Orange revolution of 05-07 riding on the back of 2010 referendum victory. Easier said than done, especially if there is no one to do football commentaries for them at Uhuru Park.
• Chief Justice and a substantial number of judges in the judiciary have quietly moved their personal belongings from offices and sent their government staff on leave. There is NO chance in any of them ever working in the judiciary again.
• Party Leader TIP TIP has more than a dozen missed calls from a mobile phone number calling from Kabarak base station. It is not known why these elements want to make this political marriage of convenience permanent. The said party leader was seen nursing a warm tusker at a pub in Mlolongo very early today.
• Those who took illegal oath of office in 2007 are required to take lawful oath of office again.....this time in broad daylight through due process. YES, they know themselves.
• And YES, the railway is still intact in Kibera while Kivuitu remains a Kenya citizen, at least he has been given a leston at managing elections.
  

More tit bits to follow; but you can post yours at the comments section of this post

Have a comprehensively reformist weekend folks!!!!

PM Raila Tops Kibaki, Parliament in Gallup Poll

The latest GALLUP POLL released this afternoon shows a huge majority of Kenyans rate Prime Minister Raila Odinga far much ahead of President Mwai Kibaki in approval of their leadership. The same poll indicates Raila to be much more popular than Kibaki.

Prime Minister received an approval rating of 85%, while President Kibaki rated at 63%, Parliament at 67% and the Grand Coalition Cabinet at 63%.

Not surprisingly, the U.S.-based pollster's interview with 2,200 people across Kenya's eight provinces showed that a whopping 70% believe that the last December 2007 presidential vote was "dishonest". 57% believe Raila Odinga won the presidency while only 25% think Kibaki was the victor.

Robert Tortora, Gallup’s Chief Methodologist and Regional Research Director for sub-Saharan Africa operations released the report in Nairobi this afternoon. The poll was conducted in June/July this year.

Read more...... Nation Media: Strong public approval for PM

Saving Mau Forest: Ogiek Community Voluntarily Accept Outside Resettlement

Yesterday, PM Raila Odinga received a large delegation of Ogiek community leaders in his office. As usual our mainstream media have given the momentous occasion little publicity. The hide-attired Ogiek delegation comprised of representatives from the Ogiek Peoples National Assembly (OPNA), Ogiek Welfare Council and the Ogiek Peoples Development Programme (OPDP) whose executive chairman Daniel Kobei doubled as their spokesman.

At the end of the meeting, the PM called a press conference attended by local and international press in which it was announced that the Ogieks were ready to move out of the controversial MAU forest on condition that the government resettles and compensates them adequately. Sadly, the NMG did not even bother to publish this story in its Nation newspaper. For those who have been following the protracted Mau saga, this announcement constitutes one of the most significant coups by any official of the government of Kenya since independence in the efforts to reclaim the forest and puts the PM in frame for international environmental honours.

The Ogieks who number about 20,000 people are not squatters but are in actual sense the only indigenous dwellers of the Mau Forest. They have since colonial times suffered eviction, persecution, harassment, intimidation, death threats and even murder from successive governments and their agents under the excuse of 'protecting the environment'. That the PM has persuaded them to peacefully leave their ancestral homeland and appreciate the importance of preserving this water catchment area is a great achievement indeed. No other government officials or Rift Valley MPs were present in this historic meeting and surprise, surprise….no tear gas canisters were unleashed on hapless Kenyans!

To put other Kenyan communities in perspective; can the proud Luo, for instance, ever accept to be evicted from the shores of Lake Victoria or perhaps are the populous Kikuyu ready to accept to be moved away from the Mount Kenya region even if it is for preserving the environment? You and I know this is an impossible dream.

Although the Mau Task Force is still working on modalities for handling the Mau crisis, it is not lost on political observers that Raila is already making inroads on the ground and is successfully working with grassroot communities in resolving the impasse. It should therefore not surprise anyone when a delegation of Kipsigis or Maasai community leaders or elders visits the PM in the near future and agree to be relocated from the Mau.

Whereas it is the right of any Kenyan community to public appointments, journalists attending the PM/Ogieks function were shocked to learn that no single individual from the Ogiek community has been nominated to parliament or appointment a minister, PS or even an MD of a public corporation, although quite a number of them are educated and qualified for public service jobs. The Ogiek never feature anywhere on the national radar apart from when they are resisting attempts to evict them from their homeland.

It will be interesting to hear what the so called Kipsigis and Maasai MPs have to say about yesterday’s meeting which was devoid of any political agenda. Meanwhile, the PM marches on……..

MAU FOREST COMPLEX: Raila Odinga’s Real Acid Test

Isaac Ruto & Company playing disgraceful KANU politics with Kenya’s livelihood

Sitting some 250 kilometers North-West of Nairobi, the Mau Forest Complex covers approximately 400,000 hectares (about 900km2) straddling no less than ten administrative districts in the Rift Valley Province. At independence in 1963, it was the single largest block of montane and moist indigenous forest in East Africa but thanks to partisan party politics it has now been sadly depleted to about 22 patches of forest.
-------------
Also in Kumekucha today: Biggest hindrance to relationships will shock you

How super earners make $100,000 online
-------------

As the country’s biggest water catchment area, the Mau forest occupies a central place in the economic and ecological lifeline of the people of Rift Valley, Western and Nyanza provinces. Indeed, the national economy stands to lose over US $300 million to the tea, tourism and energy sectors alone if the forest of the Mau Complex continues to be degraded. The Tanzanian government has already formally protested about the effects the Mau degradation is costing her environment and economy, while the Uganda and Egypt governments are said to be closely watching how Kenya will resolve this Mau fiasco that has now taken an international dimension.

Past political expediency resulted into systematic illegal excision of huge parcels that reduced forest cover in Kenya from approximately 1.7 million hectares in 1963 to 1.4 million hectares as at 2005, which translates to only 2.5% of the total land area and a meager 1.7% under closed canopy. A country with less than 10% of its area under closed canopy forest is considered “environmentally unsecure”.

At the height of his autocratic rule, President Moi’s KANU government de-gazetted huge tracts of forest land to irregularly reward party supporters. The infamous Ndung'u land report revealed that there are more than 200,000 illegal and irregular title deeds which were fraudulently issued in the Mau Complex, most of them to politically connected personalities, some of whom later sold the land to unsuspecting investors and members of the public.

Lately, the Mau has been turned into a nasty political tug of war for supremacy between MPs from the Maasai and Kipsigis communities, and this war is already threatening to degenerate into ethnic clashes. To make matters worse, some of the Kipsigis MPs led by Isaac Ruto are using the Mau as a tool of blackmail for settling political scores (read: cabinet appointments) within ODM. The Kipsigis MPs are throwing needless roadblocks into efforts to reclaim and restore the Mau forest as they know it is their people who are occupying and destroying the forest while, a little further downstream, Maasai communities are watching in horror as rivers are drying up and weather patterns are becoming harsher. Others hypocrites opposing the Mau evictions like Franklin Bett are themselves beneficiaries of the fraudulent Mau allocations by Moi.

The very nature of our politics has effectively turned the Mau Forest into very hot political potato as well as a massive environmental time bomb. The reality of the matter is that there is only one solution to the Mau problem: TOTAL EVICTION

Considering the loud war-cries emanating from the Kipsigis axis, it seems pretty obvious that we are heading for confrontation and it goes without saying that the restoration of the Mau Forest will mean forcefully uprooting thousands of squatter families, compensating them and re-settling them elsewhere. This may sound inhuman to our so-called human rights lobby groups, but it certainly guarantees the future of millions of Kenyans for whom the waters provided by the Mau mean life. Already, the commissioning of the Japanese funded Sondu Miriu hydro power station in Nyanza province has aborted due to low water levels on the river which is as a direct result of the destruction of the Mau Forest. In the already battered tourism sector, the world famous annual Mara Wildebeest migration, dubbed the 7th Wonder of the World, is also severely threatened by human settlement in the Mau.

In 2005, the then NARC government unilaterally sanctioned Kenyan security forces to forcibly evict an estimated 3000 families (about 15,000 people) destroying seven primary schools and affecting thousands of students. The displaced people were left with no access to food, shelter, sanitation facilities or education, and physical infrastructure was also destroyed. According to IDMC, allegations of rape and theft of harvested crops by evicting officers was reported. The brutality in which the evictions were carried out led to the suicide of three people, and one man suffered a heart attack when his school torched. A repeat of these unfortunate events is probably what Kipsigis MPs are concerned about when demanding for acceptable compensation and resettlement. President Kibaki has said that the resettlement will be conducted humanely. PM Raila has also assured that this time the evictions would be given a human face to ensure the fundamental rights of the affected individuals are not violated.

The latest initiative by Prime Minister in forming an all inclusive Mau Forest Conservation Task Force deserves the express support of all Kenyans. The 22 member all-inclusive task force is firstly expected to draw up its own terms of reference through consultations with all stakeholders including residents and then proceed to develop a time-bound implementation plan of evicting, compensating and re-settling those who currently reside in the Mau Forest. Ultimately, government plans to re-demarcate the forest boundaries, fence off the forest and also put in place an effective long-term management plans to reclaim and sustain the jewel that is Mau Forest. The success of these plans will mean that the country will have averted a major economic disaster and unthinkable environmental catastrophe. It will also mean another feather on to RAO's already thickly feathered political cap.

The Government also ought to prosecute all those politicians and public servants who were adversely involved in illegal demarcation of the forest in the first place. I mean, if President Moi ordered these illegal allocations, he must be called into account and made to answer charges of abuse of office!

The recommendations of the Ndungu Report may have been too drastic in suggesting amendments to sections of the constitution to facilitate the formation of a Lands Title Tribunal to enable the revocation and rectification of all irregular title deeds in the Mau and other forest., but it I think is time for us to bite the bullet for the sake of future generations.

Resources: Mau Complex Under Siege: Continuous destruction of Kenya’s largest forest, UNEP, 2005

PM Raila Due for State Visit to United Kingdom

Prime Minister Raila Odinga and Justice Minister Martha Karua at the 3rd National Integrity Review Conference at Bomas of Kenya, Nairobi, yesterday.

Prime Minister Raila Odinga is expected to visit United Kingdom beginning this weekend in his maiden official visit to the British Empire since the formation of the Grand Coalition Government.

In what would normally constitute a presidential visit, the PM will be accompanied by a record six cabinet ministers, five from PNU and one from ODM plus at least fifteen senior government officials. The cabinet ministers are; Uhuru Kenyatta (Deputy PM & Minister for Trade- PNU), Kiraitu Murungi (Energy PNU), Mutula Kilonzo(Nairobi Metropolitan - PNU), John Michuki (Environment ag. Finance – PNU), Moses Wetangula (Foreign Affairs - PNU) and finally Najib Balala (Tourism – ODM).

The Kenya Embassy in London has yet to release an official programme and it is not known if the PM will make a stop at No. 10 Downing Street for a meeting with British PM Gordon Brown. The size and composition of the PM’s entourage suggests that a wide range issues will be on agenda of the Kenyans who recently launched the most ambitious development plan since independence dubbed Vision 2030. Britain is a former colonial master and has for a long time been Kenya’s leading trading partner amongst the G8 countries.

On Sunday, the PM is due for a BBC interview where it is expected he will answer to a wide variety of issues affecting Kenya and the African continent in general. Issues touching on governance like constitutional reforms and corruption are expected to feature while Zimbabwe will certainly be a subject of his interview.

PM Odinga has several public lectures lined up including one (already fully booked) lecture at The Royal Institute of International Affairs - Chatham House at St James's Square, where he is expected to talk about Leadership and Democracy in Africa on Tuesday 22 July 2008 at 13h30.
Chatham House, formally known as the Royal Institute of International Affairs, is a non-profit, non-governmental organization based in London whose mission is to analyse and promote the understanding of major international issues and current affairs. It is regarded as the world's leading organization in this area. Read the CHATHAM House Wikipedia entry here.
Chatham House says on its website that it has a mission to be a world-leading source of independent analysis, informed debate and influential ideas on how to build a prosperous and secure world for all.

The Kenya Embassy has organised a reception for Kenyans to be addressed by the PM later on the same day at the Great Cumberland Place's Ocean Room, Cumberland Hotel at 18h30.

Yesterday, the PM extended a public invitation to John Githongo to return to Kenya and it is unknown if the PM will be meeting the former Ethics and Governance Permanent Secretary, now living in self-imposed exile in the UK.