The “Project” Culture

When the former president Moi endorsed Uhuru Kenyatta as the man to take over from him, we all referred to Uhuru as the project. It was the first time I had heard the word ‘project’ used in a purely political form. Inasmuch as the word had not been widely used before, the culture it represented was not entirely new. It was also not the last time we were going to have a political project. If anything, that occasion seemed to have ushered in a new era in our development (or lack thereof).

As Kenyans, we have cultivated and perfected what my layman’s mind tells me is a dangerous and retrogressive mindset. None of us can seem to look at the bigger picture of what is supposed to be our collective vision. We are all together in this from the President to the lowliest layman, and everyone in between. We are disjointed in our thinking and our actions. Instead of being one country moving steadily in one direction, we are just a series of projects, each moving in its own direction.

There is a belief that one cannot do anything without help. The government has always looked to the West (and recently to the East) for help in doing every small (or big) thing. Building roads, class rooms, and slum upgrades, require to be set up as projects so that we can go begging for funding. Buying ambulances and digging boreholes cannot take place in the normal development agenda; it has to be planned around the project model so that those concerned can get maximum benefit. Even the digging of pit latrines has not been left behind.

What is wrong with having a properly run development agenda where the use of available resources can be optimized? Why does every small thing have to be thought of as a free-standing project instead of part of the bigger wholesome agenda for the country? If we studied developed countries, would we find them treating every single activity as a project, or would we discover that they plan everything to be an integral part of the country’s agenda?

The Kisumu county MCAs recently voted for themselves to be bought I-Pads. They further voted to be given intensive and expensive lessons on how to use the gadgets. Such is the audacity the ‘Project’ culture can instil in its adherents. I-pads are today what paper was a hundred years ago. They do not qualify to be considered as a project. Instead, they should have been part of the plan to make work easier and so should have appeared in the same budget as stationery. Besides, county government money should not be spent on training grown-ups how to use a gadget that takes a 10 year old only a few hours to master.

As a country, we seem to believe that we are backward, late in development, and unable to do much on our own. For this reason, we feel that taking our development by the horns is too much of an undertaking for us. We therefore believe that everything has to be broken down into manageable projects. This is not wise for a country that wants to be in the big leagues. It slows us down and ensures that we will always be behind.

Devolution, as envisioned in our constitution, did not mean reducing the size of our activities. It just meant doing things that were closer to the common man. It meant having development in the smallest village in the country. What others seem to understand however, is that devolution means breaking down of useful development into useless disjointed projects whose sole purpose is to provide avenues for “eating”.

There are many NGOs running myriad projects in the country. Most of these are ostensibly to lift us and keep us out of poverty. Their effectiveness in achieving this goal is in serious question. Foreign governments are also assisting our country to achieve various goals through projects. Many of these have only helped sink us deeper into debt without changing our standards of living. The word ‘project’ is as innocent as any other English word. It has however always left a bad taste in our mouths. The above is just food for thought from the layman. It is my ‘project’ for the week.

P.S. Uhuru becoming President may have been the most successful project in Kenya – after all.

Beauty vs. Brains – The Kenyan Situation

Most men will say that they prefer to date intelligent women as opposed to just beautiful ones. However, it turns out that men actually prefer beauty to brains. What they say is only meant to establish political correctness; it does not in any way imply what they intend to do. As far as dating is concerned in Kenya, beauty is way ahead of intelligence in the criteria for choosing possible mates (Gospel according to the Layman).

According to my dictionary, the word intelligence has two meanings. The first one is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills. The second is the collection of information of military or political value with synonyms such as information gathering, reconnaissance, spying, espionage, infiltration surveillance, and observation.

Back in the days when I worked, first as a taxi driver, and later as a driver in an NGO, I always strived to be entertaining to my passengers. I discovered early that the best way to break the ice with a passenger was to gather intelligence on them. In this way, it was possible to find information about a person that was close to their hearts. Particularly the time I was at the NGO, it was possible to get detailed information about someone. I would then use what I knew to start a conversation with my passengers.

 I learnt then that if you knew something about someone before you met, you had a definite edge on any future interaction you had with the person. This technique worked well for me on all occasions apart from one. We got a new director and I was assigned the responsibility of driving him around. As was my habit, I read through his bio so as to get a background on him. On paper, at least, his life appeared boring and I could not think of what we could discuss about. He had majored in Medieval History in University! Needless to say, we didn’t hit it off with him.

I know that the Kenyan government is loaded with intelligence of all forms. The first form is there since some of the most educated and knowledgeable people in the country work for government. The second form is also most certainly there because there is a whole department charged with gathering intelligence. It is this department that gathers all information relating to security threats from both within and outside the country. It then passes this information upward to the executive for action.

Being the layman that I am, I do not have a thorough understanding of how the spies work. However, I know they have both the technical know-how and functional requirements to carry out their unenviable work. I also know that they have been doing their work if the reports we hear in the media are anything to go by.

I was saddened to hear that there had been intelligence shared with the government on the recent Garissa terror attack. The same had been said of West Gate. My source of information, like that of many other laymen, is the media. We have no way of verifying what we hear on the news. There has been no denial from the government however and so we can assume that there is some truth in the claims. I have been wondering why the government would ignore such reports, even if they were just hunches.

The government has of late appeared to be rather obsessed with image. It is an obvious case of beauty taking precedence over brains (intelligence). This would lead to it allowing attacks to happen and then come all out to fire-fight. I guess one comes out as more of a hero posing with the bodies of slain terrorists than if he quietly quells a planned terror attack. There is no heroism in killing somebody who was ready to die after he has done all the killing he planned to do. There is heroism in stopping the deaths of people you swore to protect even if it happens away from the cameras.

Don’t mind me and my grumblings. I know you will not hate the president if I point out his shortcomings. I also know you will not love him if you didn’t love him before. If you support him, it is not because you thought he would perform, it is because he is from your tribe or because your tribal kingpin supports him. If you hate him, it is not because he stole your family land; it is because your community and his community are sworn enemies. Kenya is a land of beauty, not brains!

P.S. If one who supported the new constitution (and swore to protect it) claims it is hindering him from protecting us, doesn’t he make the one who had opposed it all along to come out as a hero?

The Speed Bump Philosophy

My father used to have a blue car, a Peugeot 404 station wagon. We were all fond of that car in the family because it was the car we grew up knowing. My big brother and I got our first driving lessons in that car while we were still in primary school. It used to be parked in a wall-less shed just next to our house and since those were safe times and we lived in a safe area, it was relatively safe. One day however, a thief came in the night, broke into the car, and stole the battery. When my brother tried to start the car so that we could go to church (it was a Sunday morning), he realised that the battery was missing. He went to ask my father where he had placed the battery and that made my father very angry.

We all became sleuths in trying to unravel the mystery of the stolen battery. I am the one who discovered where the battery had been taken out through the fence by following grease marks left on the barbed wire (I used to watch Derrick on TV and was a really good detective). I even discovered a rungu (club) which we suspected was left behind by the thief since he needed both hands to carry the battery.

Needless to say, we didn’t go to church that Sunday. After all the investigations had been done and my father’s temper mellowed, he declared that he was going to teach the thief a lesson he would never forget. It was unanimously decided by the family that the thief had made a grievous mistake of robbing none other than us. Everybody seemed to agree (for some strange reason) that the thief was going to try and pay us another visit. Well, this time he was not going to catch us by surprise. We would be waiting for him.

My father used to have one of those traps used for catching animals from the time he was a forester and hunter. He decided that he would set it up on the floor of the car just under the steering wheel. We expected the thief to touch it and get caught for us to find him writhing in pain when we came to check our trap the next day. After serious consideration and brainstorming among the family members, we realised that there was a risk of the thief failing to touch the trap thereby managing to steal the new battery and escape without getting caught. My father again came up with another brilliant addition to the already brilliant idea. We would attach the car keys to the spring plate so as to entice the thief to pick them up. On further consideration, we removed the ignition and door keys from the bunch so that the thief didn’t just decide to drive off with the whole car.

My brother and I were tasked with setting up our “clever” booby trap everyday for many months after that but we didn’t catch the thief. Neither did we lose another battery. We did however become quite adept at setting the animal trap in record time and in a very constricted space. The car was stolen a few years later from a parking lot in Nairobi city and was never seen again. I guess we focussed so much on battery thieves and forgot all about car thieves.

When we had all grown up, my brother and I took a lot of road trips and we would have interesting discussions as we drove along. A major difference we always noticed was the big number of speed bumps along our Kenyans roads unlike when we would drive with our father many years before. We observed that you couldn’t drive fast on any road for two reasons. Either it was full of pot holes, or full of speed bumps. We could never agree on which the lesser evil was between the two. One thing my brother once mentioned comes to mind every time I see a speed bump. He said, “A bump in Kenya is like a tribute to a person who must have been knocked down and killed on the spot where that bump is.”

The ‘Speed bump philosophy’ is popular in all the political decisions made in Kenya. It is this same philosophy that has inspired the proposed security bill, the great wall of Kenya, the botched and re-botched police recruitment exercise, the stepping-aside of senior public officers, and the proposed shut down of the Dadaab Refugee camp. I don’t like bumps, political or otherwise. I think they force me to drive slowly on a perfectly good road, beating the purpose of building it in the first place. They also remind me that having good roads as Kenyans does not make us safer drivers. They are a constant reminder of our failure to make fundamental changes in our attitudes to be at par with our infrastructure.

P.S. My younger sister and I did not regret so much the loss of the battery, but for a rain coat that the thief also stole from the car (ostensibly as a cushion for carrying the battery). A few days earlier, we had discovered a bar of chocolate in the coat and had eaten part of it. We had not finished it for fear of being discovered and now we always wish we had eaten all of it.

Do All Religions Share a Common God?

I work for a faith based charitable organisation which takes residential care of orphans and destitute children. The unique thing about my organisation is that, the “Faith” in its title is not just a word. It is the philosophy on which it is founded and continues to exist. No requests for funds or other forms of aid are ever made to any person or organisation. Instead, when there is a need for anything, it is asked for from God in prayer. After that, all people have to do is wait for God to answer the prayers. It is as simple as that and more than 300 hundred children have graduated from there having been fed, clothed, and educated through sheer faith. This is in addition to the about 140 children still resident there.

A story is told of the home many years ago. There was no single morsel of food and supper time was fast approaching. The founder, who was then the house parent, instructed that the table to be laid as usual. He got the children to sit at their places in front of their empty plates. He then asked all to close their eyes and he prayed. He asked God to bless the food they were about to receive. A few minutes after they had said Amen, a vehicle hooted outside their door.

On going to check who was coming to visit at that time of the night, they found some Hindu adherents who had come to bring food. Nobody could believe it. The food was actually cooked and had been brought in hot and ready to eat. The children were served and ate to their fill. It was the first time I ever heard, first hand, of faith becoming manifested in an actual practical miracle besides those we read about.

In the time I have worked there, I have also experienced faith at work. At one time there was no money for the weekly grocery shopping and we didn’t know what to do next after we had prayed about it. On the afternoon of the day we thought we were going to have to take goods on credit, we got some visitors. There were local businessmen from the town and they had come to bring us groceries. They could as well have seen our shopping list. They brought the exact items that were required for the week. These people were not even Christians, they were Muslims.

My observation from the above is that when a Christian prays, his God can send a Hindu or a Muslim to deliver the answer. I also believe that when a Muslim or Hindu prays, his God can send a Christian to do his bidding. My question then is this; if the God I talk to can talk to a person of a different religion, doesn’t it then mean that we are under the same God?

Terrorism in recent years has shed negative light on the religion of Islam in Kenya. We have come to believe that Islam is a religion of violence and evil. My limited Layman’s knowledge is however enough to tell me that on many occasions in history, Christianity, Hinduism, and many other religions have been associated with intolerance and violence.

I believe there is no religion that can claim to be endowed with all knowledge and understanding of all the issues of life. I believe that all who want to acquire knowledge on anything will find it readily available. You may be wondering why the Layman is sounding all philosophical. You may be interested to know where I got the view from.

Many years ago, I worked as a taxi driver and I met diverse people in the form of passengers. On one occasion, I drove a middle aged man who was adorned in the form of African attire that is common on Nigerian movies. In those days, I was very zealous for Christ and took every opportunity to win converts. The man was quite friendly and talkative. Naturally, the discussion took a biblical turn and I was on fire. The man turned out to be more knowledgeable in the bible than me. Our discussion went back and forth between the Old and New Testaments more times than I care to remember. We were fast approaching the point in evangelism where one pops the question, “Would you like to get saved?”

I was so awestruck by the man’s profound knowledge of the word that the question I asked instead was, “Why aren’t you saved?” He looked at me straight in the eye and replied coolly, “Am a Muslim” If there is such a word as icebreaker, there should be ‘ice-former’ because that effectively froze my tongue and I didn’t know what to say next. What would you have said in my place?

P.S. I have seen Christian public crusades but have never seen those from any other religion. I wonder how it would be if Muslims and Hindus conducted crusades and evangelism campaigns.

The Great Wall of Kenya

It is now official. Kenya is going to put up a wall on the border with Somalia. When I first heard the security cabinet secretary announcing this, I thought it was just an idea that he was considering. I later heard that even the building materials had been procured and were already en-route to the proposed site. Apparently, terrorists have become too daring. They cross into Kenya’s Mandera town and attack people. They then cross back through the supposedly ‘porous’ (but actually non-existent) border into their own town of Bulahawa, a mere 3 kilometres away.

According to the Government, the terrorists’ honeymoon is now over. They can find another country to trample any way they want; thanks to the proposed 200 kilometre wall. It is, hopefully, the last we will have of terrorism. It is however not the first time a country has walled itself in. Probably the most famous wall in the world was built for more or less the same reasons that we are building ours. The Great Wall of China was originally put up to protect China against raiders from Europe and Asia. The earliest recorded section was built around 220 to 206 B.C. by the first emperor of China, Qin Shihuang.

Most of us can relate to a popular black and white TV model that has been a common feature in most Kenyan households until the recent digital switch-off. It was named after the Great Wall of China. Now you know.

Another famous wall that many of us can recall within living memory is the Berlin Wall. The wall was meant to protect the building of a socialist state on the eastern side. The wall ended up achieving the unintended purpose of preventing defectors from fleeing to the west.

Many other walls have been put up in various countries for different purposes. The 3,268 Kilometre Indo-Bangladesh Barrier and the 8 Kilometre Centa Border fence between Spain and Morocco were put up to stop illegal migration. There are other countries who, like Kenya, have decided to put up “Anti-Terror” walls. These include the 3 Kilometre Egypt-Gaza Barrier between Egypt and Palestine; and the 703 Kilometre Israeli-West Bank Barrier between Israel and Palestine. An unlikely use of a wall is to be seen in the 700 Kilometre Iran-Palestine Barrier that is meant to prevent drug smuggling.

From the little knowledge I have as a layman, I can observe that walls (apart from those in houses), rarely achieve their intended purpose. Countries that put up walls to shut others out often discover the hard way that they have barricaded themselves in.

Like I always say, I am just a layman, but one with eyes. I can see that terrorism has evolved. Warfare is also different from what it used to be in medieval times. Hand to hand combat using primitive weapons has now been restricted to the history books. Call me stupid but, I don’t see how you can wall in a terrorist who has enough explosives to blow a whole City into smithereens. I also don’t see how you can build a 200 Kilometre wall (whose height is still a National Security secret), and hope that the terrorists will not “think” of just going round it. At times like this, am not proud to be Kenyan. I can just see the senior most security bosses unable to hold back the mirth after coming up with the wall “idea” and imagining how the terrorist will be “terrified” when they realise there is nowhere to run because there is a GK wall in front of them.

In my layman’s mind, I know that if you want to fight an enemy, you have to think like him. If I was a terrorist and came up to a wall, I would know I have 3 options. First, I can just go round it. Secondly, I could simply climb over it. Thirdly, if I was in a hurry and had some explosives left over from my last terror attack, I could just blow myself through the wall. If I used the third option, the government would benefit in that it would now have two walls instead of just one; or it could have a big heap of rocks to build the next wall on the agenda.

If Kenya sees walls as an option against terrorism and other conflicts, then she will have to put up very many walls. We can have walls between areas occupied by cattle rustling communities. We could also have them between conflicting counties. If Tanzania continues with their disagreements with us, why not put up a wall between us? Why, also, not fence in Migingo Island? While we are at it, we should not forget to put up a roof as well. Pardon the Layman; he is not in a particularly good mood today.

P.S. Call me old fashioned, but I think it is in very bad taste to post pictures of corpses of terror victims on social media. Spare a thought for family members who did not already know that their loved ones had been killed.

This article was conceived before the Garissa attack and is not in any way intended to make fun out of the unforgivable act.