Nairobi Notebook

Old Boys Club

Last year Kenyan MPs voted - overwhelmingly believe it or not - in favour of giving themselves a massive pay-rise. They are now some of the best paid parliamentarians in the world (probably the best if you work out their hourly salary given the pitiful amount of time they actually spend in the chamber), taking home close to one million shillings (some $15,000) a month in salary and allowances.

But today we learn from The Standard that they are not finished yet. Having looked after themselves MPs are now turning their attentions to their predecessors. Not just their immediate predecessors...the 345 million shilling secret "send-off" includes every living MP who has entered into office since Kenyan independence in 1963. The speaker of the house has called the payment a "token gesture of appreciation".

A token gesture maybe how the political elite in this country perceive such sums of money. But I doubt that's how the 18 million or so people who live on less than a dollar a day here will see it. So pity the Kenyan tax-payer who will have to foot the bill while trying to keep his above water as   the price of  oil soars, food prices  show no immediate sign of steadying and inflation skips past 20%.

And if this move by the old boys network isn't enough to make you shake your head with despair as the blood boils, then take a look at the direction Kenya's political leaders continue to take the fight against corruption. A parliamentary committee has laid its hands on a document detailing an amnesty deal between the Anti-Corruption Commission - located within the absurdly named Integrity House - and Kamlesh Pattni, one of Kenya's wealthiest businessmen and a principal scoundrel in the Goldenberg scandal. In return for immunity Pattni has had to surrender his luxurious Grand Regency Hotel. Big deal say many here, he financed the hotel
with millions of dollars stolen from the Kenyan economy in the first place.

When I interviewed the Anti-Corruption Commission's spokesman, Nicholas Simani, last year  he assured Kenyans they would see the  day when the "big fish" were held to account. You would assume that included the masterminds behind Goldenberg. The paper-trail is supposedly there but there is zero politcal will...plus ca change!

Safety in Numbers

It is official. Nairobi is a safe city. I don't base this on any official statistics becasue I haven't seen any. I couldn't tell you whether gun crime is down, nor if car-jackers are turning their minds to other activities. But what I can tell you is that the kapoors (an Indian family living in the flat below) are now taking their daily 'power-walk' OUTSIDE the electrified perimetre fence.

This is not a decision they will have taken lightly. When I arrived 18 months ago mother and daughter would everyday stride purposefully up and down the 20 metre car park, in their matching pink tracksuits, the daughter plugged in to some Bombay beats on her walkman. Every now and again they would mix it up a bit and take in a lap of the swimming pool - one can only imagine the monotony got to them. When I asked "why", they looked at me as if I was dicing with death each time I walked out the gates.

"You know it is dangerous out there (beyond the compound walls). You will be mugged. Better to stay inside". The Kapoors have lived in Nairobi for years and they remember the city's more violent days. Not long ago people would put Nairobi - then affectionately known as Nai-robbery - in the same bracket as Johannesburg...in other words an altogether un-savoury place where you didn't venture out on foot after dark and you ran all red lights unless you actively wanted to surrender your car.

But now the Kapoors walk a circuit on a neighbouring street. Ok, it's a gated road with two guards manning the barrier. But this surely is a sign of the times.

Nairobi has reached its tipping point.  

Satirical Relief

Reading the newspapers in Kenya often involves sifting through stories of murderous jilted lovers, acts of depraved pedophilia and pages of political reportage that consistently fail to take the country's politicians to task. Sure, press freedoms are not all they could be. You do not have to cast your mind too far back to recall the armed raids on the offices of the Standard Newspaper and Kenya Television Network which the  government supposedly ordered on the grounds of "protecting state security".  Perhaps the media has has less room in which to manoeuvre than might appear?

But if you want an example of someone willing to push the boundaries and indulge himself in political satire then check out GADO's sketches. GADO - real name Godfrey Mwampembwa - rarely fails to read between the lines and let his pencil do the talking. Take today's sketch (see left) over recent calls from certain quarters within the cabinet for an amnesty for those who committed all manner of heinous crimes during the post election violence. The speech bubble "my people need protection" says it all and anecdotal evidence says that protection could be needed higher up the political echelons than many Kenyans would like to accept.
 

What bugs me is why if GADO gets it can the reporters not say it, instead filling column inches with who will make up yet another commission of inquiry.

This is my favourite sketch of the year. It sums up perfectly the outcome to the political turmoil: more than a thousand lives lost for the sake of two egos being able to say they both won. At the time my friend Steve Bloomfield, who writes for The Independent, asked Raila Odinga why neither he nor Kibaki had been out to their constituencies to defuse the tension. His answer - something along the lines of 'there's nothing I can do' - was nauseating. This sketch said more than all the commentaries and analysis that filled the papers.

GADO's work is a breath of fresh air in a paper that aligns itself a little to closely to Kibaki for my liking.

  

It Takes Two PAs

A senior civil servant's reception desk is usually a pretty good indication of his or her work ethic. Today I ventured to the office of the Commissioner for Refugee Affairs. Behind the counter, not one but two PAs. A sure sign of a bloated ego. The lady to my left was engrossed in a private text conversation on skype while her colleague opposite was slumped over her keyboard. Neither acknowledged my arrival and only after a couple of overly-polite "excuse-mes" did the lady on my right rise from her slumber...enough at least to ask me what I wanted.

I was there to hand over a letter requesting permission to visit a refugee camp near the Somali border. The government want this camp that is home to 180,000 Somalis shut down. My guess is it's a bit of an embarrassment apart from anything else. The Kenya/Somalia border is supposedly shut yet still the refugees arrive into Kenya. So much for tight border controls. The story I want to cover isn't nearly as political.

The PA waved her hand in a motion to suggest I leave the letter on the counter - tantamount to throwing it in the bin.  I insisted on delivering it to the Commissioner myself who I could see through an open door was clearly not in the meeting the PA said he was. I waited 50 minutes before he ventured out of his office, refusing like his staff to acknowledge me and brushing me aside with a dismissive wave. So I waited until he returned at which point he felt obliged to ask why I was still loitering outside his office. Explaining I hoped to travel to Dadaab and merely wanted to introduce myself, he merely turned away  mumbling "you'll hear in a week. I have a big pile of requests". You can be certain this is not true. But new to his post he seems intent on asserting his authority - read arrogance - and denying journalists permission to cover legitimate stories.

So I would like to open this blog for nominations for the most, unhelpful, obnoxious or downright rude officials you come across...

How Are We Supposed to Fill the Pool?

The taps were supposed to run dry at 9am this morning. That was the warning - not that I had noticed the double page spread taken out by the Nairobi Water Company. So we have filled every receptacle in the house. I figure 50 litres is more than enough to see us through the 48 hours rationing. Vic, who suffers water-panics if there isn’t water within five metres of her, isn’t so sure. The good people at the water company can’t tell me how long the rationing will last. My guess is a while.

For the time being water is still flowing from the taps, but perhaps we are just draining the tank.

We are told the dams are running dry. Ominously, we are supposedly in the middle of the long rains. But they have failed to materialise. Indeed right now the sun is blazing its way through my window and my study feels more like a greenhouse. There is not a black cloud in sight and we have a long wait until the next rains are due in November. It doesn’t take a hydro-engineer to work out that the rationing will have to increase in the coming months if the rains do indeed fail.

No doubt the water bill will continue to rise even though our water consumption falls. The same happened when I lived in Kampala. Again the trigger was erratic rain patterns and low water levels in Lake Victoria, the source of Uganda’s hydro-electric power. The load-shedding got so bad the power grid was turned off every other day, industry was crippled and we lived by candlelight. But that didn’t stop our bills nearly doubling. If anyone can explain which law of economics this follows I would be very grateful.

So I guess we’ll blame this latest inconvenience – how after all are we going to keep the compound’s swimming pool topped up? – on global warming and Kenya’s insatiable demand for firewood.

I remember talking to an Kikuyu lady, Elizabeth Kinyanjui, around this time last year. Her hands were calloused from a  lifetime's  farming  in the tea-plantation clad hills of Limuru just outside Nairobi. Once upon a time she could mark the days she would plant her crops in the calendar. That is how reliable the rains were. Now she has no idea when is best. Back then apparently the hillsides were covered in trees which would "pull the rain down". Elizabeth is not a scientist but she has got the basic gist.

 

 

You're Supposed to Rip Me Off

The last time (February 2007) I went to Times Tower - the nerve centre of Kenya's tedious administrative necessities - it proved a bureaucratic nightmare. It's not meant to be that way. Gone are the ubiquitous civil service typewriters, in are computers. In my quest to  obtain a change of ownership form for my car I duly joined a  queue that snaked around the faux-marble clad hall and up the stairwell. 1 1/2 hours later I was politely informed that I had been mis-informed, was in the wrong queue and would have to join the correct line at the back. A simple form-filling session took half the day. And that was before the fight of getting my log book back.

But at least I could feel virtuous for not using a middle-man. After all how could I perpetuate the system of back-handers - read corruption - that we western journalists heap criticism on African governments for, and our governments love to preach? We'll ignore the fact that back home BAE bribed the house of Saud inconceivable amounts of money and TB ordered a cover up. But what a waste of time. And how green around the ears. It was a simple lesson: Don't fight the system, go with it.

So this time around (you may recall the last car went up in smoke) I did. I was introduced to a man called Mungai who lurks about in the shadows of the petrol station next to Times Towers. He's a smart but shady fellow, dressed usually in an open shirt and octagonal sunglasses that befit a James Bond bad-guy. I met him once, gave him the paper-work, offered him a thousand shillings ($15) which I suspected to be above the odds and left it at that. Today he rang to say my log-book was ready. We met, he handed over the log-book and he turned to leave. I felt like an incredulous Brian in the Monty Python haggling sketch and wanted to shout out, "But you're supposed to rip me off. Don't give this over so easily"!

I kept quiet though and felt content, if not virtuous, that I'd only spent 10 minutes at Times Tower.

2008 Fuel Bug

This time 9 years ago the world was freaking out about the  "Millenium  Super Bug" that the doomsayers  were predicting would send the planet  into  IT meltdown.  Corporations spent who knows how many millions of dollars ensuring their systems would stay up and running into the year 2000.

So you might have thought the executives of Kenya's fuel distributors would for some time have been pondering  over what exactly to do when the need came to hike the price of petrol above 99.99 shillings a litre. Would their digital petrol pumps be able to handle triple figures? After all the price of oil has been rising for some time. In fact the price of the black stuff has increased by over 500% since September 11 2001 from a little over $20/barrel to $126 this week. No nobody can say they have been caught on the hop.

But industry sources told the Daily Nation newspaper that the Kenya Oil company had wanted this week to lift the price to 100.50 shillings a litre, only to be prevented by a technical hitch.

Still, maybe this temporary reprieve for motorists will also aid the governor of Kenya's Central  Bank who at the moment is struggling to control inflation which stands at around 21%. The cost of oil is one factor, so too are rising food prices. It feels like every week the supermarkets in Nairobi are printing out new price lists. As fellow freelancer Sara Nics points out everyone is hurting, from the farmer to the transporter to the customer...I mean  8 bob for an egg!

The outlook is not great either...the rains are playing up again and no one knows when to plant their crops. For tens of thousands of displaced farmers the rains are irrlevant anyway as they remain too afraid to return to their shambas. Kenyans are yet to take to the streets in protest at the impending food crisis, but the wait might not be that long.

Hostile Environments

The life of a freelance journalist in Africa is a perilous one: from covering conflicts where the only rule of engagement is that there are no rules to flying on board ageing soviet-era aircraft piloted by drunk Ukranians. Even a matatu ride outside of Nairobi involves placing your life in the hands of someone who has scant regard for anything...except perhaps the Mungiki.

And don't get me started on the projectiles one is likely to encounter if enough time is spent in the wrong places: RPGs, mortars, grenades...and projectile vomit!

Place your baby near your laptop at your own peril. This latest effort from Oliver landed  less than a foot away! Nick, you have been warned. They do not  mention this on a hostile environment course.

Malindi-itis

Malindi is a rough-around-the edges town, rich in Swahili influences. It retains its frontier feel while all the time oozing the trappings of its infamous Italian population.

The town has a Jekyll and Hyde thing going on. A regular to grace the white-sand shores is Naomi Campbell, one time girlfriend of Formula 1 big-man Flavio Briatore whose turreted mansion dominates the beach-front. But he is just one of some three thousand Italian property owners in Malindi. As a result it is in Malindi that you will find some of the finest espresso coffee, Parmesan and hams to be found on the continent. But they bring with them a seedy past. Rumours abound that Malindi was the place of exile for several high-level Italian Mafioso. Mafia-style assassinations are not unheard of and in December 2004 Kenyan police seized a consignment of high-grade cocaine worth over $6 million that was en route to Europe. I am in no position to draw any links between the Italians and the drugs haul, but underneath the cappuccino veneer of Malindi there are murky things going on. Prime coastal land grabbing for starters…

The rest of the town’s residents have been feeling the pinch as tourists stay clear of Kenya's turquoise waters. The beach-boys are at a loss – there are no single, fifty-something European women seeking a last-ditch sexual adventure in a desperate bid to kid themselves they still have it.

The malayas – or prostitutes – too are getting desperate as a friend discovered this weekend. It was the usual start: a pretty young woman dressed to the nines approaches the table and asks to sit down. She is gently rebuffed and settles for a cigarette instead and my friend and his drinking mate continue their evening. But she returns, repeatedly, and their polite refusals to take her propositions any further become sterner. Two bouncers come over and try and usher her away. But she refuses with a simple argument: “You expect me not to try it on with two single white guys?”, she demands, “That’s my business”. The bouncers’ argument, one that she has no time for, is that they aren’t interested. No doubt she has heard the same before and ended up selling her wares. In her mind this is no more than any other transaction. A seller and a potential buyer (except in this case that is where she is wrong), so what denies her the right to try and earn some cash? Handbags at dawn ensue.

My friend leaves. Outisde the bar a sketchy, nervous looking Italian is unloading a container load of "bathroom products"...at 4 am!

Early Stampede

I have it on good authority that the smart money is on an early wildebeest migration this year down in the Masai Mara. Light rains during the current wet season mean the savannah grasses will dry earlier...and that means the wildrbeest may chance their luck across the Mara River a few weeks earlier than normal. The crocs are already licking their chops.

The migration cannot come soon enough for the Mara Conservancy. They have been facing a financial shortfall to the tune of $50,000 a month since Kenya imploded in January. At the begining of this month their bank balance read zero for the first time. To cut costs night ambushes are suspended and daytime anti-poaching patrols are shorter than usual. There is a nervous sense among the rangers that they are leaving the backdoor open to poachers who are becoming increasingly brazen as the conservancy becomes stretched beyond its limits. I joined the rangers on patrol this week. The frustration was written across their faces as they discovered traces of a poachers camp. The charred remains of a warthog and blackened embers suggested the rangers were a just a few days too late.

Helping keep the conservancy afloat is Joseph Kimojino, the ranger usually in charge of keeping safari vehicles a respectable distance away from the animals. But with so few tourists to monitor he is turning his attentions to fundraising through a blog. Three months ago Kimojino could not even turn on a computer. Now he regularly scores 500 hits a day (cue my face turning green with envy!) and has raked in $47,000 in donations.

You can find Kimojino's blog at http://www.maratriangle.wildlifedirect.org