The day I couldn't blog is when I knew my life had plunged into the depths of boredom. Nowadays all my life is work, home, occasional shopping and back again. The one light of my life is the fact that my new apt complex have their own cable provider and one of the free channels is FSN (Fox Soccer Channel) but the only problem with it, is the fact they are a small company so at times the service is trash. So last week on Saturday morning I got up primed to watch Liverpool beat Chelsea only to have a black screen staring back at me. I called them only to be told "we shall send someone over on Wednesday." I had to restrain myself from cussing, Wednesday?! I needed to watch the match now! But anyway I did miss Rob Styles robbing us and handing Chelsea a point, but at least it's back, and I'll be able to watch this weekend's matches.
Speaking of soccer, I found this classic quote about some older players who decided to joint some lower league teams.
Over at Cardiff, the new strikeforce of Robbie Fowler and Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink (combined age 232) will surely be dubbed Darby and Joan. Neither will be playing at the weekend due to 'injury' and 'late registration'. Could the real reason be that the team coach has not yet been fitted with a wheelchair ramp?
I was reading this article and first thing I have to say, "no shit Sherlock!" When would white people ever be dissatisfied with their standard of living in America?! It's like doing a study to find out that the Sun rises in the East and sets in the West.
Talk about laying of hands! He must have really been in the Spirit! But for real, to move from sharing the gospel on TBN (The Blasphemy Network) to stomping your wife means that someone just isnt practicing what they preach? Anyway time to go back to my humdrum existance which is only brightened by the splendour that is the English Premier League. Nice weekend people!
Press Freedoms Under Threat In Kenya
5 years ago
8 comments:
Bwana Aco, get yourself a lady. She will take your mind of things. Making love is like medicine for the soul.
Lol at "laying of hands" bit. The man is either stuoid or brave, how do you slap Juanita- chick is scary when she is preaching the word of Love-God's word. Now who dares cross her?
AAs have a monopoly over domestic violence, i.e. internalized oppression.
Some of the complaining has no real merit...
Ati... "not getting a job coz of funny sounding names"...
Aco... with ur own 2 eyes... ebu check out how well some "immigrants" (& their kids) who have "funny" names like:
- Kamau (Kenyan)
- Ayesi (Nigerian)
- Omar (Egyptian)
- Patel (Indian with da motels)
- Lee (Korean)
- Hwa (Chinese)
and I could go on & on...
Then there are the immigrants & their kids akina:
- Sergey Brin (Russian parents - Google)
- Amar Bose (Indian - Bose speakers)
- Vinod Khosla (Indian - Kleiner Perkins)
- Pierre Omidyar (French-Iranian - EBay)
A small axe to the Safaricom IPO
By L. MUTHONI WANYEKI
I am not the daughter of a Big Man. Neither am I married to a Big Man — or even to the son of a Big Man.
I had the good fortune to have essentially middle-class parents who worked hard to give my siblings and me a good basic education. And I had the good fortune to have a mother whose citizenship made it possible for me to attend university, courtesy of the student loans system of her country.
The student loans covered fees and accommodation. But my parents couldn’t afford to send us much money — getting $100 on birthdays and at Christmas was like getting a windfall. So I worked to supplement the student loans, from the time I left Kenya at the age of 16.
Of course, I now recognise that, despite not being associated with a big man’s family, in comparison with the majority of people in Kenya, I am not only fortunate, I am actually extremely privileged.
But, despite that recognition, having worked since the age of 16, I also know the value of my money. I have worked for what I have. This is why, for instance, I get apoplectic with rage about corruption.
Under Kenya’s ridiculously constructed tax brackets, I fall into the same top tax bracket as Kenya’s Big Men. And I get nothing for it, having to pay privately for everything—including security where I live and medical insurance. But, my privileges taken into account, I certainly wouldn’t mind paying the amounts of tax that I do pay if I felt the money went to help those with fewer privileges, not to pay the obscene salaries of those who cannot be bothered to assure the House of a quorum sufficient to pass even 10 Bills a year — or to build the “bigness” of the Big Men.
The other night, some friends and I calculated the share of Safaricom’s reported Ksh17 billion ($253.7 million) profit that would have gone to Mobitelea — the company that, according to the Public Investments Committee, is irregularly in possession of no less than five per cent of the mobile phone company’s shares, meaning that there are apparently no records of Mobitelea having paid for that shareholding.
MEANING THAT MY TAX MONEY, which went into building and sustaining Telkom and Safaricom, was essentially given away. Meaning that, coming back to our calculation, the alleged owners of Mobitelea — the son of a Big Man and the son-in-law of another Big Man under the former regime and a Big Man in this regime — earned themselves no less than Ksh850,000,000 ($12.6 million) last year alone. From doing nothing at all, except live off the profits of having stolen from us. Ksh850 million off my back (and your’s as well). Again, I am incapacitated with rage.
And yet, the Treasury insists that Safaricom’s initial public offer will proceed, regardless of the outcomes of the PIC debate within the House or any court cases that might ensue.
What?!
FRANKLY, DESPITE OUR NEWFOUND fascination with IPOs, I don’t think a single one of us should put a single shilling forward. Those of us who do work hard and honestly deserve better. If shares in Safaricom could essentially be given away to Big Men, their sons and sons-in laws, then they can be given away to us. Why should we pay for them? They’re our property in the first place, which the government was meant to hold in trust for us. If it breached that trust for three of us, then it should share the love with all of us.
It might not seem like it, but there are, in fact, victims of corruption. Those victims are you and me — every single Kenyan who dutifully pays his or her taxes. I’m furious. I’m ready for a tax boycott — the residential associations led the way and it’s time to scale up their efforts. We need to say to hell with that IPO until the issues raised by the PIC have been satisfactorily dealt with. We need to be the “small axes” that Robert Nestor Marley talked about and cut down all those “big trees.”
L. Muthoni Wanyeki is a political scientist based in Nairobi
@ anon
I think I will take you up on that suggestion!
@ 3types
Dont mess with those church folk! Some of them are crazy!
@ ssembonge
So what theory do you use in the case of African men?
@ coldtusker
I think that immigrants have to work extra hard to make it out here but anyway, no-one said it would be easy.
@ patriotic kenyan
Im just reading the report that just came out, rivetting stuff!
This is greaat
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