I'm in utter danger of exposing my ignorance about economics but a wise man once said, "it is better to not know and ask then to not know and stay quiet." Okay, a few weeks ago the Kenyan budget was read and of course the usual suspects liqour and cigarettes were taxed a little more. The Minister also said that some taxes on certain commodities wouldn't change, I'm not going to summarise the speech here. But is it me or does everything go up after the budget irregardless of even if the Minister says they are taking tax ABC of certain things, are those cases because of corporate greed or because the companies/ industries had already been absorbing certain other taxes without passing them onto the customer and now since that burden has been taken off them they don't lower their prices to recoup their losses? Given the high inflation rate in Kenya and the fact that the economy isn't growing as fast are price controls a viable option? Bankelele and company please help a brother out?
So as not to sound crass, first of all I must express my shock about the continued beheadings by the Mungiki that seem to continue unabated. But when The East African Standard covered
this issue they as usual could not pass up an opportunity to put their collective foot in their mouth.
I am sure they did not have this
movie in mind when the Editor let this line make it to press,
"Kinyanjui was a matatu while Kamau was a taxi driver."Anyway I'm running out of time, but I'm going to give you a preview of what I am working on for my next post. There was this Mario Puzo book called the
Last Don, if I remember correctly. Part of the book was about a movie the mafia family in it had invested in and how during the premiere, many of the high rollers there went buck wild and ended up hooking up with people they normally would never be seen with ie the staff. The book referred to it as "f*cking below the line," in the book of course this was a one night arrangement and it ended there. But in real life when we f*ck below the line (hereafter referred to as settling) for a short time, what happens is that the other party may realise that this is their chance to be with someone they ordinarily would never have a chance to be with and they decide to hang on for dear life. What happens is that you now have on your hands what Archer once called an unflushable, I'll tell you all how I ended up with one a few months back and how it took a herculean effort to get rid of her.
ps: Lest you all think I have an ego and a half, there is someone out there who thinks of me and you as examples of "f*cking below the line" that is the nature of life. There is always someone out there higher on the ladder than you..........
