[ By: Charles Onyango-Obbo ]
I think we are in danger of getting carried away by Obama and forgetting to do one of the things that has enabled Africans survive all sorts of hardships — have a good laugh.

Over the last two weeks, we read serious stuff from clever men and women discussing what US President Barack Obama’s visit to Africa (Ghana, that is) means.

Would he make some earth-shaking announcement that would open a whole new chapter in US-Africa relations?

What was the significance of his decision not to visit his fatherland, Kenya?

Then, while he is in Ghana and after, the commentators and pundits continued to dissect. Oh, they said, Obama went to great length to appeal to the African youth and try and inspire them to seize the future and save our long-suffering continent from corrupt and thieving leaders.

I think we are in danger of getting carried away by Obama and forgetting to do one of the things that has enabled Africans survive all sorts of hardships — have a good laugh.

I asked myself what my maternal great grandfather, from the comfort of his grave, was thinking of Obama.

He was a warrior and a dedicated cattle keeper, who took great pride in his herd. Even by the standards of his times, the early 20th Century, my great grandfather was considered to have quite unusual views.

For example, he took intellectual property rights too seriously. As a result, whenever he saw an animal that resembled any of his bulls anywhere in nearby villages, he would consider them to have been fathered by one of his champion bulls.

So, claiming copyright, he would seize it and take it to his kraal.

Clearly he would have been scandalised by Obama. As the world’s most powerful man, and because he has roots in Kogelo, in Kenya’s Nyanza, the US president is also the biggest African chief ever. But there was nothing African about Obama in Ghana.

First, African chiefs never travel empty-handed. People know that you are a chief going by what you left in their mouths. I watched carefully, and Obama was greeting Ghanaians “like that” without leaving anything in any of the outstretched palms.

A modern African chief would travel with suitcases full of money, which he would “pour” wherever he went. Let us look at a case from Uganda.

Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni came to power in 1986, after a five-year war based in an area called Luwero Triangle, about an hour’s drive from Kampala.

In 1985 the Museveni rebels set out on a long trek toward the west, from where they regrouped and begun the big push eastward that eventually handed them victory.

Some years ago, Museveni went on a highly sentimental pilgrimage with some of his comrades in the war to retrace that journey.

Peasants, some of who had given the rebels food and other support back then, turned out and stood on the roadside to greet the pilgrims.

Museveni was aware that he was returning as a chief, not a penniless rebel leader, so he carried sacks of money.

Everywhere he stopped to greet the people, he showered them with envelopes stuffed with money. That is the African way. By those standards, Obama was a failure.

Then, and this was the definitive one, he went back to America without a Ghanaian wife. My great grandfather would have been appalled.

The elders would have either accused his wife Michelle of having “bewitched” him so that he could not look at another beauty, or they would have complained that “Michelle was the one wearing the trousers in the house.”

In the good old days when we had real African chiefs and kings, wherever they travelled, the tribes along their path gave them brides.

This served many purposes. First, it helped keep the peace, because a powerful chief was less likely to attack his in-law tribe.

Secondly, it was an instrument for redistributing wealth. Since land, fishes, forests, name it, belonged to the king, there were two ways of getting to share the wealth.

You either joined the king’s army and rose to be a great general, and he would reward you with land and forests; or you ensured that your daughter got married into the palace.

If the king were happy with her, he would give her clan or tribe goodies. Otherwise, there was no fair system for distributing the kingdom’s wealth.

However, Obama did not escape my great grandfather’s Africa altogether. He (and many Africans for that matter) might not have realised it, but those female traditional dancers who put on a show for him — and entertain the VIPs on big national days — are a rather embarrassing relic of this past.

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   By: Jerry Okungu
I have been forced to respond to the Washington Post story on Kenya that was filed by one Stephanie McCrummen supposedly working for the same paper’s Foreign Service department.

The article appeared in the Washington Post of May 19, 2009 (Memorial Service Boycott Underscores Fragility of Kenya’s Peace)

It is my hope that despite the contents of this rejoinder, the Editor of the Washington Post will still find it professional to give me as a Kenyan, the write of reply on behalf of all Kenyans at home and abroad so that falsehoods, innuendoes and rumors contained in the article are corrected.

I am not here to defend the obvious weaknesses of the present regime nor am I here to take a partisan stand on the events of December 2007 when Kenya erupted in an orgy of violence.

I am here to correct the falsehoods that the Western Press is fond of visiting on Kenya and Africa in general.

McCrummen believes that “ethnic gangs burnt to death 28 people inside a church” in Kenya’s Rift Valley region. Yes, many people perished in a Kiambaa church whose numbers we will never know.

We will never know the true numbers because the figures have been changing from time to time depending on who one actually talks to. Others have put it at 35, 40 or even 50.

More importantly, the cause of the fire, according to eye witnesses is still in contention with others talking of a cigarette smoker inside the church inadvertently starting the fire.

This is the single reason why Kenyans have been demanding for a thorough inquest into the Kiamba fire and other killings in Nairobi, Naivasha and Nyanza in order to deal with conflicting rumors if peace is to be restored in Rift Valley and Kenya in general.

McCrummen needs to be educated on the history of land conflict in Kenya, particularly in the Rift Valley and coastal regions of Kenya before making sweeping statements about the cause of the conflicts.

She needs to know that Kenya is a multi-ethnic society just like the United States of America. The difference is, you call us tribes when you prefer to refer to various American ethnic communities as races or nationalities.

Groups that caused mayhem in Kenya soon after elections were not “thugs” as McCrummen would like to call them. They were normal human beings with grievances that had lasted nearly half a century. They were ordinary people that had become fed up with lies, conmanship and blatant abuse of their rights to exist with dignity.

The 2007 election campaign was a special one in Kenya’s history. For the first time in more than 40 years, Kenyans were ready to elect a truly democratic government purely on the basis of the popular vote in all of the 8 provinces.

When this obvious theft of votes and abuse of the rights of citizens became apparent, the peasantry rose up in arms to claim what they believed to be truly theirs.

Kenya Election Violence (Dec. 2007 into 2008)

Four types of violence erupted.

First was the State organized terrorism by deploying armed police to ensure votes were tampered with in ODM strongholds. These police officers were deployed in their thousands in Rift Valley, Nyanza and Western regions where ODM had the largest number of supporters. However, what the state was not aware of was the counter intelligence network that ODM had put in place that monitored every government’s move.

With each passing day, these officers were spotted, arrested and handed over to the nearest police stations and mysteriously released even though they were “civilians with dangerous weapons.”

These events built tensions all over the country long before the ballot day.

As a Kenyan, I voted 200 miles away from the capital and returned to the city to wait for results.

The whole day had been extremely peaceful and for the next 24 hours, Kenyans already knew which party was winning the elections. The exit poll conducted by the International Republican Institute and paid for by American tax payer’s funds can testify to this.

However, with counting in progress, ODM had won 6 of the 8 provinces by a landslide.

Suddenly the Electoral Commission claimed it could not receive votes from Central and Eastern Kenya where Kibaki had his base support.

With such delays, panic and tension gripped the entire nation. What with careless humor from the Election Commission chairman quipping that some of his returning officers had disappeared with ballot papers from Central Province and were probably still “cooking the results!”

When suddenly the Press Center where the results were to be announced was cleared by armed forces, Kenyans knew something was amiss. When they saw a few minutes later that the results had been announced in Kibaki’s favor with just 43 parliamentary seats against the ODM’s 105 seats, Kenyans went in a rage.

But worse was to come. Within minutes of announcing the results, Kibaki was taking the oath office as the sun was setting at his palace lawn!

That swearing in was the last straw that broke the camel’s back.

Spontaneously, the country erupted in chaos; chaos that even State security could not handle.

If the Kalenjins attacked the Kikuyus in Rift Valley, it was not because they had planned it. They saw them as members of the Kibaki tribe that would do anything to steal their land, votes and even their rights. It was like saying, ” we are tired of being neighbors with people who can stop at nothing to have their way.”

Were they right in doing so? No, I don’t think so because many ordinary innocent Kikuyus suffered for no fault of their own.

But this suffering cannot be analyzed in isolation no matter how self righteous we may want to sound.

We have to see it in terms of the Civil Rights Movement in America in the 1960s, the King riots in Los Angeles in the early 1990s, ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, Rwanda and Hitler’s Germany.

It is natural for a human being to react angrily if injustice is visited upon him. It is called self-preservation instinct. And in most cases, the aggressor is not necessarily right. It is an emotive thing.

This was the second type of violence was seen in Rift Valley, Kiambaa church included.

The Kalenjins found a perfect excuse to reclaim their ancestral lands that were forcibly occupied by the Kikuyu tribe when Jomo Kenyatta was president between 1963 and 1978.

It must also be remembered that the Kikuyus that settled in Rift Valley had lost their ancestral lands in Central Province to the Kenyatta family and his ruling elite to the extent that to date, the Kenyatta family alone owns land equivalent to one province in Kenya.

Another thing; the current killings going on in Mt. Kenya area by Mungiki militias has a direct link to the Kenyatta era’s land grabbing spree. These are descendants of Mau Mau fighters who came from the bush to find their land taken by new leaders. That is why Mungikis are causing mayhem in Central province to destabilize the ruling class.

The third type of violence erupted in Nyanza, Western and Coast provinces.

In their nature, they were a class uprising when the have-nots found an opportunity to rise up against the haves in Kenya. It was an uprising occasioned by years of deprivation, inequality and lack of opportunities for young people to earn a decent living.

To illustrate my point; my car was destroyed by marauding youths right in Kisumu my home town where I grew up. They saw me as a symbol of what had deprived them of a bright future! In other words, they wanted me to explain why I was driving a 4 wheel car when they could not afford a bicycle! And I understood their frustration.

The fourth violence was when prominent politicians and businessmen from Central Province, and their names are with Kofi Annan, actually paid and transported Mungiki militias to go and carry out reprisal killings in Naivasha town, 50 miles from Nairobi. In that town, members of the Luo, Luhya and Kalenjin communities were flashed out of public transport buses and hacked to death in broad day light as other gangs locked families in their shanty dwellings and set them ablaze. In one case of James Ndege, he lost 9 children and 2 wives in one fire!

The last type of violence is related to the first, organized by the State and carried out by its armed police.

It targeted mainly Luos, Luhyas and Kalenjins in Nyanza, Western, and Kibera slums in Nairobi. The police alone shot to death unarmed youths, some as young as 15 years of age on the run. Most of them were shot at the back from close range according to government pathologists.

In this operation, 450 were shot in Kisumu, 119 in Kakamega, 39 in Kibera slums in Nairobi and many more in Nakuru and Eldoret in Rift Valley. A simple Arithmetic would tabulate police killings at 600 known deaths out of the 1500 casualties that McCrummen is quoting. The police therefore accounted for 40% of the deaths we are talking about here.

The reason why the Kiambaa funeral service and its planned monument is causing concern and raising tension is the way it has been planned and organized. Kenyans are asking the wisdom of reconciling Kenya by celebrating the deaths of 28 souls of a single tribe while ignoring the other 1000 plus.

They are seeing preferential treatment being given to a handful of one tribe that happens to belong to President Kibaki when nobody is talking of those 450 police killings in Kisumu or those that perished in a similar fire in Naivasha.

They are seeing the usual hypocrisy when leaders talk of reconciliation yet the wielders of state power still would love to discriminate against other communities as they use state resources to mourn and bury their dead.

They know they are lying to the public and the public know it too. That is why than lone voice looked at Kibaki and the 28 coffins and told Kibaki to his face that among those coffins, he could not see any of Kibaki’s or Raila’s children.

It was a statement that spoke volumes for ordinary Kenyans; Kikuyus, Luos and Kalenjins alike.

There is more to Kenya’s problems than the gossips and rumors in Nairobi’s pubs.

Kenyans are outraged by a proposal to pay hefty salaries to the wives of the prime minister and vice-president.

A leaked document says the head of civil service Francis Muthaura has directed that they each be paid $6,000 (£3,000) every month.

But MPs have vowed to shoot down the proposal in parliament, saying it is too expensive for the economy.

Kenyan tax-payers are already paying heavily for the cabinet – the largest ever – with more than 40 ministers.

A government memo leaked to the local media directs that Ida Odinga and Pauline Musyoka, wives of the prime minister and vice-president respectively, will be rewarded for their roles as hostesses.

   Ida Odinga                                                                     Pauline and Kalonzo Musyoka [Enlarge]

The pay is also supposed to recognise their role for upholding national family values.

‘Over-burdened’

But Eugene Wamalwa, an MP and brother for former Vice-President Micheal Kijana Wamalwa, says the tax-payer is already over-burdened and the allowances are uncalled for.

“The prime minister and vice-president attract one of the highest salaries in the world and that will be sufficient for couples,” Mr Wamalwa said.

And former head of the Kenyan chapter of Transparency International Gladwell Otieno said the move is a confirmation that Kenyan politicians are just a greedy caste, looking after themselves at the expense of poor Kenyans recovering from the effects of post-election violence.

The two women will join First Lady Lucy Kibaki, whose allowances increased last year to nearly $8,000 a month.

President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga agreed to share power in February after negotiations led by former UN head Kofi Annan to end weeks of violent clashes.

Some 1,500 people died and 600,000 left homeless around the country after last December’s disputed elections.

Taken From: How rich is Kenya, really?