Kony 2012: Justice For The Victims.

Warning: Images contained in this blog post may be disturbing.

"In April 2003, two weeks before the Iraq war started, two weeks before I travelled to Sudan to document the holocaust, I sold a movie musical to Steven Spielberg. That was always my plan: to make Hollywood musicals.
I had just finished my film degree at USC and I wanted that post-graduation globe-trotting adventure. I figured instead of backpacking Europe, I'd visit an African genocide. With two friends, my camera (purchased from eBay) and a few hundred bucks in cash, I went to tell a story that mattered. And it changed my life forever. 
We had never seen anything like it. So many bodies sleeping on top of each other. They were called night commuters. These children left their homes and walked to urban areas in search of safety from abductions by a rebel group. We couldn't believe we were witnessing something so horrific, and yet unheard of by most. These children were victims of a war that was older than them.

We returned to the states with a clear objective- tell their story. We couldn't forget the faces and names of these children."
-Jason Russell- The Invisible Children (From Huffington Post)


On 21st February 2004, an army of green-fatigued combatants from Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), led by indicted war criminal Okot Odhiambo, descended towards the Barlonyo Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp in the outskirts of Lira, Northern Uganda. Numbering about 300, most of the combatants were young boys barely in their teens.

At around 2pm GMT, Odhiambo led his child soldiers into the camp, and then presided over what is arguably the darkest two hours of Uganda's History.

Speaking in 2010 during an event held to mark 6 years since the event, a child who was part of the invading force recounted the chilling episode. “Odhiambo told us, “I have received the order from the high command of the LRA. You are to kill every living thing. Kill the old people, kill the adults, kill the government soldiers, and abduct all the young children and boys."

"We had three long lines of our fighters. Odhiambo blew a whistle and we scattered. We surrounded the camp and the detach and started fighting and lighting things on fire. Out of the 340 people we had, 100 had guns, we had bombs, we had J2s, AK-47s in plenty, and the other 240 fighters left had clubs and sticks. But most of them were ululating and boosting morale, saying, “We have to capture them alive!" 

-From Kill Every Living Thing: The Barlonyo Massacre

Barlonyo camp was home to about 5000 internally displaced persons, and quite a number of them died or were maimed beyond belief on that wretched, cursed day. Some were shot, many were clubbed to death and a great majority were herded into huts, locked inside and incinerated beyond recognition.

The government had put in place security measures consisting of local militia (the 'Amukas') and other Local Defence Units, but these forces had no radio communication with the Ugandan military, and it would be three hours before the Uganda People's Defence Forces responded. By then, Odhiambo and his forces had butchered over 300 people, and the camp was a grisly necropolis.

Eighteen months after the massacre at Barlonyo, the ICC issued indictments against the top leadership quartet of the LRA, Joseph Kony, Vincent Otti, Dominic Ong'wen and Odhiambo. Of the four, Otti has since died, while Kony, Ong'wen and Odhiambo remain at large.

The ICC indictments came during a period when the Ugandan government had applied relentless pressure on the LRA, and indications were that this pressure, coupled with internal disharmony within the LRA, (Otti was actually executed by the LRA on Kony's direct orders following a disagreement), had severely weakened the rebel outfit.

This weakening of the LRA brought about a semblance of peace to Northern Uganda, but Kony never renounced violence. Taking his band of fighters with him, he pushed West into the Democratic Republic of Congo, spreading all the way to the Central African Republic. In the meantime, his blood-lust continued and his rebels kept committing atrocities against populations they crossed, most notably the Christmas Day Massacre in the Haut-Ulele District of the Democratic Republic of Congo on 25th December 2008.

In the meantime, Jason Russell had gone back home to the United States and established Invisible Children, a non-profit organization aimed at giving compassionate individuals an effective way to respond to the situation. His goal was to challenge people's apathy and turn into action, in the hope that this action would help bring about positive change for the children who touched him so.

And in March 2012, an ingenious campaign by Invisible Children, Kony 2012, succeeded in bringing international attention to Joseph Kony and the conflict in Uganda beyond his wildest dreams. The 30-minute movie, which aims to keep international attention on Kony so that the American government can be persuaded to keep American troops on the ground searching for him, went viral a couple of days after it was posted on YouTube, and as of 17th March 2012 has already been watched over 80 million times.

But the success of the campaign has exposed it to stinging criticism, and the criticism has become almost as viral as the campaign itself. According to Wikipedia, among issues the campaign has been criticized for include:

• Oversimplification of events in the region. While the campaign promotes global activism, it has been criticized for providing a black-and-white picture rather than encouraging the viewers to learn about the situation.
• Giving a misleading impression of the whereabouts and magnitude of Kony's remaining LRA forces. Kony's followers are now thought to number only in the hundreds, and Kony himself is believed to be in the Central African Republic rather than Uganda--a fact that receives only a passing mention in the video.
• In addition, the Ugandan army and the South Sudanese army, which have engaged in military campaigns against the LRA, have themselves been accused of human rights violations such as attacks against civilians, use of child soldiers and looting of civilian homes and businesses.

Admittedly, these criticisms are valid, and they do bring to light a myriad of very pertinent issues that should be addressed. However, it is my opinion that they are more harmful than beneficial like all criticisms are supposed to be, and they only serve to muddle the picture and remove focus from the campaign's intended target: The arrest and prosecution of Joseph Kony.

Jason Russell's campaign was not to right all the wrongs of the Ugandan government on the LRA conflict, or to single handedly bring Kony to book. Much as he may have wished to provide a final, comprehensive solution to the Northern conflict and its resultant effects, he does not have the means to do so and any attempt of a campaign on that scale will in all likelihood end in failure.

When Jason Russell left Uganda in 2003, he had one goal in mind: to tell the story of Uganda's invisible children and make them visible to the international community. He found a wildly effective way of doing that, and instead of getting applause, he gets criticized?

He has been accused of mis-representing the conflict the magnitude of the conflict. For Allah's sake, How? The fact that Kony is now weak and his forces number 'in their hundreds' doesn't take away the fact that a huge percentage of those 'hundreds' are child combatants abducted and forced to fight against their will, children whose very stories Jason Russell set out to tell when he established Invisible Children.

Questions about the plausibility of Ugandan army intervention and logistical and operational support by the American military, which the video advocates, have also been raised by critics. This only serves to highlight the hypocrisy of the critics, because the sole reason why Kony is such a weak, almost spent force, is due to the relentless attacks of the Uganda People's Defence Forces, together with the support of Congolese and South Sudanese forces.

Joseph Kony has been a thorn on the flesh of children for the past twenty-six years, and his victims deserve justice. It doesn't matter whether the children are ten or thirty million, in Northern Uganda, the DRC or Central African Republic, these children need to be protected from him. and so long as he remains at large, they will remain under threat. Jason Russell and his army of invisible children have come up with a campaign that just might work. Instead of pulling him down, let us help him achieve it. Let us take Kony, Odhiambo, Ong'wen and their ilk to the Hague.

That is the only way that this person and other victims of the Barlonyo massacre will find justice.

The Origin Of A Species?

According to recent reports, a group of Chinese and Australian researchers have published a controversial study asserting that a number of unusual-looking fossils unearthed in southern China belong to a previously unknown species of humans. The fossils, with their unusually thick brows and angled jaws, exhibit a mixture of primitive and modern features, making them anatomically unique.

Computer-generated projections on how these species of apes, christened the "Red Deer Cave People", possibly looked like, came up with this likeness:

Other scientists not directly involved with the study are not entirely convinced that the Red Deer Cave people are a different species. Some suggest they're related to another species of ancient humans, while others believe that they're actually modern humans who just happen to look different.

To put the debate to a rest, the study's authors are working on extracting and analyzing DNA from the Red Deer People's fossil remains, and using similar programs their counterparts used to come up with projections on how a modern-day descendant of the Red Deer Cave people would look like. Initial projections indicate such a person would look like this:

FKF, lipa Mariga!

Events this week before the Harambee Stars vs Togo match, which culminated in McDonald Mariga walking out on the team because he felt FKF was trying to do the runaround on him, had me drawing analogous comparisons with my former school.

For my secondary education, I had the privilege of attending AGS, one of the more prestigious schools in Western Kenya. Cosmopolitan in nature, AGS attracts the brightest students from all over the country, such as Najib Balala, Dennis Oliech and this guy...

For an institution of its calibre, gaining admission to the AGS's hallowed halls was of course not the stuff of a day's work. To acquire the right to wear the institution's penguin uniform and be taught Physics by Mr. Minishi, one had to do enough in their eight years of primary education to answer at least three quarters of their primary leaving examination questions correctly. In other words academic dwarfism was a sure-fire guarantee of one NOT gaining admission to AGS.

But this is not to say that academic dwarfs never found their way to AGS. Hell, I remember one particular Christian Religious Education class when I was in Form 2 where one Ezekiel Oduori, my then desk mate, said "Mangoes, Passion Fruits and Bananas." without batting an eyelid when Mr. Oluoch, the CRE teacher, asked him to list three fruits of the Holy Spirit. There were academic dwarves at AGS, alright.

But how did such dwarves slip past the cast-iron intellectual gates which stood between the institution and intellectual dwarfism?

Easy. Football.

You see, AGS had arguably the strongest football team in the region, with an impressive record of teaching other pathetic excuses of footballing outfits from other schools very painful lessons in the game and instilling in them the kind of fear usually reserved for events of terrible import, like say a nuclear Iran.

AGS's reputation as a football powerhouse was maintained through having players on the school team who actually knew their way around a football field.However, getting such players was a perennial problem for AGS, because let's face it: intellectuals who make it to schools like AGS on academic merit tend to make very lousy footballers. True geniuses in the game, such as Ezekiel Oduori, more often than not tend to possess intellectual capacities almost equal to that of a stone in the middle of the Sahara.

This of course presented the AGS administration with a complication: They had an academic reputation to maintain, which meant they had to admit only the brightest students; but they also had a footballing reputation to maintain, which forced threw that principle into all sorts of disarray. In the end, the problem was solved by simply overlooking the academic angle and letting a few academic dwarves with footballing talent slip through.

All the tinkering made the AGS fraternity an odd, almost dysfunctional family. On one hand, we had intellectuals, who could critique Einstein's theory of relativity entirely in figures without the aid of a calculator, yet couldn't score a penalty from six yards if their lives depended on it. At the other end of the spectrum, we had the Ezekiel Oduoris, who couldn't tell you where Indian elephants are found because they didn't know whether elephants even got lost to begin with, but could score a spectacular goal at the end of a match and claim they actually meant to thread a pass to a teammate at the other end of the field.

But dysfunctional or not, the AGS fraternity was, for all intents and purposes, a family. The administrative system ensured that everyone followed the school rules and was treated fairly and equitably.  footballers never got nor expected preferential treatment in the school.


 This is not to say footballers didn't receive preferential treatment. They did, but on merit or when it was absolutely necessary. Tests were sometimes specially re-arranged for football players whenever tournaments clashed with the academic schedules, they had their own special meals during the football season, and they were allowed to skip preps after training. And nobody begrudged them this, because in the end, everyone understood that when the team won, the school's image was enhanced.

In many ways, the structure at AGS reminds me a lot of the National team set-up. Just like the AGS fraternity comprises different students of diverse abilities, Harambee Stars is made up of different players of exceptional but diverse talents. In the same way AGS boasts a mix of veritable academic giants whose examination marks are weighed rather than tallied and others whose intellectual credentials are mediocre at best, some players in the national team are international stars while others aren't even known by fans of the local teams they play for.

But when the Harambee Stars face an opponent, these diversities are only significant in as far as they aid the team as a whole, because in the field, all players are one and the same. A goal by Dennis Oliech is a goal for the Stars and by extension Kenya, just as a spilled shot by Boniface Oluoch is a goal against the Stars and, by extension, Kenya.

And just as the balance at AGS during my time there was held in place by recognition and respect for everyone's status, the administrators at FKF need to understand that the balance in Harambee Stars will only hold if individual players are treated with the respect they deserve, and everybody gets what is their just due by merit.

Which is why I'm with Mariga on this present saga. Everybody in Kenya with even the most basic knowledge of Kenyan football understands one thing- McDonald Mariga is a star. That is his status, and he has earned it.

For the good of the team and out of common decency, the least FKF should do is treat him like one.

Take Kindly The Consel Of Years...

Recently, I joined a few younger friends for a night out at a disco. I used to be quite the party animal in my youth, and after a long time off the circuits, I was eager to see whether and/or how partying has changed over the years.

Well, there's no better way to put it- it was a diabolically horrifying experience. We went to a club in Nairobi which specializes in "New School" music, and I couldn't help but marvel at how unbelievably low standards have sunk. They kept playing music by a certain lass called Rihanna -apparently the kid rules the airwaves in the way Sade did when we were young- and her voice reminded me of the brays of a very agitated donkey when its gonads are firmly in the grip of a burdizzo.

And the dancing? Well, I saw none. All I could see all around were pairs and pairs of hormonal teenagers locked in throes of simulated copulation.

Anyway, it seemed the DJ apparently shared some of my apathy for the music he was playing, because at various intervals, he would intersperse the garbage he was scratching out of his contraption with some truly wonderful gems of our time, throwing the army of brats in attendance into paroxysms of missteps which I really enjoyed watching.

Then at some point, my kindred spirit at the turntables threw in a Lingala track by some Congolese maestro which had for a while been the hottest sound in town during my partying years. This particular track has a complicated dancing style which I used to be quite adept at, and I decided that I was going to show these party neophytes what true dancing is.

Ever encountered the expression "a really, really bad idea?"

There is a line in the Desiderata which goes "Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth." Pulling acrobatic dance moves is the archetypal manifestation of youth, and since in my days I'd pulled them with the best, I was under the misguided impression that my spirit and my body were in tandem on the matter.

Only it didn't quite go that way.

How did it go? Well, think of a camel. An awkward, two-humped one, preferably. Now, imagine that camel on top of a winding, hundred-step staircase.

Next, picture a very malicious fellow, wearing a smirk on his face resembling one of those expressions common with 1980s cartoon villains. Imagine this up-to-no-good character approaching our poor camel from behind and, with all the grace and fury of a drunk paraplegic, sweeping all its four ungainly feet from underneath it.

Are we still together? Good. Now assuming it takes an awkward, ungainly, two-humped camel fifty seconds to clatter down a winding hundred-step staircase, picture the same camel at the bottom of the stairs exactly fifty-one seconds later.

Basically, that's how it went when I pulled my move, and lying there on the dance floor counseled me that some moves belong to younger bodies, which mine no longer is. I figured it was time to listen to the Desiderata and take this counsel seriously and surrender those moves along with other things of youth.

But looking like a camel that has just fallen down a staircase meant the surrender was anything but graceful.

The Wayne Rooney Saga: A Guide For Dummies

Wayne Rooney has just proved it. Football is a gentleman's game played by hooligans...and watched by Dummies.

For football to be referred to as a game, there has to be footballers. For footballers to make a living out of football, they must be good. And since thousands, even millions, of footballers worldwide make a living out of playing football, then logic demands we assume there are a lot of good footballers out there.

But even among these good footballers, there are some that are better than the rest. From these very good footballers we can further identify some that are better among the better ones, and from this cream of the crop, even more exceptional elements can still be isolated. These are the players who make football magical, the players who keep football purists believing that despite the horrifying influence of Russian gas, American loan and Arab oil money, there is still hope for football.

Wayne Mark Rooney definitely belongs to this last category. At only 25 years of age, the lad has won more trophies than Liverpool football club has won in the past 25 years, and he is just getting started. Commensurate with his unbelievable talent, he earns more money in a week than the entire annual sports budgets of all three East African countries put together, and despite the fact that he looks the way Shrek would look like when he has just thrown up, Coleen McLoughlin, a stunning beauty who looks like she could stop traffic just for the heck of it, actually agreed to marry him and have a child with him. The natural way.

Surely, Wayne has it made. His looks notwithstanding, he has money, talent and the affection of billions of fans worldwide, not to mention a wife that could stop traffic just for the heck of it. Why then, in a stunt that was sure to go through his reputation like an elephant through a glass cage holding his young, did he procure the services of a thousand-pound-a-night hooker when his I-can-stop-traffic-for the-heck-of-it wife, who agreed to have a child by him the natural way, was sitting at home pregnant with his kid?

Some questions don't have answers. Not answers that make any sense, anyway. This is definitely one of those questions, so we will let it slip and focus on a more important question: How does a world-famous footballer that was stupid enough to procure the services of a thousand-pound-a-night hooker and afterwards stupid enough to get caught, come out of the entire saga with his reputation intact and sellability unharmed?

Easy. Create a diversion.

You see, Wayne knows that millions of y'all like to watch him play, and some media mogul somewhere that knows companies would pay good money if millions of y'all got to see their products. The media mogul will then put two an two together and figure that if he put a picture of a product in the same TV screen that shows Wayne Rooney playing, millions of y'all will tune in to watch Wayne Rooney play, and therefore Millions of y'all will also see the company's product. Wayne knows that this media mogul will sell this idea to companies, and then approach him with offers of more money in a week than the entire annual sports budgets of all three East African countries put together if he could agree to appear in the same TV screen that shows that company's products. Easy as ABC.

But Wayne also knows that y'all don't like it when players cheat on their wives, especially when players that look the way Shrek would look like when he has just thrown up cheat on wives that look like they could stop traffic just for the heck of it. He knows that if y'all don't like what he did, y'all won't tune in to watch him play, so y'all won't get to see the company's products. If that happens, the company whose products appear in the same TV screen as Wayne won't be willing to give the media mogul enough money to pay Wayne more money in a week than the entire annual sports budgets of all three East African countries put together.

And this presents a problem, because you see, Wayne loves his money, every single last dime of it. It would rip his stocky Scouser heart to pieces if many of y'all stopped watching him and forced the companies to reduce his check to, say, the entire annual sports budgets of only two East African countries. But he cheated. On a pregnant wife that looks like she could stop traffic just for the heck of it. With a thousand-pounds-a-night hooker. And y'all don't like that.

So how does Wayne keep the money flowing into his pockets? Easy. Create a diversion.

Wayne might be stupid, but an idiot he most definitely is not. He knows that y'all care about reputation and all that bleeding heart morality, but y'all ain't the ones that cut his check. The companies do. And the companies don't give a rat's ass about reputation except when it interferes with their bottom line. All they care about is that their products get advertised because when their products get advertised, their products get sold. Wayne is smart enough to know all this, so he figures the way to keep the companies interested is to keep y'all watching him.

How does he do that? He creates a diversion. He enlists the help of his best friend and father figure, sir Alex Ferguson, and together, they concoct a feud. Accusations about lying are made, counter-accusations about insubordination are fired back. A rejoinder about a lack of commitment is swiftly issued and quickly countered by the one about latent disloyalty. Then comes the big one; I want to leave, and the even bigger one; The door is to your left, baby. Throughout all this, the media mogul's cameras are furiously keeping y'all updated, and y'all are thinking, Gosh! We haven't seen such action since Ali took on Foreman at the banks of the Congo River! So what's next?

And when he is sure he has you where he wants you, i.e eyes firmly trained on him and interested in only him, there is a sudden cooling of tempers and a truce is called. The companies are happy that y'all want to see him, so they resume giving him money in a week than the entire annual sports budgets of all three East African countries put together. In the meantime, y'all have forgotten that he cheated, with a thousand-pound-a-night hooker, on a traffic-stopper of a wife that chose to have a baby with him the natural way despite the fact that he looks like Shrek after he has just thrown up.

Like Redd Foxx would say, you big dummies!

Of Gonads, Communication and Cell Phones.

I wanted to start with the bit about my gonads, but that part doesn't become important until exactly four nanoseconds before I wake up. So I'll begin with the anecdote about the wife and the husband.

Once upon a time, two people, a man and a woman, got married. And as it normally happens with one hundred percent of all matrimonial interactions, there came a point during their relationship when these two people had a slight difference of opinion over something or the other.

Normally, such matters are resolved by the more assertive partner, usually the wife, imposing their opinion on the less assertive one, usually the wife. [It's complicated. I'll explain later.] However, this relationship was one of those very rare ones where both partners were evenly matched in willpower; so naturally, the difference of opinion continued and in due course, the two were not on speaking terms. Literally.

But since they lived under the same roof, ate the same food, used the same bathroom and slept on the same bed, some form of communication was necessary. They therefore worked their way around the issue and finally settled on writing as the most effective medium for their circumstances. Whenever the husband required anything of the wife, he would write it down on a slip of paper and vice versa.

This method worked OK until one day; the husband had a very important meeting to attend and had to catch a very early flight the next morning. Unfortunately, he was the kind of person who attached a great deal of value to a good night's sleep, and was rarely known to awaken before 10am in the morning. The meeting was however really important, so to work his schedule around this flaw, he requested his wife, in writing of course, to wake him up very early the next morning...

How this tale ends should be obvious to anyone with pretensions to anything that even remotely approaches a double-figure IQ, so we'll leave it there and move on towards my gonads. But before we get there, let's first talk about phones.

A friend of mine from the Northern hemisphere was once quite shocked when he read a report on the internet which said that at least 70% of all Ugandan adults each have a mobile phone. The poor fellow couldn't understand how a backward country like Uganda could have such an extensive mobile telephony reach, and he e-mailed me to ascertain the veracity of these claims.

"The report is inaccurate." I mailed him back. "The figure is closer to 90%, and at least 60% of them actually have TWO mobile phones."

I happen to belong to this percentage that possesses two mobile phones. One is a sexy Nokia 6300, which has a lot of really awesome features but goes through its battery with the speed of a Mike Tyson bout in the early nineties, while the other one is a plainer Nokia 1100 whose swankiest feature is that it is able support M-Pesa, but with one bar of battery power can sustain an entire call from Pet without disconnecting it midway. [And that is saying something.]

Quite obviously, this isn't exactly an ideal situation. I love the ravishing 6300, but for purposes of functionality, I find that I utilize the plain Jane 1100 more frequently than I do my beloved 6300. And that has me really terrified of the implications on my social standing the revelation of this little fact would occasion, so whenever I have to use the 1100, I try to be as discreet as possible. Silent mode, excusing myself and running to a secluded area whenever I receive a call in public, etc...

I risk digressing, however. Let us now connect the married couple anecdote to the mobile phones and then quickly move on to my gonads.

Like the husband in our anecdote, I am also the kind of person that attaches a great deal of value to a good night's sleep. Once I get into slumber land, I will always need help to get out of it. But unlike the unfortunate husband, I don't depend on my wife to wake me up when I've got issues that really have to be sorted out at a time when only chicken thieves are supposed to be awake. The reason behind this is quite simple; I'm not yet married,

So whenever I need to wake up early, which like a Liverpool win happens only in the rarest of occasions, I can always rely on the infinitely cheaper yet infinitely more reliable alarm system on my two mobile phones. With them, unless somebody calls me earlier, I can always get up at the precise moment I intend to wake up. And since my Nokia 6300 is permanently on silent mode for purposes of being discreet, the early caller isn't always a problem...

Unless I somehow go to bed with my phone still in my trouser pocket, and there is a hole in that trouser pocket.

In my defense, I was dog tired and didn't strip like I usually do when I went to bed last night. I also didn't take my phone off my pocket which, as is common with people as careless as I am, has a hole somewhere in its person. Therefore as I slept, the phone slipped through the hole and came to rest on my inner thigh, just below the nether regions.

And then very early today morning, my dear Pet, who works similar hours with the shadier elements of society, decided to send me a text message...

Do you have any idea how unbelievably powerful a vibrating 1100 can get, and how tremendously horrifying being woken up by a Nokia 1100 vibrating against your gonads can be?

More than just a Bad Hair Day

Like girls, guys also have bad hair days. I know this for a fact because I used to have bad hair days back when I still had dreadlocks, and, well, I'm a guy.

The difference between a guy bad hair day and a girl bad hair day, however, is that unless you point out to a guy that he is having a bad hair day, most men will never tell when they are having a bad hair day. Just ask Donald Trump, or the people of Sotik constituency and the guy they kept electing to parliament before the NARC wave.

You can also ask me about what transpired one day when I went to Mengo Hospital for a dental procedure, back in the days when I still had dreadlocks.

A dear friend of mine once told me that at the dentist's, everything is twice as painful as it looks and thrice more painful than you think. That is no exeggeration, so for those of you that have never placed their behinds on a dentist's chair for a procedure, allow me this opportunity to issue a profound warning: Start taking much better care of your teeth than you are doing right now. Because trust me, you do NOT want to ever find yourself on that chair.

Anyway, I wasn't lucky enough to have someone give me the kind of warning I am giving you now, so at some point in time, I found myself in unfortunate need of an extremely urgent dental procedure. I'd once procured the services of Mengo Hospital following a late night altercation with a couple of panga-wielding characters intent on relieving me of my phone and other valuables, [but that is a story for another day,] and had liked their services. Thus when the aforementioned need for a dental procedure arose, it was to Mengo that I immediately headed.

Mengo Hospital is quite a large institution. Add to this the fact that I don't quite like hanging around hospitals and therefore do not often hang around hospitals, It was quite obvious that I was going to encounter a bit of trouble locating the dental department where my painfully pressing needs could be addressed. So in short, I soon found myself totally lost in the hospital hallways, clutching my jaw like a driver who has just hit Mike Tyson's car and was stupid enough to get out to apologize.

The most obvious thing one ought to do when faced with such difficulty would be of course to ask somebody familliar with the place for directions, and in a hospital the person most likely to know where places such as dental departments are located would be a nurse.  Thus I stopped a nurse doing her rounds, [I know how a nurse looks like because every heterosexual man has fantasies about nurses in uniform,] and asked her to tell me where I could find the dental department.

The nurse, a petite little thing in a starched uniform who looked like anything straight from one of my aforementioned fantasies, looked at me as if she didn't comprehend my question. Then she sized me up, spending about a minute looking at my hair before she pointed to a flight of stairs. "Just head up those stairs and turn left." She said. "Beyond it you will find a red brick building and someone there will attend to you."

It had been a puzzling experience, but my tooth was at that point threatening to dig a hole right through my jaw, so I gave it very little thought as I gratefully made my way towards where I had been directed.

When I got there, the first thing I noticed was two heavily armed guards. Why would a dental department require armed guard? I thought and then stopped thinking as my toothache stopped working on my jaw and sent a jolt of pain through my gum. Quickly, I went to one of the guards. "Where can I find a doctor? I'm in pain." I asked.

The guard looked at me, mumbled something to his colleague about an apparent shortage of barbers in Kampala and both of them laughed. "Go back to the ward." He told me. "The doctor will be there presently."

Ward?

"Excuse me, but since when has the dental department of any hospital ever required wards?" I asked.

That must have been the stupidest question I have ever asked in my entire life, because the guard now looked at me like you would look at someone who has just asked you the stupidest question you have ever heard in your entire life.

"This is not the dental department." He told me. "It is the mental department." 

Captain of virtue

Celebrity sportsmen have through time found it really hard to keep their pants up away from home and their names off the sleazier sections of the press.

Last year, Tiger Woods' dalliance with more than a dozen women did things to his reputation that even an elephant would hesitate to do to a glass cage holding its young. Dude is now divorced and a hundred mil poorer.

Soon after the Woods' saga hit the tabloids, it was quickly followed by the lurid tales of one Jacob Zuma, who even two decades after the death of Apartheid remains unwilling to put down his machine gun. [OK. Maybe Zuma isn't exactly a sports personality. But he has been quite a player in the romantic field, which sort of qualifies him for that sporty title, doesn't it?]

News of Zuma's 20th-born was still settling in when another sports celebrity waddled into the murky sludge of tabloid press. John Terry, Chelsea and former England captain, was soon afterward reported to have showed more than passing interest to the ex-girlfriend of his England and former Chelsea team-mate, Wayne Bridge, and the reports caused such outrage among the English public that England coach Fabio Capello, fearing the destabilizing effect the incident would have on the England team as they prepared for the World Cup, promptly stripped Terry of the England captaincy.

Now, let us for a minute transfer the JT debacle to Kenya and assume that in the place of Terry, it was the Harambee Stars captain who was implicated in an affair with the ex-girlfriend of a team-mate. Would the public have shown the kind of outrage shown by the English and demanded that he be stripped of his armband?

That, of course, would never happen. In fact, as rhetorical questions go, that question would put the rhetoric in rhetorical.

First of all, unless the lady in question is actually married to the team-mate,a Kenyan would see absolutely nothing wrong with the captain's action.  If there is no ring around the fourth finger of her left hand, then she is, for all intents and purposes, fair game. In the JT saga, the lady, a French lingerie model called Veronica Perroncel, wasn't the wife, or even the current girlfriend, but the EX girlfriend of Wayne Bridge. In Kenyan books, nothing wrong there.

But even if a queer section of the Kenyan public had found the saga even remotely repulsive and opined that Twahir Muhiddin, Ghost Mulee, that clueless German or whoever it is in charge of the Stars should relieve the captain of his leadership duties, then this high-minded percentage of humanity would first of all have to contend with members of the erstwhile captain's ethnic community, who will scream, shout and even uproot a few railway sleepers to protest against the victimization of their community.

But the main reason no furore whatsoever would be raised is quite simple: Over 80% of Kenyans don't watch Kenyan football, and of the 20% that follow it regularly, Two thirds have absolutely no idea who the hell the Harambee Stars captain is.

A Model Trial

I love models. Nothing quite appeals to my amorous fantasies than the combination of a figure that makes you think long nights in exotic locations and an IQ figure equal to the number on a goalkeeper's football jersey. And growing up as I did during a time when 90% of vehicles on Kenyan roads had only six digits, I was at some point totally besotted with one Naomi Campbell.

Of course the distance between fantasy and reality is mostly only covered by dreams, so the stunning Ms. Campbell has since then remained exactly that, i.e. the girl of my dreams. However, when I'm not busy with other more important stuff such as debating Referendum results and waiting for the start of the new English Premier League season, I make time to look her up and see what she has been up to, as well at ogle at those looooooooong legs thrusting from whatever leading fashion house number she happens to be donning.

Slightly under a fortnight ago, I got a chance to indulge this passion of mine. Naomi had reportedly been summoned by the war crimes trial against Charles Taylor at the UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone, and she was to appear to give testimony that would help indict the former Liberian warlord. With my beautiful Naomi in the picture, I was very, very interested in these proceedings, and accordingly stacked on the popcorn.

We will come back to Naomi and models in a bit, but first, a little background for those of you who for whatever absurd reason may never have heard about Charles Taylor.

Born in 1946, this dude is something of a cross between Idi Amin Dada and Robert Mugabe, with a dash of pre-historic man. He ruled Liberia for six years from 1997 after helping overthrow the government of Samuel Doe, and all indications are those six years aren't exactly ones that Liberians remember with an incredible amount of fondness.

Taylor had a number of very disagreeable habits, and among these was an apparent overwhelming covetousness. He was reportedly so covetous of the riches possessed by neighboring Sierra Leone that he felt compelled to fund a rebel group there, the Revolutionary United Front [RUF], so that he could also get in on a share of its Diamonds resource. This was to prove his undoing, as the activities the RUF rebels involved themselves in have landed him in major legal problems at the Hague.

Naomi Campbell catwalks into this Charles Taylor saga sometime in 1999, when both she and Taylor attended a fund-raising dinner in cape Town hosted by then South African president Nelson Mandela. 

Like 99% of all heterosexual men who have ever set eyes on Naomi Campbell, Charles Taylor's senses went AWOL upon meeting her, and by the end of the night, he had displayed his amorous attentions towards her with a pocketful of uncut diamonds.

To cut a long story short, those diamonds are now central to the case against Taylor at the Hague, because during that time, he had apparently gone to South Africa with the intention of selling the diamonds and raise money to help fund the RUF's atrocious activities in sierra Leone.

To be perfectly honest, I have so far paid the Charles Taylor trial the kind of attention I normally reserve for traffic signs when I'm late for work, and I’m sure an overwhelming proportion of the earth’s population are exactly like me. But since the lovely Naomi graced the trial with her magnificent presence, interest in the trial has grown tenfold, and I’m sure the UN is very thankful for that.

Closer home, it is hoped that if Ocampo does his job properly, a number our local politicians will be acquainting themselves with the Hague quite soon. The Kenya trial is meant to act as precedent and deterrence against future acts of civil violence in Africa and the world over such trivial issues as elections results, and the UN is hoping that public interest in the case will be massive.

Kenya is taking the case very seriously, and a couple of months ago, a witness protection bill was passed in parliament to help secure potential witnesses who will give testimony at the Hague. Last week, it was reported that some of these potential witnesses are already being flown out of the country in readiness for the trial.

My question is, are there any Kenyan supermodels among those witnesses being flown out?

Of women and cars

She may be disagreeable sometimes…well, most of the time. But Allan's wife really is a good woman. Overwhelming evidence may indicate otherwise, but his Datsun actually is a good car.

  

Mrs. Allan and the Datsun, as narrated by Allan.

"Two years ago when I bought my Datsun, my wife nagged me into giving her a driving lesson. Looking back, that must have been the most dangerous afternoon of my life, for we stared death in the face three times in that one session alone. Naturally, I immediately banned her from all things motor vehicle, but undaunted, she scrimped on the kitchen budget, fed me vegetables for a month and raised enough cash to go to a real driving school. Fortunately, the driving instructors of that school were equally unimpressed by her potential and she was never licensed to drive. This put a damper on her enthusiasm and for two years, there was tranquility in her relationship with cars.

But all good things, as heaven ordained, must come to an end. Recently, a pre-natal misdiagnosis forced my now pregnant wife to re-evaluate her choice of maternity services provider, and by the next day, Pumwani had lost yet another customer and Aga Khan hospital had gained one. I was obviously dismayed by the expected increase in the relevant fees this was going to entail, but that was nothing compared to her passion for the wheel the hospital switch Inadvertently re-awakened in her.

“Every pregnant mother drives in for her appointment except me.” She complained after her second most recent trip to the hospital. “Why do I have to be the only one that walks in like a Kawangware resident who doesn’t own a car?”

“Maybe because you actually are a Kawangware resident who doesn’t own a car?” I suggested, desperately hoping she would deviate from her apparent train of thought.

No such luck. “I promise I’ll oil it, fuel it and get it washed when I come from the hospital.” When she really wants something, my wife has this remarkable ability, absent in possibly all women, of getting straight to the point.

My firm refusal earned me a night on the sofa.

But the next day when I was in a matatu on my way to work, I opened my wallet to pay my fare to and realized the car keys were missing. Their whereabouts were obviously a no-brainer, and I instantly sent a prayer heavenward for God to take extra good care of my wife and unborn child, and especially my car, that day.I was so worried that I left work early.

The car was not on the parking lot when I arrived home, But my wife was, and she had made a sumptuous lunch as if she had anticipated I would leave work early. She served me like a king, laughed at my jokes throughout the meal, asked about my day, curled up close to me when I lay back for a siesta and generally behaved very suspiciously. When she produced two Pilsners from the bedroom, I knew it was time I acted before I got too complacent. “Honey,” I asked. “Where is the car?”

“Relax.” She purred. “It is at the garage. Didn’t I promise to get it oiled, washed and fueled?”

I was extremely grateful, and I thought maybe I had been too rash in dismissing my wife’s driving competence. I resolved give her another shot at driving school and a license as soon as the baby is born, for she was showing herself to be very responsible.

This resolution was reinforced the next day, but for very different reason.

When I passed by the garage and I saw my car, I almost fainted. The paintwork on the left side of the car was gone. Not patchy or scratched, but literally gone. The front fender was twisted like the branch of an acacia tree, and it was impossible to ascertain the condition of the three headlights I had affixed to the fender only the previous week, since they weren’t even there in the first place. Gone too was the left headlamp, and the front windshield looked like a chart of the entire human vascular system, capillaries, veins and all.

And that is why it is absolutely necessary, imperative even, that my wife learns to drive. Her passion for the wheel, albeit intermittent, is absolute, and I don't want to even imagine what will happen the next time it hits. So I'd rather she actually knew how to drive when it does"

Mwiko

Like any resident in the general vicinity of the Gulf of Mexico, I have BP.

No, I don't mean BP, the company that for the past month seems to have adopted publications with titles like 'Environmental Degradation For Dummies' and '101 Ways How NOT To Plug An Oil Leak' as its operational handbooks.I meant BP, as in Big Problems.

But first, a preamble of sorts. Last week, I used up all the water in the communal tank in my plot to do my weekly washing, and this unfortunately co-incided with a similar intention by my next door neighbor to my left to do her weekly washing. The result was a row of such magnificent proportions that we had to declare a termination of all interaction with each other henceforth to put an end to it. On the other hand, my next door neighbor to my right works at a Casino in town and thus only works nights, so as I write this, he isn't home.

How the status of my next door neighbors fits into this narrative shall be made apparent presently, but in the meantime, back to me and my Big Problems. Problem One: I am hungry. Ravenously hungry. I am so hungry, I was halfway through the glass of milk I found in my kitchenette when I came home today before I realized it was actually lime water I'd earlier poured in the flask to keep it fresh.

Problem Two was when I came home with Problem One, my house was in NETHerlands.

My house being in NETHerlands is a term I use to denote the fact that there is 'Nothing to Eat in The House' [NETH]  FYI, NETH is not a straightforward description of reality. It could mean there really is nothing to eat in the house, or that there actually is something edible in the house, but I am not in the mood to cook it.

The latter was the prevalent description when I came in with Problem One, for hailing as I do from the Western Province of the Kenyan Republic, it would be easier for a camel to knit with a needle and all that than for copious amounts of maize flour to NOT be found in my house at any given moment.

But although I wasn't in the mood to cook, I was in even less mood to waste my money at a hotel. And since I was not going to exist on half a glass of lime water alone, I was left with no other alternative but to light my paraffin stove, put on a half-full pan of water, wait for it to boil then pour in the flour. But I'd hardly started to mingle the concoction when there was a sickening crack!

Big Problem.

You see, almost every step of the ugali-making process has a built-in escape mechanism for when things go wrong. For example, too much water? Reduce it or add flour. Too much flour? Reduce it or add water. Too little paraffin/gas or electricity blackout? To hell with the neighbors. Build a wood-fire outside.

But unless your neighbors are in a position to lend you theirs, [and we have already established that for various reasons, mine can't at the moment,] there is absolutely no hope for you when right in the middle of the ugali-making process, the ladle suddenly breaks.

Kids say the darnest things.

THE FOLLOWING QUOTES ARE FROM A NEWSPAPER CONTEST WHERE ENTRANTS AGE 4 TO 15 WERE ASKED TO IMITATE "DEEP THOUGHTS BY JACK HANDY":

I believe you should live each day as if it is your last,which is why I don't have any clean laundry because,come on, who wants to wash clothes on the last day of their life?
Brandon - Age 15
 
My young brother asked me what happens after we die.I told him we get buried under a bunch of dirt and worms eat our bodies. I guess I should have told him the truth--that most of us go to Hell and burn eternally--but I didn't want to upset him.
Allen - Age 10

As you make your way through this hectic world of ours, set aside a few minutes each day. At the end of the year,you'll have a couple of days saved up.
Ricky -Age 7
 
Democracy is a beautiful thing, except for that part about letting just any old yokel vote.
Anthony - Age 10

Home is where the house is.
Jenny - Age 6
 
Often, when I am reading a good book, I stop and thank my teacher.That is, I used to, until she got an unlisted number.
Susan - Age 15

Once, I wept for I had no shoes. Then I came upon a man who had no feet. So I took his shoes. I mean, it's not like he really needed them, right?
Dennis - Age 15

Mathematically speaking, a very weighty issue indeed.

According to somebody or the other, [I can't remember who exactly at the moment,] the main purpose of life is the pursuit of fulfillment and happiness. Fulfillment and happiness, according to somebody else I also can't remember at the moment, is best achieved by making the right choices.Therefore the main formula in the mathematics of life is all about making the right choices. Simple as ABC.

But far from straightforward.

 

Because mathematically, constants base the sequence of a formula, but the result of any problem will always depend on the variables. And in most cases, the variables have absolutely no inclination to behave rationally, thereby impacting on the result in ways that you may or may not anticipate. This impact can either be positive or negative, but bottom line is it WILL affect the result.

In a nutshell, what we have in the equation on life referred to in the first paragraph are constants, and they will always behave in a certain way. But when variables are introduced, the outcome may or may not go as expected.

If you have stuck with me thus long and are still reading this, I swear there is a point to all this. To prove it, I will get directly to the point I am referring to.

Marriage.

There are several reasons why people get married. For an overwhelming majority, though, the main goal is fulfillment in companionship. Those are constants. Achieving this of course depends on the right choice of spouse, That too is a constant.

One consideration in the process of choosing the right spouse is body weight. Body weight is a variable, and this is what I wish to discuss at length.

When men shop for a spouse, a key consideration is how appealingly the kilos are distributed across a potential acquisition's frame.

I am not saying that there is nothing wrong with this perspective. But men are by nature extremely visual, and since visions and perspectives are shaped by stereotypes, you really can't say that is our fault with the prevailing stereotype on beauty frowning so disagreeably upon bulk in a woman, can you?

From the mathematical point of view, body weight is a variable that can affect the eventual result a man is looking for in a lifetime companion. However in this regard, women have taken to shortchanging us of this preferred result in a manner that is decidedly callous.

A guy meets a girl and he sees that all her variables, including her mass, can produce an acceptable result, (i.e fulfillment and happiness,) when processed with the other constants in the main formula of life. For as long as they are dating, she maintains the weight variable at his preferred level until the guy loses enough intelligence to pop the question.

Once the formalities have been completed and she has his surname, however, the weight variable suddenly finds its own direction, and in most cases, that direction is up. You walk a Tyra to the altar, but one year later, you are going home to an Oprah; with kids and without the money.

This change in the weight variable will obviously have an impact on the whole equation, and a very negative one at that. When the guy was picturing a spouse that would fulfill and complete him, he probably had very definite ideas about how much she ought to weigh, and by interfering with this variable, the result will be instead of feeling completed and fulfilled, he will certainly feel disappointed and cheated.

And the funny thing is, women complain when the inevitable infidelity occurs after she has lost her allure with the weight gain, yet the 'Thin is in' stereotype that leads men to buying into a misguided cliche of beauty, is actually created and maintained by women.

Psychologically, men tend to find well-endowed women more attractive, and love handles actually form a very big part of our romantic fantasies.

The attraction to waif-like dolls is for show, because the world expects us to be attracted to its stereotype version of beauty. But the real beauty with substance image in our psychology has a more motherly quality about it, and trust me, weight is NOT an issue there.

Call Waiting

I know I've been mistaken,

But just give me a break and see the changes that I've made;

I've got some imperfections,

But how can you collect them all and throw them in my face..."

Groggily, I rub my eyes as I look at the irritatingly bright light flashing from my Nokia 6300 next to me on the bedside stool (Yes, I did upgrade again.) 03:22, reads the figure at the top right corner of the screen. Who could be calling at such an ungodly hour? I ask myself.

Actually, I lie. I don’t ask myself that question, because even without looking at the picture that I have as this particular caller's ID, (i.e. Steven Gerrard after one of Liverpool's numerous losses,) I already know who is calling. Even people I owe money know how seriously I value my sleep and wouldn't call me at such an hour, so it could only be one person.

Goodness, I think. Doesn't this girl ever sleep? And even if she can't sleep, why doesn't she channel her insomnia towards something more conventional, e.g. watching four seasons of Gossip Girl, instead of interfering with my own hard-earned sleep?

Again, I lie. I don't think that, because my sleep is hardly ever earned. Also, I know this girl actually does sleep, but only during the day. She uses the hours of night to call people trying to get some sleep and also, I suspect, engage in a little bit of night running.

(OK. She doesn't do that. I'm just being mean.)

"But you always find a way,

To keep me right here waiting;

You always find the words to say,

To keep me right here waiting..."

OK. Ungodly hour or not, fact is my phone is ringing and I have to decide whether I am going to pick it up or not. I think for a few seconds, and then decide I am not going to take the call.

"I hope you're not intending,

To be so condescending, it's as much as I can take;

And you're so independent,

You just refuse to bend, so I keep bending till I break.

But you always find a way, to keep me right here waiting..."

I mean, who the hell does she think she is anyway, calling me at an hour when only chicken thieves are supposed to be awake? Doesn't she know I have better things to do, such as indulge in my long-running dream about a lifetime of marital bliss with Amy Lee of Evanescence? Besides, she is a both a freakin’ Liverpool and a freakin’ Coldplay fan, and I think anyone who actually likes either Liverpool or Coldplay is respectively either disturbed or just plain insane, characters you obviously wouldn't want calling you at 3:22 in the morning.

 

[Chris Martin is an egg-head.]

“I've made a commitment,

I'm willing to bleed for you;

I need this fulfillment,

I've found what I need in you

Why can't you just forgive me,

I don't want to relive all the mistakes I've made

along the way.

But I always find a way, to keep you right here waiting...”

The next thing I do, of course, is reach over and pick up the phone.

SO, WHAT EXACTLY AM I TRYING TO SAY WITH ALL THIS?

Nothing, really. I just felt like dissing Val. Oh, and to let you all know that my ring-tone is 'Right Here' by Staind.