Dennis Waweru and Mike Sonko tell Uhuru to go back to Gatundu

At an event in Riruta Satellite on Monday evening this week, a mad thing happened that has left the whole of Nairobi and Kenya shocked. Dennis Waweru and Mike Sonko were announcing their partnership, a discordant and doomed marriage at best. It’s obvious that it will hardly last a week before Sonko stabs Waweru in the back; no pun intended.

As ridiculous as this partnership is, it is the choice of words they chose to announce it that left everyone stunned at just how silly otherwise seasoned politicians have become. Sonko and Waweru committed political sins that even the Pope himself cannot offer absolution for. Dennis Waweru was the first on the ambulance microphone, a setting that clearly demonstrates the critical condition of their political careers.

Dennis Waweru is one of the top runners for Nairobi Governor seat.

In a bizarre admonition of President Uhuru Kenyatta, Waweru tells the President to go back to Gatundu and leave Nairobi to its owners. Waweru foolishly tells the president that if there is any seat the president has to give, it is the Gatundu seat and not any other anywhere else in the country and especially not Nairobi.

Sonko then comes in and reiterates the message dismissing the president on his stand on the Nairobi race. In an equally careless and base talk, Sonko refers to Eugene Wamalwa as “Waziri wa Matope” to which Dennis Waweru gleefully nods to.

It is absolutely confounding why Sonko would refer to a ministry in a government he serves as Matope which by extension equally sends the message that “Uhuru ni Rais wa Matope”. It is the kind of statement one would make carelessly in a bar while drunk or among friends in jest but definitely not in front of cameras.

It is this absolute lack of decorum and appropriateness in Sonko that has left him high and dry in Nairobi.  It is understood the two were reacting in defiance to an order the President gave about two weeks ago in which he read the riot act to all Nairobi politicians opposed to his plan for the Jubilee Party.

At the meeting Maina Kamanda was tasked to bring the whole Nairobi jubilee leadership together and offer it direction towards the President’s wish. The Monday after, a meeting was held where Kamanda pledged to assist the team in Jubilee to winning all the Nairobi seats. Eugene Wamalwa was in attendance and is possibly going to be the party leader in the city.

It is very possible that both Mike Sonko and Dennis Waweru who have clearly chosen to take the president head on will have to pay for their sins. Whatever form it takes, it is going to be difficult watching two otherwise promising political careers fade into oblivion. It was absolute madness by the two.

It has been said that those whom the gods choose to destroy they first make mad. That ambulance must have been for dispatching the two to the Mathari Hospital for the Politically insane.

What kind of commander in chief would Hillary Clinton be?

In what may have been the most forceful speech of her career, Hillary Clinton said in San Diego on Thursday that electing Donald Trump as commander in chief would be "an historic mistake" because of his "dangerously incoherent" foreign policy ideas and his "temperament."

This raises the question: If Clinton were to become president, what kind of commander in chief would she be, and how might her approach differ from Trump's?

Clinton, unlike Trump, has an extensive foreign policy record to examine based on her four-year tenure as secretary of state, which can help us understand how she might operate as commander in chief.

As secretary of state, for example, she presided over the effort in 2010 to significantly tighten sanctions on Iran, which helped to bring the Iranians, eventually, to the negotiating table on their nuclear program. This diplomatic effort resulted in a 12 to 2 vote in the U.N. Security Council to enhance sanctions against Iran, "one of her major achievements as secretary of state" according to New York Times' reporter Mark Landler in his excellent new book "Alter Egos."

This move highlights what could perhaps be most distinctive about Hillary Clinton as president: her refusal to be typecast as either hawk or dove. Instead, she has long been resolutely both, advocating for military interventions in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and Syria while also being unafraid to express her support -- as in one noteworthy 2011 episode in which she and then-CIA director Leon Panetta got into a shouting match over CIA drone strikes in Pakistani territory -- for critiques of the use of force.

It is this record as both hawk and dove that suggests some of the contours of what a Clinton foreign policy would look like.

What is also very clear from her record is that Hillary Clinton is now and presumably would continue to be as president a hawk who is also willing to negotiate. When it comes to foreign policy, these are the qualities we should most associate with effective commanders in chief.

America's two big foreign policy ideas

As president, either Clinton or Trump will have to navigate the two big ideas in American foreign policy: isolationism and interventionism. As was memorably defined by U.S. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams in 1821, isolationism means: "America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. 

She is the well wisher to freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own." In other words, the United States will not become embroiled in foreign conflicts over ideals like "freedom" and "democracy" and will instead concentrate on strengthening itself at home. 

By contrast, interventionism stipulates that the United States needs to uphold -- and even enforce -- global order and liberty not only because it's the right thing to do, but also because it's very much in America's own interests, a view best expressed by John F. Kennedy in his 1961 inaugural address at the height of the Cold War when he said, "We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty."

Over the past century the United States has swung back and forth between periods of isolationism and interventionism. Isolationism kept America out of World War I until the end of the conflict and it was relatively late to send troops to join the alliance fighting the Axis powers during World War II.

After that war, America emerged as the dominant world force of interventionism, spearheading the global architecture of NATO, the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund that has helped to sustain America's position as the world's only superpower.
Then the George W. Bush administration came into office promising a period of relative isolationism and opposition to "nation building." Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security advisor, had famously opined, "We really don't need the 82nd Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten."
9/11, of course, changed all that. The Bush administration engaged in long and protracted multi-trillion-dollar nation-building efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

So how do Clinton and Trump fit into this long history of American isolationism and interventionism?

To the extent that Trump has laid out his vision of foreign policy, he is a neo-isolationist. He has famously called for a temporary ban on Muslim immigration, proposed building a wall along the Mexican border, and suggested a rethinking of the NATO alliance, which he described as "obsolete" to The New York Times in April. He also explained to the Times, "We cannot be the policeman of the world."

Trump is also an "America first" populist who has said he would torture terrorism suspects, kill their families and "bomb the s..t out of ISIS," in so doing indiscriminately bombing the cities in Iraq and Syria into which ISIS fighters have burrowed themselves. These kinds of actions are deemed to be war crimes by, among many others, the U.S. military.

Clinton, on the other hand, is very much part of the American foreign policy establishment, which for the past several decades has viewed the United States as an "exceptional country," a phrase that Clinton used in her San Diego speech on Thursday. This view of the United States' proper role in the world also comes freighted with responsibilities to act around the globe to promote both American values and interests.

In Clinton's 2014 book "Hard Choices," about her time as secretary of state, she recounted the attacks two years earlier on the U.S. diplomatic outpost and CIA facility in Benghazi, Libya, in which four Americans were killed. Clinton concluded that despite the tragic losses of life, "Retreat is not the answer; it won't make the world a safer place, and it's just not in our country's DNA."

 Hillary the hawk

Clinton's record at the State Department demonstrates that she is an interventionist who is quite comfortable with the use of American military power, but at the same time she is willing to pursue negotiations with traditional American rivals such as Iran and the Taliban whenever the right kind of openings seem to present themselves.

Clinton's vote for the Iraq War in 2003 when she was a senator is, of course, Exhibit A in any discussion of her record on national security. In "Hard Choices" she stated clearly, "I wasn't alone in getting it wrong. But I still got it wrong. Plain and simple."

Her vote on the Iraq War, however, did not make Clinton skeptical of the efficacy of American military power when the occasion seemed to merit it.

The first big national security decision the Obama administration faced in early 2009 was what to do about the worsening situation in Afghanistan, where the Taliban were gaining ground. The U.S. military advocated a substantial surge of troops to blunt the Taliban's momentum.

Clinton sided with the generals arguing for a well-resourced counterinsurgency campaign (over the objections of Vice President Joe Biden) and endorsed a surge of 40,000 troops.

In the end, Obama authorized 30,000 troops, but also ordered their withdrawal after 18 months, disclosing a timetable that Clinton says she was uncomfortable with. As she put it in "Hard Choices," "I thought there was a benefit in playing our cards closer to our chests."

Clinton's embrace of the generals' plans for Afghanistan underlines her warm -- and, to some, surprising -- relations with some of the more hawkish officers in the U.S military, chief among them retired Gen. Jack Keane, a Fox News analyst, who played an important role in helping lay the groundwork for George W. Bush's surge of troops into Iraq in 2007 and who, according to Times reporter Landler, is "perhaps the greatest single influence on the way Hillary Clinton thinks about military issues."

Clinton also took a hawkish position when Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi threatened to exterminate swaths of his population in 2011, playing the lead role in cobbling together an unusual coalition of NATO and Arab states that ended up removing Gadhafi from power.

This would turn out to be the Obama administration's largest unforced error overseas, because -- just as was the case in Iraq in 2003 during the overthrow of Saddam Hussein -- there was not enough consideration given to what "the day after" would look like. Libya today is mired in a nasty civil war in which ISIS has gained a significant foothold.

Clinton was unafraid to promote hawkish positions even to a reluctant President Obama. Early on in their fight against the Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad, in 2012 Clinton urged the arming of "moderate" Syrian rebels. At the time, Obama nixed this idea but later he would come to embrace it. Another substantive difference with Obama is Clinton's advocacy of a "no-fly" zone in northern Syria to protect Syrian citizens from Assad's air force, which enjoys total air superiority and has killed untold thousands in indiscriminate airstrikes on civilian areas.

Most memorably, Clinton was the most senior official in Obama's Cabinet urging that U.S. Navy SEALS be deployed to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. On April 28, 2011, Obama's war Cabinet gathered in the Situation Room for the final meeting to consider the potential bin Laden raid. Obama asked his senior advisers for their views. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates urged caution and advised against the SEAL raid. So, too, did Vice President Biden. Clinton said the raid was the best option on the table.

Hillary the dove

Yet Clinton is far from merely a hawk. Clinton's director of policy planning at the State Department, Jake Sullivan, played a key role in secret back-channel negotiations with the Iranians beginning in 2011 that were facilitated by the Sultan of Oman. These negotiations eventually bore fruit four years later with Iran's agreement to suspend its nuclear weapons program.

Less successful were similar back-channel peace negotiations with the Taliban overseen by veteran U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke, whose office at the State Department opened up secret talks with representatives of Taliban's leader Mullah Omar that largely fizzled.

And it was Clinton who oversaw the rapprochement with the pro-Chinese military junta ruling what they termed Myanmar and the rest of the world knows better as Burma. That rapprochement, beginning in 2011, set the condition for elections four years later that brought to power in a landslide the Nobel Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, who had spent a decade and a half under house arrest and with whom Clinton enjoys a particularly warm relationship.

What the future could look like

With these experiences to draw upon, what would a President Clinton's foreign policy look like?

To a degree, she would probably be somewhat more interventionist than the Obama administration has been. On Afghanistan, where the Taliban is again taking territory, she would likely not follow what has (until recently) been the Obama administration's policy, which is a withdrawal of U.S. forces.

On ISIS and Syria, she would not send in a large American Army. "I do not believe that we should again have a hundred-thousand American troops in combat in the Middle East," she said in November. She would, as she explained in her San Diego speech, "step up the air campaign" against ISIS, while also continuing the Obama administration's policy of strangling the sources of ISIS finances, its propaganda arm in cyberspace, and its flow of foreign recruits.

On China, Clinton has very nuanced views. In "Hard Choices" she wrote, "This isn't a relationship that fits neatly into categories like friend or rival, and it may never." She therefore would likely continue to shore up American alliances with China's neighbors such as Burma, but she would also not needlessly antagonize the Chinese. They are, after all, effectively America's bankers since the United States owes Chinese banks more than a trillion dollars.

Would a President Clinton invoke some kind of "red line" with Russian President Vladimir Putin, such as incursions by Russian proxy forces into any of the Baltic states? It's not clear from her public pronouncements, but her San Diego speech left no doubt of her lack of patience for Trump's tendency to "praise dictators like Vladimir Putin and pick fights with our friends -- including the British prime minister, the mayor of London, the German chancellor, the President of Mexico and the Pope."

Email and @ Symbol inventor dies at age 74

By Samwel Doe

Ray Tomlinson, the US programmer credited with inventing email in the 1970s and choosing the "@" symbol for the messaging system, died at the age of 74.  

He was the first to use the @ symbol in this way, to distinguish a user from its host.The program changed the way people communicate both in business and in  personal life, revolutionizing how “millions of people shop, bank, and keep in touch with friends and family, whether they are across town or across oceans”, reads his biography on the Internet Hall of Fame website.

He was the first to use the @ symbol in this way, to distinguish a user from its host.The program changed the way people communicate both in business and in personal life, revolutionizing how “millions of people shop, bank, and keep in touch with friends and family, whether they are across town or across oceans”, reads his biography on the Internet Hall of Fame website.

“I sent a number of test messages to myself from one machine to the other. The test messages were entirely forgettable and I have, therefore, forgotten them. Most likely the first message was QWERTYUIOP or something similar. When I was satisfied that the program seemed to work, I sent a message to the rest of my group explaining how to send messages over the network.

”Tomlinson said in his blog. The first use of network email announced its own existence. Tomlinson's innovation has endured for 45 years - and shows no sign of going anywhere yet.

Simple reason why I'm not celebrating this year's Valentine

Perhaps this year’s Valentine’s Day is not in my favour in many ways. Unlike in the past three years that I have had to observe the day with so much respect, this year’s Valentine’s Day will probably find me indoor unless otherwise happens.

When I reflect what I used to do in the past years, I just find it was ridiculous thanks to my single status now!

As it is known, single people do not enjoy this day as people who have partners do. Never be cheated that the day is the day that you can show anyone including your parents and relatives that you love them! Far from it.  This day is good for people who are in love and not those related by blood.

Happy Valentine’s Day forks! 

POPE'S MESSAGE ON ENVIRONMENT SHOULD BE EMBRACED

By Maritim Evans

Pope Francis not only brought the word of God to Kenya, but also a strong message on environmental conservation. He dedicated his precious time to talk about environment at United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) headquarters and the need to embrace and encouarge the commitment of international agencies and civil society organisations that draw public attention to environmental issues.

Kenyans should at least pick something from the Pontiff’s message. Our continued destruction of our forests should come to an end. Mau Forest for instance, has been in the headline for a while now but our politicians continue to use it for political gains.

As Pope said, every step we take whether large or small, individual or collective we should at all cost be resposible in matters environment.

Pope preached dialogue with responsible cooperation among the political authorities, the scientific community, the business world and civil society. The cooperation among these bodies cannot be overlooked as it can bring positive change as we try to conserve our natural surrounding.

This much-needed change of course cannot take place without a substantial commitment to education and training. Nothing will happen unless political and technical solutions are accompanied by a process of education which proposes new ways of living as the Pontiff said.

The government should also seriously play its role without fear or favour as it is the custodian of our environment and natural resources.

We need to ensure that our institutions are truly effective and sustainable, as future generations will still need to live in a good environment we are trying to conserve today.

Pope’s message is timely as it comes at a time when the world leaders are in Paris for 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference. The conference objective is to achieve a legally binding and universal agreement on climate, from all the nations of the world.

The conference is an extension of Kyoto Protocol singned in 1997. The Protocol commits State Parties to reduce greenhouse gases emissions, based on the premise that global warming exists and man-made carbon emissions have caused it.

His message on envoironment in Kenya is also important as the world prepares for Habitat-III Conference to be held in Quito, Ecuador, in october 2016.

POLITICIANS SHOULD STOP POLITICISING MAU COMPLEX ISSUE

By Maritim Evans

It is high time politicians should stop politicising the Mau Forest issue and do something worth for us to conserve the forest which is a lifeline for many people across Kenya and beyond. 

Kenya is privileged to have such a big water tower in East Africa and her efforts to conserve it cannot be gainsaid.

The immense value of the forest cannot be underestimated. The ecological services that the Mau Complex provides are estimated to have an annual market value of USD 1.3 billion, supporting Kenya’s most important economic sectors including energy, tourism, and agriculture.

Besides that the forest acts as a natural source of water for many urban centers in Kenya, forming the upper catchment of 12 rivers and feeding five major lakes, including Lake Victoria, the source of the River Nile.

This means that conserving the forest will not only benefit Kenyans, but also Egyptians who mainly depend on water from the Nile for irrigation.

Mau Forest Complex 

Alarming statistics that the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) released in 2011 almost sparked a furious row between Kenya and Egypt.

UNEP revealed that almost a quarter of Mau has been encroached for settlements, illegal resource extraction such as logging and charcoal production, and the change in land use from forest to large-scale tea plantations and smallholder agriculture including change in ownership from public to private. This has taken a toll on the rivers and lakes that depend on the forest catchment area.

In 2008, the inauguration of the Sondu-Miriu hydro power plant was postponed due to low water levels that are said to be resulting from the destruction of the forest.

Despite the huge resources that the country draws from the forest, the Ogiek community has cultural and spiritual attachment to the forest.

Eviction of Mau illegal settlers began in 2005, but the approach used could not work.  The government should not have evicted tens of thousands people while it had no place to settle them.

While it is important to conserve the forest, the illegal inhabitants should be properly settled after eviction.

Even as the eviction and conservation of the forest continue, awareness campaigns should be carried out to teach people the importance of conserving the forest. Resettlement also should not be used as a bait by politicians to win votes.

WHY HELB FINDS IT HARD TO FUND STUDENTS ON TIME

By Maritim Evans

Perhaps students demanding for Higher Education Loans Board (Helb) funds would have waited a little longer to give time the board to realign its budget as it prepares to fund more students this year.

Enrolment in universities has been increasing over the past three years and the board has been under pressure to fund the increasing number of students who are admitted to public universities.

Despite that, loan defaulters have not been able to pay the loan in time prompting the board to seek alternative source of money to fund other students who are studying in various universities across the country.

It is not business as usual this year in the board since it used a lot of money from donors including the World Bank last year. The board had stayed for few months before it funded first applicants last year. Some of the students who applied for the funds then had to wait until almost mid this year in order to get the loan from the board.

University students preparing to demonstrate. PHOTO/COURTESY 

Statistics available on the Helb website show that more than 110,000 students applied for the loans at the end of last year, up from the 2013 figure of 65,000, while government capitation has been rising relatively slowly.

Out of the 110,000 first-time applicants, only around half, 65,000, qualified for loans, but not all would get the money.

In the last financial year that ended in July Helb had sought US$170 million from the government as capitation, but received only US$28.3 million, a decrease of 15% of the request.

Further statistics show that the loans agency has targeted raising the student financing budget four-fold from the current US$63.5 million to US$224.7 million in 2018.

Only 10 in 100 loan defaulters have been able to pay back the money to the board. This makes it hard for the board to finance the incoming students thus making it look for another source of money.

University education in Kenya, a 2009 World Bank report showed, is among the most expensive in the region. With over 50% of Kenyan households considered poor, most parents and guardians require supplementary funding to keep their children in class.

In conclusion, the government should allocate more funds to the board so that it can fund ever-increasing number of students joining universities every year in time.