Post by Onyango Oloo on Jan 23, 2015 14:41:53 GMT 3
A Digital Essay by Onyango Oloo
Despicable.
Racist.
Cowardly.
Who does she think Kenyans are?
Antarctic penguins?
Zombies?
Pegida followers in Germany?
Clueless Tea Party members in the American Deep South?
Pre-historic sloths?
Expired 386 dinosaurs in a Canadian land fill?
I used to admire Hon Charity Ngilu.
Back in the day when she was the Presidential candidate of my former party, the SDP, in 1997; when she was the first woman to vie for that post in Kenya.
Those days, long evaporated now, when she used to kick serious butt, storming police stations to demand the release of incarcerated human rights activists; during those nostalgic times when she would organize counter demonstrations to denounce sexist cabinet ministers who mocked Akamba culture.
I was so enamored of Mrs Charity Ngilu during those days, that the very first time I met her face to face in Whippany, New Jersey, USA ,at the annual conference of the Kenya Community Abroad way back in July 2003, I practically sidled up to her and cajoled her
to pose with my then 12 year old son as I snapped away with my digital camera.
Those days have vanished like extra money in your pocket in early January, in the aftermath of another bout of ill advised Xmas festivities.
But she is a member of the tyranny of numbers tribal cabinet and she croaks a different sycophantic tune-off key-these days.
It is a tried and tested gimmick in Kenya among the ruling and powerful elite in Kenya:
In the face of a particularly embarrassing scandal involving corruption in the country, just look around for a convenient scapegoat.
It really helps if said scandal is Goldenberg, Triton or Playgroundgate.
Like a cynical conjuror, these cynical political manipulators will more likely than not ferret out a Pattni, a Somaia, a Harbans Singh.
A Kenyan of South Asian origin is “safe”.
First of all, it is ASSUMED that s/he is not even Kenyan. He will ALWAYS be an INDIAN even though his great grandparents have never set sight on the sub-continent–not even as tourists or foreign students.
Secondly, they are unlikely to ever pose an ethnic threat to the so called “tyranny of numbers”.
Thirdly, Kenyans of South Asian descent have been presumably intimidated into silence by the mighty and powerful with threats of “deportation” hanging over their Kenyan heads.
But for every Pattni there is a Saitoti; for every Somaia there is a Moi; for every Harbans Singh there is a proxy owner of Weston Hotel who is expected to remain a nameless private developer and a top notch Jubilee big wig.
Fortunately, Kenyans are among the most intelligent human beings on earth.
And even more than the dynamic digital duo, they are quite adept at social media.
Ever since the Cabinet Secretary for Lands opened her mouth to unleash that ridiculous canard about the Singh land grabbing cartel, the howls of derisive laughter and the decibel of sneers on Facebook, Twitter, the blogs, online forums, text messages have been as relentless as the recent menacing typhoon which forced the Argentinian pope to cut short his Filipino crusade.
There has been a lot play in the ubiqitous male surname of the Sikh community with a lot of people “singhing” or passing around Ruto’s mother tongue salutation of “Cham ge me SINGH” without the jocular tweeps and facebookers cottoning on to the subliminal message of their unconscious anti-Muhindi xenophobia
Land grabbing and senior Kenyan political leaders are stuck together like white on rice.
From 1963 to date that is why the major land grabbers also appear to be closely linked to State House and the executive.
This aspect was very apparent during the public hearings of the TJRC, with hundreds of thousands of Kenyans around the country coming forward to give testimony how well connected political crooks grabbed public, community and ancestral land across Kenya.
The TJRC attempted to meticulously record and document this testimony and compiled all this into four volumes which comprised their Final Report.
But then something happened.
On orders from above, portions of the Land chapter of the TJRC Report were SUPPRESSED.
But some of the commissioners refused to take this lying down.
According to a Press Statement released by the late Ambassador Berhanu Dinka, Prof.Ronald C.Slye and Judge Gertrude Chawatama, respectively, the three Ethiopian, American and Zambian members of the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission:
The Land chapter was approved, signed, and submitted to the printer for publishing prior to the end of our operational period on 3 May 2013.
It had been unanimously approved by all Commissioners, and transmitted to the publisher in order to be printed and bound with the rest of the Report.
At that time, there was one Commissioner who had raised some concerns about the chapter.
There was a discussion about these concerns that concluded with the possibility of that Commissioner drafting a dissent.
No such dissent was ever submitted to the Commission.
Around this same time, a copy of the Land chapter appears to have been leaked to individuals with ties to State House.
Shortly after this, the Commission was told that in order for us to hand in the Report, we needed to provide an advance copy to the Ministry of Justice and to the Office of the President.
The reason, we were told at the time, was that officials in those offices needed to prepare a summary of the Report to brief the President so that, when we handed over the Report, he would have already been able to familiarize himself with its contents.
Initially, the Commission resisted this request.
After numerous both internally and with those offices, and after we were told that the Report would not be received unless this “normal procedure” was followed, we agreed to provide a copy of the executive summary of the Report to the offices of the Attorney General and to the Office of the President.
After this concession was made we were still told that an advance copy of the entire Report was required.
With much regret, and with the abstention of two of the international Commissioners, it was agreed to give an advance draft of the Final Report to the Office of the President.
Shortly after the apparent leak of the Land chapter, and the handing over of an advanced copy to the Office of the President, the of some of the Kenyan Commissioners began to shift.
One Commissioner who had been the first to approve the Land chapter, and who stated that it was “excellent and not a comma should be touched,” and who vigorously opposed the suggestions of the other Commissioner who was contemplating a dissent, began to argue forcefully and consistently for major revisions to the Land chapter. These revisions involved the removal of entire paragraphs of the chapter, and significant revisions of other paragraphs.
It was at this time that a number of Commissioners, including at least one of the international Commissioners, received phone calls from a senior official in the Office of the President suggesting various changes to the Land chapter These suggestions included the removal of specific paragraphs.
Some of the Commissioners who now demanded changes to the Chapter began to exert enormous pressure on staff and others related to the production of the Report This included demanding that changes be made without any consultation, much less consent, from other Commissioners.
At one point it was asserted that five Commissioners approved changing the Land chapter.
When two of those individuals were contacted, they clearly stated that they had never consented to such changes and in fact later those same Commissioners were to put their position against such changes in writing.
Even if five Commissioners had approved of such changes, the three international Commissioners (and perhaps others) were never consulted; no meeting was called; and thus the procedures by which the Commission is to make decisions were blatantly ignored.
The myth of five Commissioners agreeing to changes in the land chapter at this point even manifested itself in a formal letter written by the Chair to our Director of Research, purporting to authorize the changes to the Land chapter based upon a majority of five votes.
And yet at least one of these written statements expressing opposition to any changes in the report evaporated in a twenty-four hours,also in writing and after, we are told, direct intervention by senior officials in the Office of the President.
In a matter of days, five Commissioners appeared united concerning changes to the Land chapter.
The dissenting international commissioners then RE-INSERTED THE DELETED PARAGRAPHS:
203.In addition, there were peculiar cases of land grabbing and related malpractices during Kenyatta’s administration which serve to illustrate how deeply the problem of land grabbing had cut into Kenya and the wanton manner in which key government officials, including the president grabbed what should have been public or communal land and “dished” it to relatives.
A case in point involves the president himself. When Kenyatta’s son, Muigai, married Isaiah Mathenge’s daughter in 1976, Kenyatta’s wedding gift was a large tract of government land which was, apparently, acquired without official approval and without compliance with legal procedures.
227.The foregoing statement discloses the potential danger of violent conflicts by Kenyans whose government has not only committed atrocities against, but has also failed over the years to recognize their plight and redress them. In light of secessionist movement inclinations manifested by the MRC at the Coast, any honest view that a community in Kenya would be better off with colonialists should be carefully addressed to avert the possibility of more secessionist movements that may be facilitated by the current establishment of regional governments across the country.
231.Apparently over time, especially between 1996 and 2003, the Criticos family offered a substantial proportion of the 30,000 acres of land to the government for purchase at the low rate of only KSh600 per acre to settle landless squatters. However, after acquiring the land, the government, in its usual style of irregularity, began to settle people from upcountry, especially the Kamba and not the coastal communities that the land was meant for.The Criticos family further offered to sell land at concessionary rates to landless communities from the Coast and from upcountry, including those from Nyanza who had settled on the land as farm workers but the family’s efforts were thwarted by the government which, through the provincial administration, forcibly evicted the Criticos family from the whole parcel of land and began to irregularly settle people on it. By 2008, the Criticos family’s efforts to give up a large portion of the land for re-settlement of the landless appears to have been completely disrupted, to a halt, as a result of illegal dealings with the land on orders of the then President, supplemented by support of the local MP and the Ministry of Lands and Settlement.
257. However,after Kenya attained independence, in 1972, President Kenyatta unlawfully alienated to himself 250 acres of the land, especially portions on the beach. He also allocated part of the land to his friends, relatives and other associates. He directed residents that whatever was left of the trust lands would be established as settlement schemes for their benefit. However, without following due procedures of law, he again took part of whatever remained for himself and his relatives. He also demanded that local communities that should have benefited from the trust lands accept payment of KSh600 per acre. When the locals declined to accept the money, he told them that whether or not they accepted it, the remainder of the trust lands would go to the government. That is how irregularly President Kenyatta took all of Tiwi and Diani trust lands at the expense of local people who immediately became ‘squatters’ on the land and were subsequently evicted, rendering them landless and poor. By 2012, land in the former trust lands fetched KSh15 million per acre.
261.Since Kenyatta’s administration, settlement schemes at the Coast have been fraught with irregularities, outright discrimination of landless coastal communities, settlement of mainly one upcountry community on coastal communities’ lands, land grabbing by high and low-ranking government officials and fraud. It emerges that the real intention of settlement schemes at the Coast, especially in the period immediately after independence, was to settle mainly the Kikuyu tribe on ancestral lands of coastal communities. As a result, many members of coastal communities who lost their land during colonialism remain landless, poor and, in many cases, destitute, their means of livelihood having been forcefully taken away.
It is not lost on many Kenyan observers that right in the midst of the Lang’ata Primary School playground controversy, both the NLC Chair Dr. Swazuri and the Lands Minister Charity Ngilu were busy renewing the 99 year lease in Taita Taveta for the 30,000 acres owned by the Kenyatta family.
On the day that Charity Ngilu threatened to resign after “naming” the hitherto unnamed "name behind the name", there were those who had taken the precaution of buying pop corn in anticipation that Ngilu would be fingering her tearing eyed cabinet colleague the deputy president.
Some Kenyans were flabbergasted, many more almost peed in their pants with amused shock when she convened a press conference to unleash the moniker of the previously unheard Harbans Singh.
For the record, reliable sources inform me that Harbans Singh is NOT a saint and he is not UNKNOWN as far as land grabbing in Kenya is concerned. His convoluted and dodgy ties with the main grabbers in this country go back decades to the Jomo Kenyatta era; he allegedly was part and parcel with the notorious land grabbing figures in the Moi era. His wheeling and dealing saw him collude with others to grab a school compound owned by then Nairobi City Council and erect a building which was later sold to Safaricom; yep
Safaricom Houseon Waiyaki Way in Westlands sits on grabbed public land-thanks to the cosy ties between Harbans and Daniel arap Moi. I am told that he had an arrangement with KANU's creme de la creme where he would identify and target an area he wanted to grab and hey presto! a letter of allotment with Moi's original signature would soon be in his pocket. Apparently, some of the grabbed land would be later sold to NSSF using workers' contributions. If we accept that the Jubilee administration is a continuation of KANU by other means (Uhuru was the KANU candidate in 1992; Ruto was KANU's Secretary General) why should anyone be surprised if a direct organic link was found to exist between Harbans and say, William Ruto?
But was Harbans Singh REALLY the guy Charity Ngilu was so rattled by that she was going to name and resign?
Was HE the one who summoned police squads from six police stations?
Was Harbans the one who organized the tear gas?
Was Mr. Singh Amrit the one directing OCPD Elijah Mwangi on when to terrify the primary school kids?
I must confess that Onyango Oloo was not among the millions of gob smacked Kenyans who were astounded to hear Harbans Singh, his offspring and siblings named as the "private developers" behind the Lang'ata Primary School playground saga and fiasco.
I had been prepared, forewarned, a couple of days earlier right on the very pages of Jukwaa, the online Kenyan discussion forum that I founded and have been administering for the last ten years.
A pro-Jubilee raucous blogger had warned me of dark days ahead for Jukwaa even as he chastised me for my reckless audacity in wondering if it was Deputy President William Ruto who was indeed the Lang'ata Primary School playground land grabber.
There is a lot of jabbering,yammering and yapping about Singhs and land grabbing.
But my question today is:
How about the OTHER Singh?
I mean
Davinder SINGH Lamba.
Yes, that Davinder.
Davinder Lamba is probably the number one champion against land grabbing in Kenya, the person synonymous with Operation Firimbi who just last year was being clobbered by PCEA hired goons outside the grabbed Kibagare wetland in Westlands.
My point is that it is very easy for this matter to degenerate into a seasoned frenzy of South Asian bashing, losing sight of the bigger picture.
One thing is for certain:
Charity Ngilu has ensured that the name of William Samoei Ruto is not going to depart from the news headlines anytime soon.
Despicable.
Racist.
Cowardly.
Who does she think Kenyans are?
Antarctic penguins?
Zombies?
Pegida followers in Germany?
Clueless Tea Party members in the American Deep South?
Pre-historic sloths?
Expired 386 dinosaurs in a Canadian land fill?
I used to admire Hon Charity Ngilu.
Back in the day when she was the Presidential candidate of my former party, the SDP, in 1997; when she was the first woman to vie for that post in Kenya.
Those days, long evaporated now, when she used to kick serious butt, storming police stations to demand the release of incarcerated human rights activists; during those nostalgic times when she would organize counter demonstrations to denounce sexist cabinet ministers who mocked Akamba culture.
I was so enamored of Mrs Charity Ngilu during those days, that the very first time I met her face to face in Whippany, New Jersey, USA ,at the annual conference of the Kenya Community Abroad way back in July 2003, I practically sidled up to her and cajoled her
to pose with my then 12 year old son as I snapped away with my digital camera.
Those days have vanished like extra money in your pocket in early January, in the aftermath of another bout of ill advised Xmas festivities.
But she is a member of the tyranny of numbers tribal cabinet and she croaks a different sycophantic tune-off key-these days.
It is a tried and tested gimmick in Kenya among the ruling and powerful elite in Kenya:
In the face of a particularly embarrassing scandal involving corruption in the country, just look around for a convenient scapegoat.
It really helps if said scandal is Goldenberg, Triton or Playgroundgate.
Like a cynical conjuror, these cynical political manipulators will more likely than not ferret out a Pattni, a Somaia, a Harbans Singh.
A Kenyan of South Asian origin is “safe”.
First of all, it is ASSUMED that s/he is not even Kenyan. He will ALWAYS be an INDIAN even though his great grandparents have never set sight on the sub-continent–not even as tourists or foreign students.
Secondly, they are unlikely to ever pose an ethnic threat to the so called “tyranny of numbers”.
Thirdly, Kenyans of South Asian descent have been presumably intimidated into silence by the mighty and powerful with threats of “deportation” hanging over their Kenyan heads.
But for every Pattni there is a Saitoti; for every Somaia there is a Moi; for every Harbans Singh there is a proxy owner of Weston Hotel who is expected to remain a nameless private developer and a top notch Jubilee big wig.
Fortunately, Kenyans are among the most intelligent human beings on earth.
And even more than the dynamic digital duo, they are quite adept at social media.
Ever since the Cabinet Secretary for Lands opened her mouth to unleash that ridiculous canard about the Singh land grabbing cartel, the howls of derisive laughter and the decibel of sneers on Facebook, Twitter, the blogs, online forums, text messages have been as relentless as the recent menacing typhoon which forced the Argentinian pope to cut short his Filipino crusade.
There has been a lot play in the ubiqitous male surname of the Sikh community with a lot of people “singhing” or passing around Ruto’s mother tongue salutation of “Cham ge me SINGH” without the jocular tweeps and facebookers cottoning on to the subliminal message of their unconscious anti-Muhindi xenophobia
Land grabbing and senior Kenyan political leaders are stuck together like white on rice.
From 1963 to date that is why the major land grabbers also appear to be closely linked to State House and the executive.
This aspect was very apparent during the public hearings of the TJRC, with hundreds of thousands of Kenyans around the country coming forward to give testimony how well connected political crooks grabbed public, community and ancestral land across Kenya.
The TJRC attempted to meticulously record and document this testimony and compiled all this into four volumes which comprised their Final Report.
But then something happened.
On orders from above, portions of the Land chapter of the TJRC Report were SUPPRESSED.
But some of the commissioners refused to take this lying down.
According to a Press Statement released by the late Ambassador Berhanu Dinka, Prof.Ronald C.Slye and Judge Gertrude Chawatama, respectively, the three Ethiopian, American and Zambian members of the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission:
The Land chapter was approved, signed, and submitted to the printer for publishing prior to the end of our operational period on 3 May 2013.
It had been unanimously approved by all Commissioners, and transmitted to the publisher in order to be printed and bound with the rest of the Report.
At that time, there was one Commissioner who had raised some concerns about the chapter.
There was a discussion about these concerns that concluded with the possibility of that Commissioner drafting a dissent.
No such dissent was ever submitted to the Commission.
Around this same time, a copy of the Land chapter appears to have been leaked to individuals with ties to State House.
Shortly after this, the Commission was told that in order for us to hand in the Report, we needed to provide an advance copy to the Ministry of Justice and to the Office of the President.
The reason, we were told at the time, was that officials in those offices needed to prepare a summary of the Report to brief the President so that, when we handed over the Report, he would have already been able to familiarize himself with its contents.
Initially, the Commission resisted this request.
After numerous both internally and with those offices, and after we were told that the Report would not be received unless this “normal procedure” was followed, we agreed to provide a copy of the executive summary of the Report to the offices of the Attorney General and to the Office of the President.
After this concession was made we were still told that an advance copy of the entire Report was required.
With much regret, and with the abstention of two of the international Commissioners, it was agreed to give an advance draft of the Final Report to the Office of the President.
Shortly after the apparent leak of the Land chapter, and the handing over of an advanced copy to the Office of the President, the of some of the Kenyan Commissioners began to shift.
One Commissioner who had been the first to approve the Land chapter, and who stated that it was “excellent and not a comma should be touched,” and who vigorously opposed the suggestions of the other Commissioner who was contemplating a dissent, began to argue forcefully and consistently for major revisions to the Land chapter. These revisions involved the removal of entire paragraphs of the chapter, and significant revisions of other paragraphs.
It was at this time that a number of Commissioners, including at least one of the international Commissioners, received phone calls from a senior official in the Office of the President suggesting various changes to the Land chapter These suggestions included the removal of specific paragraphs.
Some of the Commissioners who now demanded changes to the Chapter began to exert enormous pressure on staff and others related to the production of the Report This included demanding that changes be made without any consultation, much less consent, from other Commissioners.
At one point it was asserted that five Commissioners approved changing the Land chapter.
When two of those individuals were contacted, they clearly stated that they had never consented to such changes and in fact later those same Commissioners were to put their position against such changes in writing.
Even if five Commissioners had approved of such changes, the three international Commissioners (and perhaps others) were never consulted; no meeting was called; and thus the procedures by which the Commission is to make decisions were blatantly ignored.
The myth of five Commissioners agreeing to changes in the land chapter at this point even manifested itself in a formal letter written by the Chair to our Director of Research, purporting to authorize the changes to the Land chapter based upon a majority of five votes.
And yet at least one of these written statements expressing opposition to any changes in the report evaporated in a twenty-four hours,also in writing and after, we are told, direct intervention by senior officials in the Office of the President.
In a matter of days, five Commissioners appeared united concerning changes to the Land chapter.
The dissenting international commissioners then RE-INSERTED THE DELETED PARAGRAPHS:
203.In addition, there were peculiar cases of land grabbing and related malpractices during Kenyatta’s administration which serve to illustrate how deeply the problem of land grabbing had cut into Kenya and the wanton manner in which key government officials, including the president grabbed what should have been public or communal land and “dished” it to relatives.
A case in point involves the president himself. When Kenyatta’s son, Muigai, married Isaiah Mathenge’s daughter in 1976, Kenyatta’s wedding gift was a large tract of government land which was, apparently, acquired without official approval and without compliance with legal procedures.
227.The foregoing statement discloses the potential danger of violent conflicts by Kenyans whose government has not only committed atrocities against, but has also failed over the years to recognize their plight and redress them. In light of secessionist movement inclinations manifested by the MRC at the Coast, any honest view that a community in Kenya would be better off with colonialists should be carefully addressed to avert the possibility of more secessionist movements that may be facilitated by the current establishment of regional governments across the country.
231.Apparently over time, especially between 1996 and 2003, the Criticos family offered a substantial proportion of the 30,000 acres of land to the government for purchase at the low rate of only KSh600 per acre to settle landless squatters. However, after acquiring the land, the government, in its usual style of irregularity, began to settle people from upcountry, especially the Kamba and not the coastal communities that the land was meant for.The Criticos family further offered to sell land at concessionary rates to landless communities from the Coast and from upcountry, including those from Nyanza who had settled on the land as farm workers but the family’s efforts were thwarted by the government which, through the provincial administration, forcibly evicted the Criticos family from the whole parcel of land and began to irregularly settle people on it. By 2008, the Criticos family’s efforts to give up a large portion of the land for re-settlement of the landless appears to have been completely disrupted, to a halt, as a result of illegal dealings with the land on orders of the then President, supplemented by support of the local MP and the Ministry of Lands and Settlement.
257. However,after Kenya attained independence, in 1972, President Kenyatta unlawfully alienated to himself 250 acres of the land, especially portions on the beach. He also allocated part of the land to his friends, relatives and other associates. He directed residents that whatever was left of the trust lands would be established as settlement schemes for their benefit. However, without following due procedures of law, he again took part of whatever remained for himself and his relatives. He also demanded that local communities that should have benefited from the trust lands accept payment of KSh600 per acre. When the locals declined to accept the money, he told them that whether or not they accepted it, the remainder of the trust lands would go to the government. That is how irregularly President Kenyatta took all of Tiwi and Diani trust lands at the expense of local people who immediately became ‘squatters’ on the land and were subsequently evicted, rendering them landless and poor. By 2012, land in the former trust lands fetched KSh15 million per acre.
261.Since Kenyatta’s administration, settlement schemes at the Coast have been fraught with irregularities, outright discrimination of landless coastal communities, settlement of mainly one upcountry community on coastal communities’ lands, land grabbing by high and low-ranking government officials and fraud. It emerges that the real intention of settlement schemes at the Coast, especially in the period immediately after independence, was to settle mainly the Kikuyu tribe on ancestral lands of coastal communities. As a result, many members of coastal communities who lost their land during colonialism remain landless, poor and, in many cases, destitute, their means of livelihood having been forcefully taken away.
It is not lost on many Kenyan observers that right in the midst of the Lang’ata Primary School playground controversy, both the NLC Chair Dr. Swazuri and the Lands Minister Charity Ngilu were busy renewing the 99 year lease in Taita Taveta for the 30,000 acres owned by the Kenyatta family.
On the day that Charity Ngilu threatened to resign after “naming” the hitherto unnamed "name behind the name", there were those who had taken the precaution of buying pop corn in anticipation that Ngilu would be fingering her tearing eyed cabinet colleague the deputy president.
Some Kenyans were flabbergasted, many more almost peed in their pants with amused shock when she convened a press conference to unleash the moniker of the previously unheard Harbans Singh.
For the record, reliable sources inform me that Harbans Singh is NOT a saint and he is not UNKNOWN as far as land grabbing in Kenya is concerned. His convoluted and dodgy ties with the main grabbers in this country go back decades to the Jomo Kenyatta era; he allegedly was part and parcel with the notorious land grabbing figures in the Moi era. His wheeling and dealing saw him collude with others to grab a school compound owned by then Nairobi City Council and erect a building which was later sold to Safaricom; yep
Safaricom Houseon Waiyaki Way in Westlands sits on grabbed public land-thanks to the cosy ties between Harbans and Daniel arap Moi. I am told that he had an arrangement with KANU's creme de la creme where he would identify and target an area he wanted to grab and hey presto! a letter of allotment with Moi's original signature would soon be in his pocket. Apparently, some of the grabbed land would be later sold to NSSF using workers' contributions. If we accept that the Jubilee administration is a continuation of KANU by other means (Uhuru was the KANU candidate in 1992; Ruto was KANU's Secretary General) why should anyone be surprised if a direct organic link was found to exist between Harbans and say, William Ruto?
But was Harbans Singh REALLY the guy Charity Ngilu was so rattled by that she was going to name and resign?
Was HE the one who summoned police squads from six police stations?
Was Harbans the one who organized the tear gas?
Was Mr. Singh Amrit the one directing OCPD Elijah Mwangi on when to terrify the primary school kids?
I must confess that Onyango Oloo was not among the millions of gob smacked Kenyans who were astounded to hear Harbans Singh, his offspring and siblings named as the "private developers" behind the Lang'ata Primary School playground saga and fiasco.
I had been prepared, forewarned, a couple of days earlier right on the very pages of Jukwaa, the online Kenyan discussion forum that I founded and have been administering for the last ten years.
A pro-Jubilee raucous blogger had warned me of dark days ahead for Jukwaa even as he chastised me for my reckless audacity in wondering if it was Deputy President William Ruto who was indeed the Lang'ata Primary School playground land grabber.
There is a lot of jabbering,yammering and yapping about Singhs and land grabbing.
But my question today is:
How about the OTHER Singh?
I mean
Davinder SINGH Lamba.
Yes, that Davinder.
Davinder Lamba is probably the number one champion against land grabbing in Kenya, the person synonymous with Operation Firimbi who just last year was being clobbered by PCEA hired goons outside the grabbed Kibagare wetland in Westlands.
My point is that it is very easy for this matter to degenerate into a seasoned frenzy of South Asian bashing, losing sight of the bigger picture.
One thing is for certain:
Charity Ngilu has ensured that the name of William Samoei Ruto is not going to depart from the news headlines anytime soon.
Onyango Oloo
Nairobi, Kenya
January 23, 2015
Nairobi, Kenya
January 23, 2015