Palaver

I see a sinister hand in the nonsense ‘debates’ raging in Dr Kofi Annan’s forced marriage. In a union where issue can be taken over important matters, it is peculiar that the most heat goes into wars over renegotiating the National Accord or making the PM the top civil servant. These public arena jousts seem crafted to keep the divisions created before the last election fresh. Don’t we tire of this shameless manipulation?

Incompetence is not limited to officialdom: Some criminals demonstrate unacceptable stupidity in their crimes. Why use a gun, risking lives (yours included) in anything as petty

as an ATM robbery? Or a haberdashery heist? Before anyone writes in moaning poverty, may I remind you billions are lifted out of Kenyan pockets in smart, non-violent heists?

A poser for Environment minister John Michuki: Why is the Government keen to rip up a parking lot to ‘save riparian land’ (make an underground canal or mtaro visible), while planning to pump money into Webuye’s worst polluter and destroyer of indigenous tree species? And why not demolish in Runda’s wetlands? We smell a rat in selective environmentalism.

Doom and gloom thinking has led us to miss one of the big miracles of the last year, says Jack Onyango. The Kenya Revenue Authority managed to collect 96 per cent of its revenue target for the first six months of the current financial year. Talk of "missed" targets doesn’t mention that the target was 13.6 per cent higher than the previous year. Basically, they collected more money even as the economy slowed. We need more of such ‘failure’!

And finally...

The John Gakuo philosophy of making do with the tools

you have works for prison breaks, too: Six prisoners escaped a Canadian jail last year after spending four months chipping a path to freedom with nail clippers and other makeshift tools. The remand prisoners, who removed a grill and a steel plate and dug through a wall, wouldn’t have escaped if they had been kept busy, say herding goats or making vehicle registration plates.

—palaver@eastandard.net