But you’ve gotta love Kenya.

Somebody wins an election in a foreign country, Kenya declares a national holiday.
Somebody wins an election in Kenya, its time for a National Emergency !!

Why have elections at all ? Lets celebrate other elections !

Cup of fine Espresso in Nairobi: 1.25 Euro (coffee produced locally and blended)

Nice third degree price discrimination at work. i.e. the average person drinking fine espresso in Italy is poorer than the average person drinking fine espresso in Nairobi – same product, different audience segments.

I rented a Hyundai at the airport. The gas prices must be hitting home, the woman with heavy makeup at the rental agency (she had an ugly little pekingese crawling inside a child basket) told me Hyundais have been particularly popular.

Drove three hours, and then took an exit off the interstate, through some really downbeat townships. Mugithi noticed: “All the poor people are fat”. In the richer localities, where there are houses instead of trailer parks, and lawns instead of potted fungus and cacti, the people are fitter, some jog, some take their dogs walking and are generally thinner.

(via : New York magazine)

So all those “mooning” jokes at the UN finally reached the ears of the secretary general ?

Note:

Briefly, I worked as an auditor for a UN project. While auditing Value Added Tax redemptions (the UN is tax exempt because its a well-heeled humanitarian organization). I discovered they were filing VAT claims for individual purchases (5 reams of paper, a computer mouse, 50 rolls of toilet paper and so on). For most of these items, the cost of processing the VAT was higher than the VAT itself.  I was subsequently relieved of duty for suspected insanity. (Though at at point I was merely acting like a true vulgarian)

I was sitting in the living room discussing some tedious details with mugithi’s aunt. The sun had made it round the house, by this time I was being blinded by the reflection from the aunt’s nose (the nose having burnt up its ration of talcum powder – a failed attempt to look très digne).
It was at this moment that our internally displaced house help came sobbing uncontrollably, and a death was reported.

I rushed to the cage, and president hamster was indeed lying listless on the tiny swing inside the cage (which swung back and forth in a dreadful silent ballet).

We have 2 hamsters, named after the president and the prime minister, sometime back, just for the dismal pleasure of it, I had made the house-help’s child in charge of feeding the hamsters. The child had diligently taken on the task and fed these mute creatures 10 times a day – and fed them to the point of gluttony and sinful death (the hapless prime minister hamster passed away a day later).

After a solemn ceremony, we buried them together in the garden. May they find a happy place in hamster heaven

My only problem with the story is that it tries to evoke horror and suffering, but evidence to the contrary is present right there in the article:

A college student known by her trade name of Brandy, who plies her trade from a girls’ hostel in the city, confided to us that she makes up to Sh35,000 in a week when business is good.

“It a thrilling business,” she says. “I was forced into it due to hardship and the harsh living conditions, and now I pay my own fee and still have something left over to send to my mother who is a widow.“

Her mother believes that she is the beneficiary of a lucrative internship with an international NGO in the city.

(Nice touch I must say, claiming to work for an NGO)

Apparently it is shocking that the business is a lucrative one:

In a shocking revelation, one of the bureaus alleges to pocket close to Sh300,000 a day from the services delivered by some of the 20 girls in its stable.

A regular office worker earning KSH 30,000 a month pays income tax to the government. A prostitute earning more than the office worker lives on a tax-free salary.

Either way you look at it: there is little incentive for a prostitute to change professions, and the government loses out on tax revenues.

(Coincidentally, I had Mozart’s requiem mass in D minor playing on my car’s stereo)

The problem is, world food prices are driven by commodity price speculation, rising oil prices, the dropping US dollar, and general panic.

Result: Calling it a ‘silent tsunami’ most probably fuels more speculation and panic, thus driving prices up even more.

The supply of food itself seems no worse than before, just the prices have gone up.

This is a great time for people like the world food program, now they can make a stronger case for GMO.

Note: bio-fuel is not the cause, but subsidies like this are.

Sometime ago I got bumped off a Kenya Airways flight on the Malindi-Nairobi sector. There were 13 other people bumped off on that particular flight. Now usually, overbooking is done on busy sectors with lots of passengers, on this particular sector there is one flight a day, and the planes are as big as matchboxes.

So the airline put us into a bus and we took a hour and half bus ride to Mombasa, where after a 2 hour wait we boarded a flight to Nairobi. Assurances all round that this was not a regular occurrence but a glitch in the system. Now, I also had a return ticket on the Nairobi-Malindi sector, and because I did not board the flight in Malindi, the airline promptly canceled my return flight ticket as a no-show!

This week I decided to take another airline Fly540, and guess what, while I was boarding the flight to Nairobi in Malindi, I saw a group of irate passengers for the Kenya Airways flight being loaded onto a bus headed for Mombasa! (and one of the passengers even looked like me!)

Note: Fly540, so far so good, despite the noisy planes. Even the air stewardesses look more shapely.

You bet we are gonna see more motorcycles, if not cycles with engines [2]:

Note [1] – This parking lot guy hiked his rates after a bigger parking lot in front of the Regency got bought out by an Indian company to build some kind of sky-scraping corporate office.

Note [2] – I’ve cut usage of a car by 80% since I got the motorcycle. But what is really stopping people from using a motorbike is some kind of class dirge surrounding anything with less than four wheels.