Between Christmas and the New Year

I have been trying to find an answer to this uncomplicated question:

Is there any other nation in the World that choses to hold elections between Christmas and the New Year ?

Think of this:

• Would Israel ever have elections during Passover ?
• Would America ever have elections during Christmas ?
• Would Malaysia or Pakistan or Iran ever hold an election over Ramadan ?
• Would India ever hold elections during Deewali ?
• Would <insert country of choice> ever hold elections during <insert country’s major festival> ?

There must be some outré reason as to why countries do not hold elections during the convenience of such holidays ?

Statistics and recursion

The wordpress blog statistics informed me today that one of the top search engine phrases hitting this blog is :

“post erection violense in kenya”

Big balls

In Kenya its the time for conspiracy theories. This is mine.

Watch this video

About 20 seconds in you will see the Kenyan president in full color (Yeah, he is the guy with the big head and the pimpin blue shirt). Notice how he walks ? Its more like a waddle. The reason is simple : he has big balls, very big balls.

Clearly you need big balls for political confrontations. But Mr. president appears to have taken it literally – because when I viewed some earlier video footage, there appears to be no sign of the “big ball waddle”, so its a recent phenomenon. The president’s competitor gives him a good run for his money when it comes to the wardrobe, but falls short when it comes to big balls.

Thus on the basis of being the most well endowed contestant, the president is declared the rightful guardian of the national throne.

Armour

I have been watching the heavily armoured Kenya police severely battering the general population into submission. I did a bit of research and found that much of riot gear was purchased with donor money from the Swedish government!

This is a time of great opportunity. Apart from my earlier suggestion of funding the supply of humane rubber bullets (after all there is a way to humanely beat up people)- I also see vast possibilities in proposing hi-tech voting machines (donors would line up to fund that).

Decentralization – CDF

This is a highly centralized country. Disbursal of funds has traditionally been under the iron-fist of one despotic president or the other.

So the CDF – constituency development fund was one such resource sharing mechanism to encourage decentralization. The state disbursed funds directly to the constituencies via the member of parliament. To prevent misuse of the fund, constituency level committees were set up as part of the oversight mechanisms. The member of parliament still had a final say on how the funds could be spent.

But now, the State has thrown in a little invisible spanner in this scheme of local empowerment. It is mandatory now for the DC – District Commissioner to approve any spending at the constituency committee level. And who is the DC ? The DC is an agent of Centralized state, appointed by the powers directly under the president.

Now if the DC is effectively the president of local CDF disbursal committees, it means the agent of the Centre can chose to overrule the elected Member of Parliament on how to best spend these funds.

Does this look like “decentralization” ?

The Kenyan media is uniformly pathetic. There is reportage, navel gazing and little in terms of analysis. There have been reports about CDF in the news – not one has touched upon what the changes really mean.