Disaster....disaster!

It's really sad to speculate or comment on an incident where innocent life has been lost and my condolences and sympathies to all the families affected by the incident at Nyayo Stadium last Saturday and in the other incidents herein mentioned. In all fairness, what we should be doing right now is acting to prevent a recurrence, especially because we believe as some learned professor once said..."It was an act of God". We should at least be ready to do something helpful when the next one happens!
...here we go again! Another disaster, more tears flow, more catalogues in our library or archive of national disasters! Tears had not dried from our faces and we had not finished going through the latest addition to the library. We were just going through the motions of doing post-mortems to the disaster and simply moving on with our lives (as we have always done) when, lo behold, another one happens!
There were incidents like; 'Ngai ndeinthya', 'Bombolulu', 'Kathyaani', thousands of matatu vehicles' contributions, marine vessels like the Likoni ferry have not been left out, we've even been bombed in our city with many lives lost!
Yet, with all this experience in our 'CV', we still lack when we look at the paragraph detailing our disaster preparedness. Actually that paragraph is non-existent in the said CV.
Compounded with this lack of preparedness is the fact that we are still suffering from our own home-grown, home and internationally practiced corruption. The culture of impunity is still squeezing tears out of our eyes-just like a painful bodily injury or an irritating onion peeled in a non-ventilated room. Why were the stadium tickets over sold? Why did the gate keepers only open two gates out of the available six? Did we have first responders-police, paramedics, ambulances, first aid trained personnel like the St. John, in place at and around the stadium or did the organisers feel these to be an added unnecessary expense to be avoided?
Corruption!
Someone benefitted from the excess tickets sold or someone had printed their own tickets and sold them pocketing all the proceeds.
May be there was a cartel that controlled who got in at the gate-(valid ticket or no) which needed to concentrate on their activities so they felt it was better for them to have as few entrances as possible open.
Were there extra traffic police officers directing traffic around this stadium?-I might even imagine that the traffic lights at the nearby round-abouts were not working and the motorists decided on right of way by mere urgency of one's intended destination! But here again, I speculate.
At this point in time; the planners of this event, the staff at the stadium, all those involved should answer questions and those answers should help in formulating regulations for planning such events in future to avoid recurrence. If such regulations are in place, then we need to know who did (or did not do) what and what becomes of them.
I am speculating, and I stand to be corrected.

CDFs....? Does the new constitution....?

One thing that always manages to bewilder me is the persistence of our tendency to take short-cuts. Even when we know that short cuts will lead us to pit falls and patches of quick sand, we still convince ourselves that we are better than those before us who fell along the way. Nobody wants to put in a day's honest labour to earn an honest day's wage. Everybody wants to grab other peoples' lifetime earnings in one day and make it their own. They don't care about the repercussions on the whole community thereby caused. We have simply internalised and justified GREED and the saddest thing is that we have tailored our laws to protect and perpetuate this vice!--or so it seems.
Year after year, we wait to read, and do read, the Auditor-General's report on fiscal spending (or is it mis-spending) by our Civil servants and in unison cry out loud, "Oh No! Not again!"
.
.
That's it. That's all we do.
I wish the report could be re-formatted to show the misappropriated funds side by side the numbers of  deprived citizens in our midst, the names of the perpetrators. If we cannot take action on those criminals in our midst, let us at least know them by name.----but then again, maybe I'm living in an Utopia?

Tribute to a liberator.

Yet another of the freedom heroes of Kenya has passed the divide and we have again, as we have done so many times in the past, assembled at their homesteads to pay our last respects and shed tears.
We have perfected the art of paying last respects although these are usually the only respect the deceased ever got from the nation they sacrificed so much for. We shed tears though the deceased from their vantage point in the here-after can tell they are of the crocodile variety.
What a shame!
It is high time, especially with the recent re-birth of our nation and the accompanying new spirit of nationalism, that we chronicled our struggle for 'uhuru halisi'. We need to recognise all those who have played roles in our freedoms and know them by name. We don't have to carve or make sculptures of them but at least we ought to have a wall like memorial- most appropriately at the so called freedom corner and/or on other appropriate locations nationwide, and their names etched thereon. We need to know how and where the still living heroes are, the conditions of their lives, their health status. It really is national immorality to decry a former freedom fighter's poor conditions at their gravesides, after they die.
Farewell, Peter Young.