Recap of the day

I have since found out, since I posted earlier, that there was an attempt of a demonstration this afternoon in Nairobi but it just involved a few people and 3 or 4 MP’s. They got out of their big 4x4’s and tried to walk across from the Nairobi Serena Hotel (opposite the Uhuru Park). They were stopped at the entrance of the park and when they wouldn’t leave by the request of the police, there was a canister of tear gas fired and that was that it seems.

In Mombasa, they weren’t so lucky and there was some trouble in the city centre where some people were also trying to demonstrate. Some shops were smashed up and looted. It seems in Mombasa town temperatures are much higher between the tribal groups and I think this stems from the extreme tribal violence in the ‘Likoni Clashes’ that left many dead back in 1997. It seems there's some kind of revenge mission going on down there between the tribes, the stories and threats between the different tribes are horrific.

Both in Nairobi and Mombasa the opposition have vowed they will try and demonstrate again tomorrow against the continuous pleas of the police not to.

We can only hope that Desmond Tutu is really getting somewhere with regards to getting the two sides to talk, but it seems that each side has conditions that I’m not convinced at this stage, the others are willing to meet.

We’ve had ‘Let’s recount the votes’
…. The president has not dismissed this one,
but then we get, ‘No’ from ODM, ‘Bad Plan, chances are there’ll be more changed than there were the first time!’.
Then we had ‘Let’s have a coalition government’
…… ‘No, We won’t agree’ says ODM, 'as we want to be in charge.'
Then its ‘Kibaki must resign before we speak’
…….. ‘No, I am the President’ is of course is Kibaki’s answer to that one.

At this rate I’m not entirely convinced we’re getting very far, very fast, but any kind of talking, even it’s just ‘No, No, No’, surely is better than no talking at all.

Meanwhile, I understand that Sunday has been declared a day for fasting and praying for peace by all the various church leaders here.

I do think anything’s worth a shot at this stage and if a day of prayer is the best we can do, well then I’m all for it.

‘Let’s Pray for Peace!’

Rally in Nairobi has been “put off”!

I have just got home from my day out in mayhem and received this message from Nation Media:

“ODM puts off Uhuru Park rally to Tuesday ‘for the sake of peace’”

- can I just say – seeing as I’ve been out and about all around Nairobi City Centre including around Uhuru Park most of the day and seen what has been really going on, the only reason that ODM has put off this rally is because they couldn’t get into Uhuru Park and it had nothing to do with the ‘sake of peace’ as there was not a lot of peace around town this morning, that’s for sure.

What I can’t bear is that they are going to try and hold this meeting again on Tuesday – arrrgggh ……….I can’t bear it – Please will someone knock these peoples heads together, get some sense out of them and stop the carnage.

I saw riot police harassing a taxi driver for absolutely no reason. Their only excuse was that he wasn’t doing a ‘U’ turn fast enough for their liking. There were others who jumped on a perfectly innocent loner that happened to be walking past a group of them and although quite decent looking, they decided they didn’t like the look of him and so started harassing him anyway.

I saw tens of ODM supporters with water bottles in their hands, (which you can be sure were full of chang’aa – which is the local brew), eyes big as footballs from smoking bhang strutting down the middle of the road in groups (and also falling off the pavement if they happened to wander into it!), and watched helplessly as a small group of about 10 of them mugged a completely innocent passer by. I wanted to stop and help him but couldn’t for threatening of stoning and burning of the car.

I saw a massive group of ODM supporters move down the road and trash everything in their wake. They looted the kiosks and what they didn’t steal, they smashed or burnt. They even tried to burn down this petrol station but were luckily moved on too quickly for them to succeed.

There were people shouting at their ODM leaders outside their headquarters in Nairobi that their people were being killed and they wanted revenge.

I saw two of the ‘Pentagon leaders’ from the ODM party on the road, (Norman Nyagah and Charity Ngilu). My driver told them their supporters were causing mayhem and heading their way and all they had to say was “We know, we know, come and join us!”

We had people throw themselves in front of the car, rocks in either hand shouting ‘We want Peace’

Their chant is “NO RAILA, NO PEACE” and I saw it written on walls of buildings they passed.

Please STOP destroying our country. If you really do want peace talk to your leaders and ask them to please talk to each other and solve this awful situation one way or another.

The first ‘working day’ of the Kenyan year.

Being the 2nd of January, and the first working day of the year where we generally all rush back into the office and are rearing to go after our Christmas break, today seemed a little strange.

I started off in the supermarket at 8.30 as soon as it opened in order to catch the few deliveries that had hit the shelves before the hordes of panic buyers rushed in. Basically, apart from their being absolutely no meat to speak of, no bread on the shelves and a meagre offering of mostly expensive fruit and very little veg to speak of, the shelves were fairly well stocked considering the mass panic buying that has been going on in the last few days, where the queues have been absolutely shocking and the supermarkets so overwhelmed that they have had to restrict the numbers through the door at any one time.

After doing my shopping in a relatively calm atmosphere, which was quite a novelty considering the antics of the last few days, I then headed for town and my office which is on the periphery.

We got there without any issues at all on the road - 'we' being my driver and I (my driver’s a rather large burly Luo chap who everyone thinks is my bodyguard and is armed – he’s not actually – but people often ask me the same!).

Once in the office people slowly trickled in. The police were stopping all the cars and matatus on the way into the city centre first thing this morning and were making all the passengers get out and walk to work, although as the day progressed, this seem to relax and as I was coming home this afternoon there were even a few public buses running.

It ended up being quite an odd day though. Some of the banks didn’t open before mid morning (if at all), and most of the shops, apart from the supermarkets and the odd cafe, stayed shut throughout the whole day. Traffic was easy, with very few cars on the road which was quite a nice change to the norm, but the few shops that were open were bustling with business.

Talk was all of politics and what had happened where and to whom, and who was still trapped in their houses surrounded by trouble. SMS's came through throughout the morning warning of roadblocks being manned by gangs on the road out of Nairobi to the west of the country, Nakuru, Eldoret and Kisumu, where apparantly the vehicles were all being stopped and all those of the wrong tribes (depending on who was manning the road block), were being thrown out and allegedly threatened with their lives.

We called around and found all our staff safe and well – although some of them are not able to move out of their estates for fear of their own safety. In some of the slums there is still a stand off between the different tribal factions with armed police in the middle keeping the two sides apart with live gunfire to stop them fighting.

Raila, the opposition leader disputing the results, has insisted that he will go ahead with his ‘peaceful’ demonstration in the morning, but after the last few days of absolutely shocking violence rocking the country, absolutely no-one trusts that the demonstration will be at all peaceful as all it will take is one tribesman from the wrong side to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and it will more than likely all go pear shaped.

The government is insisting that the rally is illegal, but the opposition say they have gone through all of the right channels to announce the demonstration and are calling their supporters to go ahead with it.

We have no idea how it will pan out and all we can do is wait and see, but the police and military have been deployed all over the city and I’m sure will try and stop people marching into the city centre at all costs.

I understand Desmond Tutu is headed our way for a spot of mediation. All I can say is I hope he’s doing a lot of praying for us right now too, as I really think we will need it tomorrow.

Please wish us luck and a peaceful outcome.

I'm gonna get me a Nobel prize!

Turn's out there's an alternative to the real Nobel Laureates called the 'Ig Nobel Prizes' that are given out for marking achievements that 'first make people laugh, and then make them think.'

The Ig Nobel prizes were created by AIR (Annals of Improbable Research), and are intended to celebrate the unusual, honour the imaginative, and spur peoples interest in science, medicine and technology. (I'm not sure if they spur my interest in the sciences and suchlike but they most certainly spur my sense of humour. They are superb.)

..... and some of the winners of this years awards are:

The Ig Nobel peace prize which went to the US Air Force's Wright Laboratory in Ohio for its 1994 plan to develop a weapon that would make enemy soldiers sexually irresistable to one another, an idea later dubbed the "gay bomb". (This is great as they can all have a 'love in' instead of blowing each other's heads off.)

The Ig Nobel aviation prize was given out for a study showing that a hamster-sized dose of Viagra can help the rodents recover from jet-lag. (Very useful i think when travellling with one's hamster to far off places - as one generally does of course!)

The Ig Nobel prize in medicine went to Brian Witcombe, a radiologist at Gloucestershire Royal NHS Trust for his study of sword swallowing and its side effects. The most common problem for sword swallowers he found is "sword throat," a soreness that develops when they are learning the trick. But Witcombe and Meyer could find no documented fatalities caused by swallowing swords – excluding internet reports of people who swallowed neon tubes, spear guns, or jackhammers. "The big question is why the hell they do it," Witcombe says.

- "Absolutely Sunshine - If you could find out WHY they did it, you could probably earn yourself another award!"

The Chemistry Prize went to Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan for producing synthetic vanilla from cow dung. (- must remember to pass that one onto all farming friends of mine and get them out there picking up that valuable dung, ditch the dairy business and get into vanilla processing.)

Linguistics – This Ig Nobel prize went to Juan Toro, Josep Trobalon, and Núria Sebastián-Gallés of the University of Barcelona for a paper titled "Effects of backward speech and speaker variability in language discrimination by rats". They found that rats could recognize the rhythmic differences between Dutch and Japanese sentences, but not if the words were replayed backwards! ....... (No, really!!! ........ Note in diary: Must remember to play all linguistic tapes to rats forwards so as not to confuse them.)

Biology – Johanna van Bronswijk of the Eindhoven University of Technology earned the Ig Nobel biology prize by vacuuming up insects, mites, spiders, crustaceans, bacteria, and fern spores from Dutch mattresses, to survey all the tiny beasties lurking in the average bed. - Now that really sounds like good fun! Get the hoovers out girls - finally a use for them at last!

So now i've run through what a bunch of supposedly sensible people out there get up to of an evening, it's my turn.........

Thinking of submitting the following:

Medicine: Research into the longest time a 2 year old can play with a piece of lego without getting it stuck up their nose.

Linguistics: Teach Golden Retriever and Rottweiler some new words besides 'Woof, Woof and of course Woof!', and study which one of them has the best English accent.

Peace: Give everyone in Kenya 1 and a half oranges and a banana and teach them all how to make fruit salad rather than throwing them at each other! This will give them all a chance to have a banana for the PNU, an orange for ODM and an orange and a half for ODM Kenya - these being the symbols for the 3 main parties vying for the Presidential elections here in Kenya.