Olympics in Kenya: Where we went Wrong

By the time track races commenced in Olympics, we cared not about our position worldwide; medal-less. The sleeping giant would once again reclaim its glory as the global champion on tracks.

Unfortunately, our confidence and sense of pride has been rubbed off the wrong way. Japs, Merikanos and Britons are taking long races, while the neighbourly Ethiopians continue piling dust in our athletes' eyes.

It is embarrassing when a night is sacrificed to watch the races and experience bales of disappointing results. Elias Makori, a sports editor attending the games has inside story in what is actually happening in TeamKenya.

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 Kenya came into the London Olympics with high hopes, everyone confident that we would surpass the performance of Beijing four years ago where Team Kenya scooped six gold, four silver and four bronze medals.

But the pre-Games tension between the National Olympic Committee of Kenya and Athletics Kenya has thrown Kenya’s campaign to the dogs. It is sad watching our sports officials, with their bloated egos, fighting turf wars at the expense of the country’s respected name and image.

Many will wonder just how Vivian Cheruiyot, the double world champion (5,000 and 10,000 metres) faded away badly in the opening day’s 10,000m final and indeed why London Marathon champion Mary Keitany failed to get a medal in the marathon last Sunday.
 
Questions arise from the women’s steeplechase debacle and the fact that we have just Hellen Obiri in Wednesday’s 1,500m semi-finals or how we failed to break the 44-year jinx in the men’s 10,000m.

Well the answer to these questions is simple: Our officials have let us down terribly and they must do the honourable thing and take the long walk away from managing sport in the country. Period.  

We raised the flag when a dozen officials from Kenya’s Olympics management team literally abandoned athletes to rush to a pre-season camp in Bristol that meant little in terms of quality preparations, especially for distance runners.

We saw Ezekiel Kemboi travel to Bristol, and then flee back home due to the atrocious conditions there, where the recalcitrant NOCK officials set up camp merely to rake in their $300-a-day allowances, totally ignoring the fact that serious competition awaited the team at the Olympic Stadium.

The tab was picked by the toiling taxpayer. There was drama as Vivian’s husband and personal coach, along with one of the team’s coaches and doctor were locked out of the Olympic Village by the NOCK team led by executive officer Stephen arap Soi and general team manager James Chacha, leaving Vivian, our red-hot medal hope, in tears.

Vivian was shattered and it was hardly surprising that she failed to pick herself up and take the battle to Tirunesh Dibaba.   This didn’t bother Soi and his team who have misused the trust bestowed upon them by NOCK chairman, our legend Kipchoge Keino, who, as a respected member of the International Olympic Committee, is playing multiple roles here, delegating the management of Team Kenya to Soi, Chacha and company.


Vivian’s loss on Day One should have fired a wake-up call, but rather than address the issue, Soi and company continued with their personal wars with Athletics Kenya, declaring the AK chairman, Isaiah Kiplagat, persona non grata at the Olympic Village.

 As the selfish turf wars continued, we lost the men’s 10,000m, where Wilson Kiprop, winner of the controversial trials in Oregon, pulled out with an injury that the Team Kenya officials knew about at the Kasarani camp but failed to address.

What a shame! AK’s decision to hold the trials in Oregon will seriously be questioned, as will Soi’s decision to lock out one of the team’s medics while knowing that some of the athletes, like steeplechaser Lydia Rotich, who is asthmatic, needed round the clock, personal medical attention.

Journalists critical of Soi and the NOCK management team have been declared unwanted guests at the Olympic Village, Soi’s team eager to sweep the management rot under the carpet as medals continue to, painfully, slip away from our grasp.

The issue of joyriders in Team Kenya hasn’t been addressed, while the rather unprofessional manner in which distribution of training and competition kit has been managed here continues to irk the athletes, with some of them, like swimmers Jason and David Dunford, taking no chances and purchasing their own strip.

As things stand here, Kenyans should be prepared for the worst, unless Prime Minister Raila Odinga, here for the final days of the Games, works out wonders to lift the dying Kenyan spirit. Unless this happens, I can only predict just three more gold medals from Pamela Jelimo (800m), David Rudisha (800m) and Wilson Kipsang (marathon).

Forget about the women’s 5,000m, men’s 5,000m or even women’s 1,500m where the gold medals belong to Tirunesh Dibaba, Dejen Gebremeskel and Fantou Magiso, all of Ethiopia, respectively.

Unless the Prime Minister cracks the whip, and unless we see the backs of the NOCK officials who have seriously let the athletes and the country down, we should not expect sporting glory to come any time soon. The issue of pre-Games training, lack of focus by AK’s top management and the absence of personalised training for our athletes are issues we will tackle another day.

Meanwhile, we await the report of the Parliamentary team investigating similar mismanagement of the Kenyan team at the last All Africa Games in Maputo where the same officials are implicated. Will we ever learn?

KENYA MIGUNA WAR: SARAH ELDERKIN Peeling Back Miguna's Mask

I have defended Miguna Miguna in the past, both in print and in private – at least, it was meant to be private, until Miguna broke an undertaking of confidence and made a private communication public.

That is typical of the Miguna we have unfortunately come to know – a person with deeply worrying issues and insufficient personal morality to restrain him from selling his friends down the road, let alone to prevent his embarking on a campaign of all-consuming personal vengeance filled with hatred.

Many of us, including Raila Odinga – the object of Miguna’s poisonous wrath, have tried hard to save Miguna in the past. Ultimately, in the Prime Minister’s office, it became impossible to keep Miguna and to protect him from himself.

It is deeply sad that a man with a good brain should be tortured and destroyed by emotions he cannot control, so that he ends up a victim at the mercy of his own self-destructive inner turmoil.

Other responses to charges in the Miguna book, Peeling Back the Mask, will follow this. But first, we need to peel back the mask that Miguna Miguna himself wears. Let us examine the untold Miguna Miguna story.

Anyone who has watched Miguna on television will have seen the staring eyes, the jabbing finger, the overbearing ranting and raving. But it was Justice Mohamed Warsame who referred very succinctly to Miguna’s inner turmoil, in dismissing, on December 15, 2011, the case Miguna had brought challenging his August 4, 2011, suspension from the Prime Minister’s office.

In his judgement, Warsame made some interesting observations about Miguna. Speaking of his own perceptions (not issues raised by lawyers), Warsame said that Miguna was a man “who exhibits mental and emotional fits in his defence of issues”.

He spoke of Miguna as having a “relentless sense of fighting back”, as one “who appears unpredictable and ready to fight”. Warsame added, “He is described as a man living in [a] mental darkroom.”  

It is from the turmoil of this “mental darkroom” and out of his “relentless sense of fighting back” that Miguna decided to do his very best to destroy the man for whom he had previously and fervently declared his “love”, and whom he revered.

Miguna is a man of wild extremes. His actions have nothing at all to do with Raila Odinga. They have everything to do with Miguna Miguna, his lack of balance, and his distorted sense of self.

Let us begin by setting straight the record concerning the relationship between Miguna Miguna and Raila Odinga. Contrary to the wildly delusional claim in the publicity for his book, Miguna Miguna was NOT “for six years … the Prime Minister’s most trusted aide”.

Miguna Miguna was NEVER the Prime Minister’s most trusted or most senior aide. The fact is that Raila never felt he could fully trust Miguna, and that is why he deliberately kept him at arms’ length in an office on Nairobi Hill, and never allowed him to operate from his own town-centre office.

Trust is surely something that must be declared by the person doing the trusting. The Prime Minister has never voiced or shown such trust. The claim is entirely of Miguna’s own fabrication.

Then there is the “six years” Miguna speaks of. By his own admission, Miguna met Raila Odinga for the very first time in October 2006. Note that that is not yet six years to date.

Raila had gone to Toronto at the start of a speaking tour and from there continued to a number of similar functions in the USA. Miguna, of his own volition, travelled along with the party from his home of two decades in Canada, to Raila’s next stop, in Minnesota, which was the first of many on that tour – Washington DC, Atlanta, Huston, Omaha, Kansas City, New Jersey.

Miguna has claimed that he paid for this trip and met the expenses of Raila Odinga, a man he had never previously met, and certainly a man who had no need of or desire for Miguna’s sponsorship.

The tickets for the trip were, as confirmed by Raila’s friend Paddy Ahenda, who over the past weekend has consulted the relevant records, bought in Nairobi through travel agent Al Karim. It is one among many of Miguna’s self-aggrandising statements.

From that first meeting in Toronto, we fast forward four-and-a-half years – not six years – to the day Miguna Miguna was, on August 4, 2011, suspended from the office of the Prime Minister for conduct unbecoming. 

During those four-and-a-half years, Miguna was an employee of the Prime Minister’s office for just under 2½ years, having been appointed by President Mwai Kibaki on March 6, 2009.

Six years? Miguna Miguna is a master of exaggeration and fantastical ravings.

After that first meeting in October 2006, Miguna (who, like everyone else, could calculate that Raila Odinga had a very good chance of taking power in Kenya the following year) apparently took stock of his own situation in his adopted country, and decided that this was his opportunity to leave behind a chequered and rather uncomfortable past, and to reinvent himself back in his homeland.

Much of Miguna’s legal work in Canada had consisted of assisting immigrants, including immigrants from Kenya. In the course of this work, the 40-year-old Miguna had been publicly arrested on November 4, 2002, and charged with sexual assault on one of his clients, a 19-year-old woman.

Miguna appeared in court for trial on July 14, 2003, when he was rearrested and charged with further counts of sexual assault on another immigration client.

The trial judge acquitted Miguna, ruling that the alleged victims’ evidence was partially contradictory and not strong enough (as so often happens in sexual assault cases) to sustain a secure conviction. The trial judge did not, however, rule that Miguna’s accusers had acted maliciously, nor that they had formed a conspiracy, nor that they had lied.

Miguna reacted in a manner we have come to recognise – by suing everyone in sight. The defendants ranged from the Queen of England through the Canadian minister of justice, crown attorneys and the Toronto Police Board, to police officers involved in his arrest, for what a Canadian Appeal Judge called “a galaxy of reasons, some existent in law, and many not”.

Miguna also sued a newspaper that had printed a police appeal asking anyone else who believed herself a victim of Miguna’s unwanted attentions to come forward.  

Miguna sought Canadian $17.5 million in damages, but he lost just about all, if not all, the more than 20 cases he launched, ending up having to pay out tens of thousands of Canadian dollars.

Dismissing some of the cases, the Appeals Judge referred to Miguna’s “allegations based on assumptions and speculation” and said that Miguna could not “merely plead allegations that he believes may or may not be true”.

Miguna was apparently operating in the realms of fantasy and speculative allegations even then. It seems to be a pattern.

But now an opportunity to escape all that had presented itself. Miguna must have eyed his new acquaintance with Raila Odinga as the chance of a lifetime.

Throughout the following year, while still in Canada, Miguna tried to cement this plan by bombarding Raila with unsolicited and unwanted advice.

This is what Miguna now describes as having been a political strategist for Raila during the period. Knowing Raila, I doubt he ever even read those communications, or had time to give them any of his attention.

Raila Odinga is a consummate political strategist. Why on earth would he need to depend on a man who had been out of the country for 20 years, having run away at the first hint of trouble in 1987 – at the same time as Raila Odinga and many others were undergoing the torturous conditions and life-threatening privations of Kamiti, Shimo la Tewa, Manyani and Naivasha maximum security prisons?

Raila suffered many years of three separate detention periods and went into exile when a fourth threatened – but he stayed away only a few months, and then he returned to continue the fight for change. Unlike Raila, Miguna stayed away living a very comfortable life in a western nation for two decades, leaving it to genuinely committed others to fight the real battle for reforms.

During 2006-2007, Miguna was also trying to raise his public profile prior to his return to Kenya by bombarding newspapers with his articles. Many people became dismissive. Miguna was not back in the country yet but he was already becoming a figure of fun, not taken seriously. It is sad, for an intelligent man. But he brought it on himself.

Eventually, Miguna returned to Kenya, in September 2007, just in time for parliamentary nominations. He tried his luck in Nyando and failed miserably at the ODM nomination stage, gaining miserably few votes.

Characteristically, he lost no time in instituting a court case.

Homosexuality in Kenya: Not a welcomed option

Prof Makau Mutua’s piece titled “Rights body has finally stood up for gays and lesbians” (SN, May 13) bashes valid objections to homosexuality and lesbianism, and attempts to recast these practices as human rights protected under the Bill of Rights, though they remain illegal under the Penal Code.

Fixated with Western aphorisms such as “democracy”, “human rights”, “tolerance”, and “openness”, an increasing number of African intellectuals under the aegis of “civil society” have gleefully joined a well-choreographed global campaign by Western governments to propagate homosexuality as part of the “human rights” rubric and population control agenda.

Aware that within most cultures few openly embrace or accept sexual deviance (including homosexuality and lesbianism), the powers behind this diabolical agenda have relentlessly sought to rebrand them, to make them more readily acceptable, hence the donning of sodomy and lesbianism with the ethereal-sounding and legally-protected garb of “human rights”.

As part of this sexual-cultural putsch, the traditional and widely-used descriptions of same-sex relations such as “sodomy” and “homosexuality” have been replaced by more innocuous-sounding, suave, (even anagogical and acceptable) ones such as “gay”,”LGBT”, or “men having sex with men”.

This rebranding has been marketed from a variety of springboards, ranging from court decisions to social organisations, in order to accord rebranded homosexuality wider acceptance, legality, and authenticity, while at the same time stripping it of the stinging stigma.

Zealous acolytes have pilloried anyone standing in their path and perceived to be resisting this wave, branding them as “homophobes” and “conservatives” whose cultural, religious, or moral reservations towards, and against homosexuality are dismissed as having atrophied into irrelevance.

More fundamentally, foreign aid is increasingly being tied to acceptance of homosexuality.

As a conjugant in the trend, particularly in Western Europe, stretching the scope and application of “hate speech” laws to punish anyone who frowns upon homosexual conduct has been the latest frontier in this rebranding, but which (to his credit) Prof Makau steered away from.

In the end, the phonetic gymnastics describing same-sex relations may paint a superficial transformation from a pejorative, stigmatised act to what is perceived as a politically correct expression of “liberty”; but this nevertheless leaves sodomy essentially unaltered in terms of what it has always been known in Africa – unacceptable.

This is not a putative, theoretical rejection of homosexuality across African cultures but a factual one. In exemplification, the Kikuyu of Kenya have consistently rejected homosexuality as “mugiro”; meaning an intolerable evil, and an abominable act that invites divine wrath.

This cultural rejection of homosexuality can neither amount to bigotry nor be classified as an expression of hate.

It simply is not within the moral sphere of the Kikuyu to embrace homosexuality, nor is it openly practised among them, with the notable exception of extremely rare cases.

When Prof Makau laments that he has been pilloried for defending homosexuality and then turns to brand as bigoted and hiding behind religion and culture to “spread” hate anyone who objects to the practice on religious or cultural grounds, isn’t he being hypocritical?

To argue that the Constitution does not outlaw homosexuality (even indirectly) is redactionist of Prof Makau, and is itself a very narrow interpretation of the document, since the Rule of Law espoused in Article 10(2)(a) presumes that Section 162-165 of the Penal Code are automatically embedded in the gamut of valid Kenyan laws.

Which African culture is this that Prof Makau speaks of that openly embraces homosexuality and offers a platform for one to readily and openly practise and celebrate such acts as part of its cultural values, and which Kenyans should belong to, so that they cease condemning homosexuality? None.

Which religion does he have in mind that promotes homosexuality? There is none.

The freedom of religion enshrined in Article 32(4) of the Constitution guarantees that if one’s religion outlaws homosexuality, then as part of that religion, one is entitled to an unequivocal expression of disaffiliation with homosexual practices, and to condemn an expression as “bigotry” is itself a breach of that right.

Rhetorically, does “openly speaking for gay rights” which he propounds as a solution to eliminate the stigma that attaches to homosexuality effectively function to reduce or eliminate the stigma?

A stinking fish by any other name will never cease to offend nasal senses even if the mouth speaks bountifully of an imaginary beautiful scent.

Mr. J. Harrison Kinyanjui

A CHILD'S VIEW OF THE BIBLE IN SUMMARY

A child was told to write a book report on the entire Bible.

This is amazing!!. I wonder how often we take for granted that children understand what we are teaching??? Through the eyes of a child here is the Children's Bible in a Nutshell.

In the beginning, which occurred near the start, there was nothing but God, darkness, and some gas. The Bible says, 'The Lord Thy God is one, but I think He must be a lot older than that. Anyway, God said, 'Give me a light!' and someone did. Then God made the world.

He split the Adam and made Eve. Adam and Eve were naked, but they weren't embarrassed because mirrors hadn't been invented yet. Adam and Eve disobeyed God by eating one bad apple, so they were driven from the Garden of Eden. Not sure what they were driven in though, because they didn't have cars. Adam and Eve had a son, Cain, who hated his brother as long as he was Abel.

Pretty soon all of the early people died off, except for Methuselah, who lived to be like a million or something.

One of the next important people was Noah, who was a good guy, but one of his kids was kind of a Ham. Noah built a large boat and put his family and some animals on it. He asked some other people to join him, but they said they would have to take a rain check.

After Noah came Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Jacob was more famous than His brother, Esau, because Esau sold Jacob his birthmark in exchange for some pot roast. Jacob had a son named Joseph who wore a really loud sports coat.

Another important Bible guy is Moses, whose real name was Charlton Heston. Moses led the Israel Lights out of Egypt and away from the evil Pharaoh after God sent ten plagues on Pharaoh's people. These plagues included frogs, mice, lice, bowels, and no cable. God fed the Israel Lights every day with manicotti. Then he gave them His Top Ten Commandments. These include don't lie , cheat, smoke, dance, or covet your neighbor's stuff. Oh, yeah, I just thought of one more:.


Humor thy father and thy mother.

One of Moses' best helpers was Joshua who was the first Bible guy to use spies. Joshua fought the battle of Geritol and the fence fell over on the town. After Joshua came David. He got to be king by killing a giant with a slingshot. He had a son named Solomon who had about 300 wives and 500 porcupines. My teacher says he was wise, but that doesn't sound very wise to me.

After Solomon there were a bunch of major league prophets.

One of these was Jonah, who was swallowed by a big whale and then barfed upon the shore. There were also some minor league prophets, but I guess we don't have to worry about them.

After the Old Testament came the New Testament. Jesus is the star of The New Testament. He was born in Bethlehem in a barn. I wish I had been born in a barn, too, because my mom is always saying to me, 'Close the door! Were you born in a barn?' It would be nice to say, 'As a matter of fact, I was.'

During His life, Jesus had many arguments with sinners like the Pharisees and the Republicans. Jesus also had twelve opossums. The worst one was Judas Asparagus. Judas was so evil that they named a terrible vegetable after him.

Jesus was a great man. He healed many leopards and even preached to some Germans on the Mount. But the Republicans and all those guys put Jesus on trial before Pontius the Pilot. Pilot didn't stick up for Jesus. He just washed his hands instead.

Any way's, Jesus died for our sins, then came back to life again.

He went up to Heaven but will be back at the end of the Aluminum. His return is foretold in the book of Revolution.

The end, awe men. via

 

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