SIASA
Outgoing British PM Tony Blair is qualified to comment on media matters. He’s a man the media took to the mountain top and then brought down with a thud. And his words are apt at a time when the Media Bill debate is on. Of regulation, Blair says: "The media are best placed to bring change." And for the media, he is stinging: "Today, more than ever before, the media hunt in a pack, tearing people and reputations to bits. Too many newspapers have become viewspapers, where opinion overtakes fact."
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Is it true that Coast Cabinet ministers and MPs who are opposed to Danson Mungatana’s high profile in Narc-Kenya are destined for the Democratic Party, the home Mwai Kibaki built in 1991 and abandoned in 2002 when he ascended to Kenya’s top job?
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Human rights-for-cash activists are back in town in the name of Amnesty International Kenya chapter. And the script never changes: Police should be investigated over deaths in the crackdown on Mungiki gangsters. The guys sound like a stuck record for Kenyans want Mungiki hunted and decimated by any means necessary. The police should not heed the lamentations of human rights activists on hire and for hire. Why didn’t they release glossy press releases when Mungiki beheaded and skinned?
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The time when each district had two titans fighting for supremacy appeared to have died. But it’s now clear that this was just a lull. Take Paul Muite and Njenga Karume in Kiambu District. The former has thrown jabs at the latter, saying with such a friend Mwai Kibaki needs no enemies. But the veteran of Kiambu politics isn’t taking it lying down. He says Muite has a murky past, and pointedly talks of income-generating projects that have gone this way and that ...
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And finally...
Last year and early this year, ODM-Kenya presidential aspirants were always airborne destined for the US, UK, Germany and Scandinavia, among others. The aim was to raise funds for the presidential nomination and actual race. But this is no longer the case, especially since the London trip debacle and the arrival of the Hummer. Did the well dry up or are wallets bursting at the seams?
