Monday, May 21, 2007

POLITICS

The battle lines in ODM — or what remains of it — are drawn. Uhuru Kenyatta and Kalonzo Musyoka’s insistence on an elections’ board, JJ Kamotho’s railing at the party and Kanu branches’ call for a meeting to review relations with the Orange must not be seen in isolation. It’s choreography, political style. And the other side is not idle. Raila Odinga’s and Najib Balala’s return of presidential nomination forms and Fred Gumo’s new spring in his walk, too, are signs of another choreographed dance. Which way Orange? Two-some or three-some?
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If you want quality university education, you must pay for it! The question is not whether fees will rise. They must. It is how students can be financed. No student in the regular programme gets 100 per cent State funding. Of the Sh200,000 a year, Government pays Sh140,000. The rest is loan and from students’ pockets.
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In Narc-Kenya, you trust and obey at your own peril. Last week, it was all quiet when grassroots elections were announced. But those who rolled their sleeves for campaigns had not reckoned with one Jayne Kihara, the flower party’s chief whip. And as a good student of Norman Nyagah, she sent an SMS overruling the election date. Never mind her excuses — they were as unconvincing as their lack of originality. That’s the flower party for you. When you think it’s home and dry, you realise it never left the shore. By the way, why does Kihara insist on ‘y’ in Jayne? High school creativity that has refused to go away?
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Does the British curriculum allow students to smoke in school vehicles? Last week, a student in an international school in Nairobi had no qualms smoking long and leisurely in a school van outside Nairobi’s Sarit Centre. And who said students in public high schools are indisciplined?
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And finally …

The Christian conservatives in President George W Bush’s corner have swallowed the bile of defeat in the resignation of World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz. But would world opinion have mattered to the hardliners if Germany had not stood firm and declared the man persona non-grata?