Why do Kenyans win athletic races?

I was at the edge of my seat as I watched the Kenyan athlete Pamela Jelimo sprint past the finish line at the women’s 800m final at the Beijing Olympics this past Monday leaving the rest of her competitors with a huge margin. I screamed loudly afraid that I would wake my next door neighbors who happen to have a baby. The commentator announced that the Kenyan women had bagged both the gold and the silver medals. I was elated! Kenyan had for the first time in history had won a gold medal in the women's 800m a race that has been largely dominated by Maria Mutola of Mozambique having won the gold medalrepeatedly including at the Sydney games in 2000.

The following morning at work, as we exchanged the ritual morning niceties a colleague at work who happens to hail from one of the Caribbean islands looking wide eyed asked me “why is it that Kenyan athletes always win the long distance athletic races?”She went on to postulate – “ is it because back at home they have to walk long distances in their villages ?” Looking irritated I also shot back a similar rhetorical question and asked her if she also thought that the Jamaicans that won the short distance races won because they have to run that fast to their destinations in their country. Our conversations slowly died a natural death as we all went back to our Monday morning work related duties.

These myths and many others that have been widely distributed in the Western media continue to spread to much dismay. The most common myth is the one that states that Kenyans in the villages run to school for years growing up and hence the running predisposes them to good athletic performance in the future.This is simply untrue because some of the children live quite close to school and there is also usage of public transport and some students indeed wake up early and walk to school.

The most common argument however is the one related to the high altitude. It is claimed that Kenyans are born and raised in high altitudes thus running at these high altitudes give them better lung capacity and superior performance.Another cloesely related one also postulates that it is their body morphology focusing on theor feet. One such study by a Danish researcher even made the spurious claims mentioning that " the Africans had "birdlike legs, very long levers that are very, very thin" enabling them to "bounce and skip" over the ground, with their legs taking off after each footfall far faster than the Europeans" to justify why the kenyans won races.

What all these explanations of Kenyan athletes stellar achievements have in common is that they lack the common thread of determination that Kenyans as a people possess. Ask anyone who knows a Kenyan. Kenyans generally are a disciplined and a work ethic is incalcated in Kenyans when growing up. In the same manner the kenyan althletes train and work hard. They are secluded and live in training camps and run seeing their families for sometimes as long as three months. They work hard and as hard as any other athlete from any country and they also have a deep sense of determination and commitment

When I use to live in the same neighbourhood with Catherine Ndereba I would wake up at 6.00 am to jog,I would find that she was already up and running on the path on the way back and that was daily.

So for all those who want to explain this performance of why Kenyans run, it would be wise to rethink your arguments or forever remain silent!

The School Violence in Kenyan - A mirror of the soceity

There has been a recent rise in violence in Kenyan schools - with a number of schools closed down because of students gone on the rampage. The politicians spearheaded by the Minister of Education Prof Ongeri is calling for expelling the ring leaders and re-introducing corporal punishment. But I would personally attest that both these measures will be deficient in the long run.

The students are clearly taking their cues from a society that deals with its vengences the same way - Violence. This was clearly manifested in the post election debacle. This mirrors what the Kenyan society has degenerated to. It is what I would like to call a 'mta-do' soceity ( The Kenyan Lingo of what can you do about it ? - albeit sarcastically said).Just to give a handful of examples :

Kenya is a country where we have a president who is a practicing catholic and has a publicly known mistress
A country where we have a Prime minister who has changed political parties a thousand times
A country where the Attorney General has claimed innocence or lack of knowledge in countless cases of graft
A country where the exams results were canceled and messed up with and there were no consequences for those in charge at the exam council
A country where the Ministry of Justice cannot deal with the post - election violence in a manner that is seen to be impartial
A country where the Chief Justice swore in a disputed president on national television
A country where the Chairman of the Electoral Commission of Kenya walks free after overseeing a flawed election

I could go on forever - I think my point is made. Whether the Government wants to claim that they are on drugs.There is a serious lack of honesty in the leadership of the country and therefore this is what the students are simply reflecting.

The violence that they are meting out is as a result of Kenyan society's failure to find ways of conflict resolution that are perceived as just for all the parties involved .I bet no one has sat down with those students and investigated what they really want or what TRULY their problem is. We have simply become a society where the rules are for a certain class of people and not for everyone in an Orwellian fashion.

Violence comes from the verb to violate which means to break, infringe, or transgress (a law, rule, agreement, promise, instructions, etc. and this is exactly the trend that the leaders as well as parents, teachers and the rest of Kenyan society have set for our youth. Why would we expect them to behave differently ?I recommend that a starting point would be to change the top down approach that is used in our schools and revert ot one of constructive engagement. The teachers should sit down with the students in a round table format and discuss what their grievances are and seek solutions together. since generated by both parties these solutions will be co-owned and burning issues averted.But as long as we deal with the students in the way we have we will keep getting the results that we are getting.

Hard line stands such as the reintroduction of caning / expulsion / arraigning them in court will only lead to more and more strikes and nothing resolved in the long run

Kibaki sinking Kenya

I have just been doing my usual round up of Kenyan news and it is depressing to say the least.
The latest Grand Regency saga is just pathetic. We all know that Kibaki and Kimunya and a pack of friends who belong to the same tribe went in and did a deal. They negotiated and sold a public asset to Libyans at a throw away price.

Now what baffles me is the inability for certain Kenyans to call a spade a spade and invoke morality when it is needed.
We do not need an expert , a committee or god - forbid another one of those expensive circuses that they call commissions of inquiry to find out what happened. But knowing Kenya that is wxactky going to happen. Despite the great disappointments that the Kibaki government has upheld since its inception in 2002 there are people who fail to see this and in many of the blogs that I read and participate in . There were many people who lauded Kibaki for brining about economic development, free primary education and a host of things that he was indeed supposed to do as his given his mandate.

To put this straight- a group of us Kenyans have sunk so low - in our integrity and deep in our tribalism such that we would never condemn one of our own - whatever it is they do.
The Government has made several mishaps and misspoken a gazillion times on issues ranging from the IDP's to 'justice' for post election violence perpretators
But what the this section of Kenyans that I am attacking fail to see that this is what the rest of Kenya - who opposed Kibaki was fighting for all along
A new different team that excludes cronies like Kimunya, Ndung'u , Ringera and the rest of that inner circle who more often than not are members of the same tribe.

This kind of thinking is not unique to Kenyans - it is embraced by some in the other countries such as the US.Scores of people who keep on blaming immigrants for their jobs while their jobs are been shipped abroad by the same corporations who are run by people who are ethnically homogenous to themselves

I don't know what it will take for certain people to see wrong as wrong and right as right .There trully is a deficiency of morality going round the world

A visit by African Development Bank President

Last month the African Development Bank president Dr. Donald Kaberuka was at the United Nations and so naturally New York University's Africa House took the grand opportunity to invite him to have an evening with a rather mixed audience at NYU.He gave a well prepared talk about what he thought Africa's challenges were with respect to development and underdevelopment and the general role of the African Development Bank.he talked about the Bank aiming to finance the infrastructure and other good things that Africa needs. He also weaved through how far they as the Bank had gone in terms of milestones. However when the time for Question and answer came, I was very dissappointed at the way the questions were addressed. Alot of questions that were raised by the diaspora Africans remained largely unanswered. So it was in short a public relations serving events that you end up attending all the time. This is not to discredit Dr. Donald Kaberuka . I have a lot of respect for his great work, as chief the architect of the successful rebuilding of Rwanda post the genocide .

One of the questions that impressed me was one brought up by the chairman of an organization called Extelecoms Africa and he posed the vital question of – What if the diagnosis of the problem of the underlying causes of underdevelopment was wrong in the first place ? He went on to build his argument by saying that because the problem was diagnosed by people/experts ( mostly non- Africans ) who were not aware of living the harsh realities of African suffering in the first place or the insights that come with growing up in the continent. He also criticized the view of that some of the overarching frameworks such as the Millennium Development Goals that have been used to both define African problems as well as find the solutions may be at fault .This observation was interesting to me because when Kenya broke out on violence after the post election crisis, I tried to keep myself as informed as I could. This resulted in my reading of news from over 20 sources to find an unbiased view and the diversity of the analysis of the causes was strak. Going back to Dr. Kaberuka, his answers were largely banal and he talked in passing about the need to find solutions that worked for Africans etc etc etc.

What also astounded me was when the ADB president went on emphasis on the role of the Bank as one was mainly on focusing on regional economic reintegration and not on political issues leaving the latter to UNDP. This left me wondering how one could dutifully achieve this so called Economic integration without first seeking to understand political governance in these countries because anywhere in the world , economic development issues are intimately tied to the Government. One need not be an International development student to understand that interwoveness of Governments and corporations with respect to regulation and oversight. to simply say that they had a singular focus on regional intergration for me seemed naive.

Other questions that I felt went unanswered was the role that Africans in the Diaspora can play in the development process.There are millions of young Africans working in industries as diverse as Investment banking to local government to the science industries that are part of the brain drain . A lot of them meet together to discuss what needs to be done to bring the continent back to its feet but never get an institutional forum or support in projects that are African centered and what they can do . It always seems like there is little room for Africans to be experts on Africa . Albeit the fact that some of the professionals in question have schooled in the same classes with the ‘experts’ and share the same knowledge skills and even insight. So these are the issues that I felt went largely unanswered . The role of Africans, the role of external equity , the framework for the definition of our problems amongst others .

Well I was not suggesting that Donald Kaberuka offer all the answers to these delicate questions but in my mind when I went to the talk I thought that we would have a constructive engagement with the president and if the ADB claims that it is the transformational Institutions that it is . It should at least try to do business differently in Africa. This paradigm shift is what I think is needed to ask the necessary critical questions and create forums where they can be addressed as well as greater opportunities for Africans to be involved in the development of Africa, otherwise we will always form the engaged audience in Western capitals for a long time to come

Harlem for Obama 08'

Today I canvassed for the first time in my life .I volunteered for the Obama campaign and went out to the famous 125th street in Harlem. It was a very exciting experience. The goal of the campaign was to get people to vote for Obama in New York in the primaries on 'Tsunami Tuesday'.It was extremely cold . But people stopped by to listen take reading material and ask questioins. What was deeply captivating to me was the conversations that arose from the passerbys. The first one was a woman who claimed that she was a republican and she kept on asking ' what do you say when someone asks you what Obama stands for?' She kept on asking questions such as 'what has Barack done for the community in New York? ' what is he doing about housing in Harlem ?and she went on and on firing question after question. The responses she got were also equally interesting; one of the core members of the campaign responded to her and told her about Barack's record in Illinois and how he worked at the grassroots level organising .Someone else told her that he didn't vote for the war from the beginning but most importantly was one response that was that it is more important to listen. To listen to the peopl's voices and find out what their needs are and if there is something that you don't have an answer to say 'I don't know'. They then gave her pamphlets to read on Obama's stand on the policies and the aggresive woman was pacified and she looked very satisfied with the way the campaaigners handled her .
It was a very interesting exchange.