A country of free men is not free if they are owned by somebody else.

“Debt is the fatal disease of republics, the first thing and the mightiest to undermine governments and corrupt the people”
Wendell Phillips 

Numbers, huge sums of money, mind boggling debt, billions in expenditure, very few people like these or can process articles about such quickly while dealing with the other hassles and vagaries of daily life in a third world republic.

Lately I have felt that I have been inundated with news to do with just such numbers. Whenever I look at headlines all I see are staggering figures bandied about like they were mere exercises in mathematics class, except they are not.

We are in trouble, we have let unbridled expenditure coupled with borrowing at the rate of a drunken sailor take hold of our lives.

Sample this:

Kenya’s gross domestic debt (government’s borrowing from the local markets) had in June this year hit the trillion-shilling mark up from 859 billion twelve months ago.

We already have an external debt burden of Sh800 billion, therefore the national debt comes to about Sh1.8 trillion, which is basically one half of our Sh3.6 trillion economy.

That is not all, we have during this August borrowed another 425 Billion Shillings from China, this means our external debt is now more than 1.25 trillion Shillings, there’s a ceiling on how much we can borrow externally and this ceiling is 1.2trillion which we have exceeded.

And lest we forget: “Debt is an ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slavedriver. ” 

While looking at these figures we have to remember that there’s no record of anyone having ever managed to wildly spend their way out of a slow economic growth or to borrow their way out of debt, certainly spending money we don’t have by borrowing more and more while our debt burden rises cannot be good economics.

Meanwhile I read today that in our country a Judicial Service Commissioner ‘earns’ Sh80,000 for every sitting, and that in the last year; the JSC held 247 meetings, meaning a commissioner who attended all 247 meetings took home Sh1.6 million every month in allowances, coming to a total of KES 19,760,000.00 per year. This then led to a situation in which in the 2012/2013 financial year, commissioners gobbled up Sh377 million in allowances for board meetings, conferences and seminars, foreign travel and subsistence, catering service and accommodation, gifts, food and drinks and legal fees.

The CJ had a house bought for him at 310 million, when the initial budget was 200 million.

Remember, while this was going on we couldn’t pay teachers, policemen, and health workers the pittance we offer for their crucial services.

The government also had time to throw in half a billion for offices for a retired president, as well spend another half a billion shillings building a home for him on his private land at Mweiga.

And then there was the plan to blow Sh2.5 billion on celebrations to mark 50 years of Kenya’s independence with: Sh690 million for events management and logistics, Sh286 million for conference and exhibition during the one week celebration, Sh300 million for publicity and communication, Sh365 million for entertainment and a handsome Sh320 million to go towards identifying Kenya’s most prominent personalities.

It also includes Sh50 million for erecting a bronze statue of retired President Mwai Kibaki

And we think MPigs are the worst of the lot?

A man doesn’t have to be much if he has much.

“In two years I plan to be pregnant by a rich man so he’ll have to marry me and support my life of luxury”

– Louisa Mason, proud to be a gold-digging Piranha

I was once made fully aware of what an ex required I think she was. She made it explicitly clear to me that she was not a gold-digger, but that she was not cheap….

I never understood what she meant by “not being cheap” since, to the best of my admittedly limited knowledge, I had not asked to buy her, nor could I have afforded to buy her anyway if I wanted to, which I did not….

 

This particularly sordid period of my chequered love life had been the culmination of a spat between us brought on by an amicable break-up –as if there are ever amicable ones– which had then gotten sour because a busybody, out to make sure we threw away whatever little decency we had left between us, had intimated to the ex in question that I had supposedly called her a gold-digger; this in fact was ridiculous because both she and I knew there was no gold to be had (a fact she pointed out in the most brash of manner to the detriment of whatever little was left of my ego).

 

So what happened here was that I had managed to make one lady very angry by leaving early when maybe she had forecast that I had the potential to be the life of the party. It didn’t help matters this just happened at about the same time I managed to secure funding for a chugging jalopy that I had been dreaming of for months; she even made to me this statement: “most men leave their girlfriends when they buy a vehicle”, I had never heard this said anywhere before but I understood her anger at the missed opportunity for bar hopping in style; you see she was a student and still in that phase of life where it is more important to stay up all night in a club than it is to worry about starting a family or even looking for a job.

Ironically the jalopy left me more indigent and deeper in debt than I was when without one, a fact that was completely lost on my ex, naturally.

 

Fast forward to twenty or so months later and I’ve met this established professional lady and everything is going fine. However, slow glimpses of the same attitude with my clubbing ex start rearing their ugly head yet again. You see this new lady was shocked to know that my life on the fast lane was lived by the mantra of faking it till you make it; to her it was a matter of actually having the goods to back up your dreams, talking of real moves being made and not being projected to be made in the future, here was someone who was basically much more stable than I have ever been and with a much fatter bank account than me (granted that’s hardly a great feat) yet somehow she would keep repeating things to the effect she never needed to pay for anything if I was around, and this line of thinking was not a question but was rather like a memo to the donkey of a man she took me for.

Eventually it became a question of actually forking over money to her rich self because she had “run out of spending money”, I am sure it is unclear to others how it is possible for this moneyed contradiction, with means far beyond mine, to ask someone not that far removed from a church mouse for cheese, but it happened. And the explanation was that they “usually don’t carry a lot of spending money” not even on MPesa (mobile money), and guess who carries the spending money for two… the braying ass of a man that yours truly was. Even worse this girl in question was a finance person who by all means is a better manager of cash than most, well maybe that was the point after all.

 

Needless to say I chose to cut my losses, moved on promptly, and kissed whatever had been lent goodbye. It had dawned on me that I was looking at yet another “I am not a gold digger, but I am not cheap” person. Ask around, there are many of those; they swear by the thinking that a woman, no matter her worth, should not spend a cent of her money on herself if a man can be made to folk out the cash; they also condemn a man who thinks otherwise as a cheapskate and an ungentlemanly scrub.

It is little wonder there is a new generation of proud gold-diggers that confess their intent to become “Piranhas”, thankfully I am too encumbered with penury that I haven’t enough flesh for these to sink their jaws in.
 

 

SO THIS IS THE DEVIL HAITI MADE A PACT WITH?

An earthquake measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale is a hard to imagine and no doubt unwanted occurrence anywhere near a human settlement. However, it is clear that the devastation in Haiti has been directly contributed to by the state of impoverishment in the country. A 1989 earthquake also measuring  7.0 struck the Bay Area in Northern California and the casualties recorded were less than seventy people. Obviously poorly constructed buildings, congestion and a lack of disaster preparedness have a lot to do with the terrible figures of those injured and the dead in Haiti’s case. It is this poverty whose beginnings must be deciphered.

According to Pat Robertson Haiti’s hugely unfortunate lot made a pact with Satan in return for aid in driving brutal French colonizers and slave masters off, in his assessment, this explains their numerous misfortunes including this crippling earthquake.

Apparently the earliest person to attempt to organize escaped slaves in Haiti into a group of freedom fighters was a Voudou priest by the name Mackandal, he was a one-armed fugitive slave, originally from Guinea, who escaped in 1751 and spent the next six years staging successful raids and evading capture by the French until he was captured and burned alive in 1758. Now perhaps it is this initial leadership of the slave revolt by a Voudou priest that has Robertson talking about pacts with the devil, that I’m not sure of but I am sure of one little fact of history that has been largely ignored, even as the spotlight remains on Haiti, and that is the pact they made with diabolical empires that has kept them in penury and vulnerable to the ravages of nature and a heartless global capitalist regime.

Basically Haiti’s slaves, most being indigenous Africans, defeated the French in a fight for independence in 1804 thus effectively becoming the first non-slave republic in the Americas. After their ouster the French demanded reparations from Haiti equivalent to 150 million gold francs. This was however reduced to 90 million gold francs, which is over $20 billion US dollars by today’s rates. Haiti couldn’t afford this extortionate sum and hence France and other Western countries, including the United States, offered high-interest loans; by 1900, 80% of Haiti’s annual budget was being spent on repayment of this debt and the struggle to pay this debt took until 1947 to be done with. Haiti had enriched France a lot more than any of its other colonies prior to Haiti’s liberation and the subsequent reparation ensured Haiti never gained a solid economic footing.

Even worse, immediately after the 1804 revolution, the US refused to recognize Haiti because being a country that depended on slave labour it clearly couldn’t acknowledge a country of free slaves; thus Haiti was subjected to a devastating economic embargo by France and the US, sanctions that lasted 60 years and were only ended in 1863.

Furthermore The US occupied and ruled Haiti by force from 1915 to 1934. For 19 years, the US controlled customs in Haiti, collected taxes, and ran many governmental institutions. It is not clear how many billions were bilked from Haiti by the US during this forced occupation. From 1957 to 1986 Haiti was governed by US backed despots “Papa Doc” and “Baby Doc” Duvalier, support for these dictators was premised on their supposed “anti-communist” leanings in total disregard to their cruelty and affront on the human rights of Haitians. The Duvaliers’ corruption stacked up Haiti’s debts even further and as a result it is estimated that the country now is indebted to the tune of more than $1.3 billion in external debt, close to half of this debt having been accumulated by the US-backed Duvaliers.

A little over 30 years ago Haiti was self sufficient in rice and sugar production. Today the country has to import most of its rice as well as sugar, this is because Haiti was forced by the IMF and the World Bank to open its markets to the world allowing the US to dump millions of tons of US subsidized rice and sugar into Haiti’s markets hence putting local farmers out of business and consigning the country to being the third largest world market for US rice.

In 1991, Haiti got its first democratically elected president in the person of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. In less than a year he was ousted by the CIA. Curiously US-backed forces restored Aristide to power in 1994 while starting another spell of US military occupation between 1994 and 2000. Haiti is currently under UN occupation, has no formal army and Aristide has been banished to exile.

Yes, Haiti might have made a pact with the devil but that devil is no amorphous spiritual being, that devil embodied by the nations by the US and France in their tacit collusion that has reduced the republic of Haiti to the basket case that it currently is.

CONSPIRACY THEORIES ON MICHAEL JACKSON’S DEATH (OR LACK THEREOF)

Having lived the sort of secluded peculiar life he did, it was bound to happen that his death would have tongues wagging, the grapevine buzzing and all manner of cock and bull conspiracy theories being formulated. MJ seems to be the biggest thing to happen this year, this has overshadowed Obama’s inauguration or Iran’s faulty elections and has even managed to push economic recession gloom off the airwaves, albeit temporarily.
About a quarter of all tweets had ‘Michael Jackson’ in them within a day of his death and most people on Facebook updated their profile with a reference to him or posted his videos and quite a sizeable number changed their profile pictures to one of Jacko. Predictably the most common theory is that MJ isn’t dead at all… a few main stream media organizations as well as numerous blogs and websites carry such theories and you can follow the links below to get to any that might interest you.

Personally, I think the theories are a bunch of crap as this is the same non-sense that came out, and continues to, when greats like Elvis Presley, Bob Marley and Tupac died…. MJ is dead and gone, let’s celebrate his life

Russian’s claim Icon Michael Jackson was assassinated By CIA fourwinds10.com
Theory that Jacko is ‘alive’ thesun.co.uk
Michael Jackson’s fateful prediction just a week before his death dailymail.co.uk
Jackson Death Conspiracy uk.news.yahoo.com
MJ conspiracy theories; unanswered questions telegraph.co.uk
Jackson Conspiracy Theory digitalspy.co.uk
Jackson might have been chemically Manipulated for Profit naturalnews.com
He had just pills in his stomach, was bald, bruised, his ribs broken and had 4 needle wounds near his heart thesun.co.uk

Websites dedicated to these conspiracy theories include:

michaeljacksonsightings.com

michaeljacksonhoaxdeath.com

Photos of MJ’s last performances here

dailymail.co.uk