Alphonce SHIUNDU

Good people, Thank you for standing by me and reading all my thoughts. That 8,700 plus of you have been on my blog, read quietly and walked away is simply amazing. I appreciate that very much. That some of you had the time to read and leave a comment is equally enthralling. And I know more will be reading and going back through the posts to read some more. But, five years doing the same thing, is not fun. People grow old, things that we used to love sound silly, the stuff that we used to enjoy, sounds commonplace, and the things that helped us grow are taken foregranted. But no. You have been wonderful. Blogger too has been a great host for me, for free and I really appreciate that. The writing will never stop, I hope it gets better and better and better. For now though, I have to say goodbye.

Dear Mum! Last year, on a day like this, will forever remain unforgettable. It was April 24. It was Easter Sunday, quite early in the morning, when life finally left your ailing body. I remember watching you the previous day and earlier on in the night as you struggled eating food, as you struggled breathing, and as you had problems even lying on the bed. I know it was tough on you. It was heart-breaking on me. When I walked to your room to put you back on the bed together with dad, hoping to talk to you in the morning, only for dad to wake up me up from my house at four in the morning, with the sad news that you were no more. Darn Liposarcoma!!!! As I looked at your lifeless body on the bed, it all sunk in: you were gone. Forever. The mourning that followed, the flood of friends and relatives that swamped our home to pay respects to you, the many people who said all sweet things about you reminded me that I had the sweetest mum on earth. Twelve months have passed and every...

If there’s one MP whose term in the Tenth Parliament can be described as full of chilling drama, it is Mr Gitobu Imanyara (Imenti Central), he who just five days ago pushed the government to beef up his security over threats to his life and his family. A look at some of the incidents which the fearless MP has experienced takes one back to February 2008 when he told journalists about his encounter with the First Lady, Ms Lucy Kibaki, at State House Nairobi. Mr Imanyara was in a meeting of the small parties group. The meeting was chaired by the President. But midway, State House operatives called him out of the meeting, something which, Mr Imanyara said, was quite odd. When he stepped out, all hell broke loose. “She jump(ed) at me and start(ed) throwing punches at me. She wasn’t wearing any shoes, she was half dressed, she was in pyjamas,” Mr Imanyara said of an incident that had happened days to the first sitting of Parliament. He survived the legendary fury of the First Lady. ...

Yesterday I had to attend a meeting of the Information Sciences alumni. The turnout was excellent. We were so so many. I was amazed. But, back to the meeting. It was one of those moments where you get revealed to yourself. You’re also made to feel a little bad about yourself, and partly, you’re forced to offer that uncomfortable explanation about whatever you do. You see, Katuu, was in the House. He said he had “a problem with journalists”. His beef is that we don’t give “thought” to what we write. He did not like that some journalist did a story about digitization of Nelson Mandela’s archives (or something like that) in such a manner that “to put it bluntly, it is just a clever way of copying and pasting.” “It is all on the website. Why would I not just go to the website and read whatever is written there?” he told me. Well, Katuu knows his stuff, plus, he’s got the advantage of having worked on the project that this journalist was writing about. “A journalist is an analyst,...

“When the government begins to have fear of its own citizens, it means we’re in a democracy. If the opposite happens, that’s a sign of a totalitarian State,” Javier Sicilia, Mexican poet and journalist, and the leader of the MPJD I picked the title ‘Witness’ because there’s just no way I can tell the story of the Mexican movement against the drug war in a few paragraphs. It is huge. But I don’t mind sharing my experience when I stood side by side with the victims of the Drug War last Wednesday. On March28, I was in Cuernavaca, some city in Mexico’s State of Morellos. Like the rest of the 70-plus journalists, I was there to cover the one-year anniversary of the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity for Narconews. It was one of the major assignments for the School of Authentic Journalism this year. The moment I stepped on the Zócalo (public square) I saw the pain in the faces of the people who had come for the commemoration. If felt so much like a memorial mass –but there w...