Fat cat diary

Aidan Hartley on the Wild Life

Nairobi
I want to say Kenya is a victim of negative press. Shady characters called bloggers are nicknaming the President’s new Peace cabinet of ministers ‘Ali Baba and his 40 Thieves’. That is very cheeky. Everybody knows there are 42 ministers, 52 assistant ministers and 42 permanent secretaries. But ‘Ali Baba and his 136 Thieves’ isn’t so catchy. Typical imperialists and their comprador agents on the world wide web. Britain and the US should be careful. The Chinese can also be our friends.

Unfortunately, we are not yet free. Even today our former colonial masters call the shots. That is why they forced our politicians into a peace accord to stop the recent bloodbath. What we need are African solutions for African problems. (Kofi Annan may be Ghanaian but that is not the point.) Westerners do not care about Africans killing each other. Their priority is only to control our resources. Everybody knows we have undiscovered oil. Whites still own 80 per cent of the land growing pineapples for multinationals. Asians do not allow anybody else to compete in industry. American scientists — probably the same ones who invented Aids — come to steal our bacteria and make millions patenting biological detergents. Enough of Europe underdeveloping Africa! We must ban all foreign investors who steal jobs from Kenyans.

Some bloggers described the bloodletting here as ‘tribal’. And TV stations showed youths pulling innocent civilians from taxis to be butchered, while others sharpened their pangas on the asphalt. These reports reinforce an unfairly negative image of Africa — but why do they not show positive images? It is like the British campaign to undermine Zimbabwe’s economy to punish Robert Mugabe for taking back land from the whites. Journalists make it look as if there are more plane crashes in Africa than on any other continent.