Focal Point

If it's not limping, it's ailing. If it isn't ailing, then it is paddling in a pool of embarrassment. This is the narrative that has been a recurring feature in Kenyan football for as long as there was football and memory, and the recent embarrassing scenario that marred Harambee Stars' journey to Cape Verde should perhaps be the crown on our ever growing pile of humiliation. The story has been the same for years-different casts but the same script and this low has exposed the real issues if at all we had missed them in the past. 1. Poor leadership This is perhaps the highlight of everything wrong with our football. From vacous and silly supremacy battles to lack of proper structures, no low is too low for this current administration to stoop,even as far as threatening players is concerned, what with allegations that a top official from Football Kenya Federation (FKF) allegedly threatened to ruin a player's career for protesting the treatment of the team in the s

Poetry Remember me, For my passions, And for what I could best describe as compassion, I do not know the nerve I tickle in you, But in any way remember me. I may not be ideal, But I am a man of means, I am my writing and my writing is me, Yes by definition I am a writer, But by occupation, a waiter, Waiting upon the fates to finally smile down at my efforts. I may make it, I may never make it For its hard , smiling when crying is the default, Fighting when giving up is the only way to rest my faint frame. And to that I say I may or may not see the light at the end of the tunnels. I would love to see the sun shine again, upon my life, my family, Posterity, anyone that I touch with the crafts and smiths of my words, But in the wake of the shrewd dealings of reality, I know that my life might be cut short before I see the end. Why did it have to happen, I always ask anyone with ears enough to listen, That I would find myself footslogging in the bog of uncertainity, hea

                             2          IN THE FACE OF HUNGER A gust swept through the heath, through the unending vast, empty plains of Hatma, covering the whole area and the air above in a thick, heavy cloud of twisting dust. The brown threads of dirt swirled as they trundled across the emptiness, after the wind. Aside from a few scrubs and small, elfin and unhealthy trees scattered about, there was not much vegetation here. Homes were a rarity, sparse and scattered on the plains that stretched into the very periphery of the miraged horizon. A few pallid and sickly cows gnawed at the hardly leafy scrubs, with some attempting to reach the leaves on the trees. Others,yet, lay on the ground, having given up entirely on finding food and silently waited for their peaceful demise. In one particular compound, one that was a little too flung from its nearest neighbours, was a mud house, with a woman shaded on its front, eyes distant in troubled muse. She looked bony and unhealthy, sick a

                               1                    STILL WATERS                                 * The hill rose in a precipitous ascend, overlooking the submissive valley below. Its rugged contours and sparsed verdure contrasted with the all consuming forest cover in the valley below. A river flowed right through the centre of the fold, dissecting the human settlements and the forest cover. It was quiet and reserved, snaking its way past the kinked lanscape of the area in silent defiance, before disappearing behind a cluster of trees far ahead. It was not an intimidating river as such, but it was home to overwhelming potent, strength harboured beneath its still veneer, power with force to kill. River Jemange had a tendency of breaking banks during the rainy season. When it did, the calm waters would flip mode and turn into a brown, murky mass of destruction, raging into nearby homesteads at the foot of the hill and laying to waste anything, and anyone that crossed its grain. But