STORIES FROM MY HEART

MY JUBA DIARY 2Oth Dec 2010 Morning hours: I broke the law. Good Lord, its going to be a bumpy one! 2.00pm: departed Nairobi to Juba via Jetlink express, landed at Juba International Airport at 3.45. Hot. Its 33 degrees Celsius. 4.00pm: picked up by a driver sent by the team that’s been on the ground one week earlier. Interesting ride; I love taxi drivers! They are such a great source of the most amazing stories. My driver was a Ugandan who came to Juba 4 years ago. He has a wife and kids back home in Entebbe; he is a happy man, he provides well for his family, even built them a home so they don’t have to worry about rent. He sends home money every month for upkeep. I bully him a little, and ask him if he has a second wife in Juba, he laughs and says its too expensive to have a wife or a girlfriend in Juba…then he adds “ but on and off I call someone, it costs me 100” I ask, Sudan pounds? He says “if it was Sudan pounds I would have married another wife. “Its 100 dollars a ni...

Safaricom just launched this new ad, which i think is absolutely amazing. But that's not why I pasted this video in my blog. Just a day after the ad aired on TV, the online platform is filled with comments of how Safaricom "copy pasted" a Quantas Air ad which carries the same concept. Just wondering, do we have to be so pessimistic? I would say that's the same reason why we keep putting everything Kenyan waaay below standards, and if it's too good, we could'nt have done it, we must have copied. We can be such whiners! Nktest.

Interesting day: and when I got back to work boldly wearing my WEF ( World Economic Forum) tag, I got a tweet from my boss saying: “ Ati CEO round table?” We laughed about it, but I’m sure that’s perhaps a question that I have and will have to answer in the course of the evening (until you get to read this post- at least) At 8.30 this morning I made my way to Crown Plaza in Nairobi’s Upper Hill area, where Africa practice's Godfrey Chesang had invited me to. It isn’t everyday that the country’s top CEO’s and government officials otherwise known as policy makers are in one room, and accessible for questions and open discussions about the path that Kenya is taking towards economic stability, The CEO round-table is organized by the World Economic Forum, and this time round the theme was: Assessing Kenya’s Competitiveness, which was derived from the Global Competitiveness report. Kenya was ranked 106th in the Global Competitiveness Index 2010-2011, while Rwanda was ranked 80th. The fo...