once in not so a blue moon, i encounter what i call day killers. these are circumstances, people or emotions that just mess up my day totally. in addition to spoiling my day, these day killers ensure i find myself unable to recover the day. i end up accounting for such a day as a loss. such stuff kill my day in the sense that only a nap can recover it. in other words i have to sleep and wake up in the course of that day to make it productive, just like a new day. otherwise i have to wait till the next day to pick up life.

waking up in the morning from a terrible nightmare definitely tops the list. some of these are horrors that give me a throbbing headache, which apparently stays put for the rest of the day. some of them are plain crazy, a common one being wrenching nails from a wall with my teeth or working myself tired a whole night trying to find my way out of an eerie maze or digging trenches to contain the floods.

missing out the alarm in the morning coz of heavy sleep is another day killer. especially when i have an important appointment and i wake up an hour or more later. it is worse when i hear the damn thing but i switch it off unconsciously. some form of conditional response. my hand is used to reaching out from the heap of warm beddings and skillfully maneuvering through the snow, find some ice cream in the form of the alarm button, pressing it and triumphantly retreating to the igloo to savor the delicacy of a morning sleep.

the conditioning had replaced the constant smacking of the alarm which left my hand aching and the occasional smashing against the wall. that’s how i lost my first cell phone. this made me relocate the alarm to weird places like under the bedside table or under the bed or inside the wardrobe. at first it worked, but the morning gymnastics of nabbing the intrusive spy turned dangerous as the sleuth in me working 99.9 percent asleep severally suffered grievous body harm. the alarm had to go to its bedside watchtower! after alarm relocation, the devious mechanism in me connived with the ears to be ignoring the melody all the same, especially when i have important assignments. i end up waking hours later with a back ache to boot.

another morning day killer is when i wake up and find that kenya power and lighting company has decided to challenge god’s edict of ‘let there be light’. there are alternatives but i am yet to find an effective one for un-ironed clothes. this collusion happens when i fail to iron on a sunday or the previous evening and i have a presentation or an interview. possibility thinking gets challenged, its just a matter of seconds and the lights are back. of course that does not happen and i have to crisscross town impulse buying formal clad and looking for an open dry cleaning service to get them straightened up. if the appointment is early in the morning, the tongue and the cell phone gets to work to negotiate a few hours or another day. but with the mind at a freeze, it is like reading a book with no cover and lots of nibbled out pages!

bosses do kill their employees’ days too! you are upbeat in the morning, feeling good and gorgeous, armed with the report whose deadline is today. you pass it to your boss with a smile and she smiles back approvingly. you rush back to your desk feeling king solomon. you grab a cup of coffee since you spent most of the night polishing up and colourfully laying out the report.

before you can settle for the day, your boss calls you to her office and kills your day! the nicely formatted report is now full of ugly red markings, all these ?!@*??!! characters combined and implied. nearly all sentences have been cancelled and indecipherable writings have replaced your favourite font.

with the handing back of the report, the boss opens your x-files in her mind and spats to you all the mistakes you have ever done since you signed the dotted line. no chance for explanations, you are supposed to hand over the report in an hour’s time. in many other instances than this one, you feel micromanaged. as you sit down to redo the report, you wonder why she didn’t do it herself, she has rewritten all over it anyway! nevertheless she is your boss, and you asked for it. you just swallow hard that your day was killed and you long for a fresh day. if only you could take a nap!

Points extracted from Jimnah Mbaru’s – Nairobi Stock Exchange Chairman - published statement on the growth of Kenya’s stock market.
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1. Increased individual domestic savings arising from increased incomes from the milk sector, sugar, maize and horticulture, among others. we must also bear in mind that many parents are no longer paying school fees for primary school education since the government implemented free primary education, hence, their disposable incomes are higher

2. Expansion in the size of funds held by pension funds following reforms that have been carried out by the retirement benefits authority (RBA) since 1988. Previously, most pension funds were overweight in property investments and underweight in equities. Many of these pension funds are rebalancing their portfolios in line with RBA’s regulations, hence, their push into equities market. It should be noted that the size of the pension funds is now in excess of KShs 200 billion and continues to grow annually.

3. Increased in investments in securities by the National social Security Fund (NSSF) as it tries to balance its portfolio as per the RBA guidelines. NSSF holds over KShs 50 billion mostly in real estate and treasury bonds

4. Increased insurance premiums as the sector has become more aggressive in marketing innovative life assurance products such as funeral policies, travel insurance, education plans and mortgage protection policies among others. insurance companies have also expanded with the neighbouring countries and continue to tap new premiums

5. Increased retained earnings by the corporate sector following improved profitability. This is evident from the many companies that have achieved substantial recovery after years of depressed growth including Kenya Airways, Kenya commercial Bank, Barclays Bank of Kenya, East African Cables and Mumias Sugar company, just to mention a few.

6. Increased profitability of small and micro enterprises due to improved market conditions including competition and greater transparency in the award of government tenders.

7. Rapid growth in mutual funds and unit trusts, giving small investors an opportunity to invest their small savings in large, profitable firms. Some of these mutual funds include Old Mutual and British American unit trusts. Currently, these unit trusts hold over KShs 10 billion.

8. Substantial remittances by Kenyans in the Diaspora, who are remitting back to Kenya an estimated USD 750 million – USD 1 billion (KShs 50-75 billion) annually through western union and commercial banks. Most of these funds find their way into the stock market and the real estate, among others.

9. Increased inflows from international investors, including speculators, dedicated emerging market funds and hedge funds. Presently, international investors contribute about 15 per cent of the stock market turnover. Most of these funds are remitted to Kenya through commercial banks who act as custodians for these investors. The Central Bank of Kenya keeps track of where these funds are coming from.

10. Availability of low interest rate and unsecured personal loans to individual investors and similar business loans to small and medium enterprises. The impact of this lending was demonstrated during the recent Kengen primary share issue

11. First time investors in the stock market. The Kengen issue, for example, attracted 240,000 investors, of which majority were first time participants in the equities market. These new investors include the youth and students who are at home with financial assets, as well as trading on the internet.

These sources of funds have not just developed by accident. They have expanded because of the attractiveness of the Kenyan economy due to economic recovery arising from better macro-economic management, which is demonstrated by low fiscal budget deficit, low inflation, low interest rates and a competitive exchange rate. The Kenya Revenue Authority has also increased its tax collections from about KShs 200 billion in 2003 to KShs 375 billion in 2006. The increased tax revenue has contributed to less borrowing by Government from the money market, hence, the low interest rate environment.

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it was once written on kenyan papers that raila odinga has an intelligence network that leaves kenya's formal intelligence service envious. how he manages to finance and create such a network is beyond this post. he has all plots being hatched figured out; be it the standard raid, mercenaries out to finish opposition, a stage-managed attack at security minister home or meetings held specifically to plot how he will be assassinated. one thing in kenya is that raila is a top contender for the presidency and at times i think he wants that seat just too badly. he cannot afford to miss a thing that’s happening around kenya. that i understand. he leaves many with admiration of his energy, charisma and his attention seeking tactics.

he has also had the nse bubble figured out as well. according to his theology, the current boom being experienced at the nairobi stock exchange is largely due to drug money being sanitized through the exchange. there is no bit of economic prosperity and the economy has grown at a paltry three per cent if any growth has occurred at all. raila's claims at face value look ridiculous. well, there is nothing to stop a drug dealer from using the exchange to cleanse his money and it’s hard to say that kenya has no drug money given the fact that only the other day, kenya destroyed a billion worth of netted cocaine haul. but attributing the nse bubble to dug money is to say the least, misleading.

well, a nation newspaper columnist once commented that whenever raila opens his mouth to talk about economics, his economic professor, prof. anyang nyong'o feels like going under the table. what with his trashing of gdp and ndp reported growth rate? instead he recommended for a measure of gnu. gross national happiness! imagine him as president, such radicalness. maybe kenya needs such now; railanomics!

other than the growth in the kenyan economy, which is a fact, there are numerous other factors that have led to the nse boom. the other leading factors include government goodwill in privatisation of parastatals and automation of the trading process (cds & ats) that increased trades executed per day as well as reduced turnaround times. the banks have been more than willing to finance share buying at affordable rates. the local mwananchi is more aware of the investment opportunities available at the nse than he/she was five years ago. the pension rule that was introduced three years ago that one cannot access their employer retirement contribution until they are 55, have left pension funds with more than enough funds to invest.

good tax collection by the kenya revenue authority have reduced the government's domestic borrowing, making treasury bills and bonds unattractive to corporate investors. the base interest rate has been caged to a single-digit figure making banks to release their funds to other higher rate borrowers fuelling enterprise growth. the ipo craze both for public and private companies has also fuelled the nse bonfire. the business community is at peace with more predictable policies and the political stability has been near-guaranteed. that in my opinion has fuelled the nse boom.

other interesting factors are that the average kenyan investor at the nse is more gullible, less risk averse-or pure risk blindness and quite speculative. we hedge our hopes on the ever skyrocketing prices hoping to make a kill from a more gullible investor. the broker cartel has colluded to keep manipulating the market and this has acquired a life of its own. insider trading is the order of the day. ever wondered why some suspect deals like the massive offloading of uchumi shares a day before closure has never been acted upon? or a city trust deal investigation that saw the share price take a hike form kshs 120 to kshs 407 in a matter of hours?

the above paragraph has led to another category of doomsday prophets who advocate that in a few days to come the nse bubble will burst on the face of its ardent believers. market professionals call it a sure prediction of market correction that will leave many wounded when the bull and the bear touch base. i call them prophets of doom because they say the end of the nse triple-your-cash is just before the end of the month bearing in mind that this school of thought got class-full beginning of this month. i respect their opinion but i feel the crash is not coming that soon. eveready will still be oversubscribed regardless of what the prospectus says or the battery market prospects. mumias maybe a quiet one but not the kenya-re ipo or the 20 per cent safaricom offload in 2007.

i see a situation where even the election volatility and political tension in 2007 will not scratch the over-zealous nse investors. going by 2002 elections, there are enough of us gullible investors who are ready to pump funds at the nse by near-end 2007 - we speculate the prices to be low, courtesy of election uncertainty and cash-in once the new government stabilizes in 2008. if there is a hundred thousand of us, what will make nse crash? not to be taken seriously, i could be in my own class of doomsday cult. however it is said that the best test for a prophet is time. time will tell. in the same light i am also slowly building up my scanad shares, advertising will be key in an election year.

what i wonder is whether there will be a time when market fundamentals and financial analysis will matter at the nse. currently it is largely a speculative market. maybe the best strategy is to have two classes of portfolio, a sound market fundamental one and a speculative portfolio balanced based on the risk one is willing to take. maybe price speculation is a part of market fundamentals?

after scouting around, i have decided to settle for jean. there were several candidates to choose from but jean beat them all. it was interesting to see that despite being a candidate in many a ladies list, i never appeared in her list. well, with tact, words and actions, i top it now. not an easy game, i would have preferred learning backgammon but jean it had to be.

jean’s candidature as the first lady poses its unique challenges and i have to spend a fortune, prayers and strategy to overcome the challenges.

i would have preferred a quiet solemn ceremony somewhere inside the attorney general’s chambers, but jean wont hear of it. she has the senate and congress votes and that ensures that i play ball. the senate comprises of her nuclear gang and the congress, mine nuclear gang!

i am also in a busy mode shopping for a clergyman to do the knots bearing in mind that i have been a visiting church member in many a nairobi churches, i am not sure i belong anywhere. i am seriously considering my pcea roots but that communion card has not been filled for years.

jean wants a garden wedding. i thought hallowed grounds make the event get the seriousness it deserves but she is of a venusian mindset. “jeevanjee gardens?” i innocently ask. “no sweetie, not any of that, and don’t mention uhuru park or arboretum, i know that’s where you are getting next” she extends the reply. jean can read minds, that’s a revelation. she now knows my tactics. she knew i wanted to joke about the garden wedding idea and push for my hallowed grounds eventually. jean is damn serious about a garden wedding. i hope she doesn’t mention naivasha, and camouflage the boat ride down the aisle.

the samantha’s bridal magazine is my next challenge. i innocently bought for my mademoiselle the bride magazine and its now making me feel like tearing off some pages. i intend to do no loans neither fund raising nor wedding committees, its all on my precious savings. jean has decided to give the budget a shove but if we follow that magazine, my goodness, we will feed on stones for sometime after the wedding. the baby magazine isn’t helping either. i am wishing she just kept to eve, drum and true love. i have introduced some collections which are bringing grim finalities to the reality of the situation. thank heavens, the event is still afar off i have some time to be sane and plan.

i intended to post about the nse drug money and its prophets of doom but i reserve that crap for another time. hearty heart matters first. the heart likes candy and biscuits!

watching my 25^th year fizzle away fills my mind with nostalgia, calmness and uncertainty. a concoction of sought. or is it 26^th year if the nine gestation months matters. god bless the lovely mothers. no, its not birthday time.

i always subconsciously longed for the twenty fifth year of oxygen addiction. now it feels more like the getting on a summit as the downhill slide to thirty starts in earnest. fortunately, this year moves away the cloud of the valley of the shadow of… okay, i don’t intend to be freaky but….

i just realized that i never got over it. what? when i was sweet sixteen (does it apply to dudes?) i read this book titled ‘eighteen and no time to waste’ about some teenagers whose life were cut short immediately after making that best decision of following the lord. one of them was so determined to recoup the wasted years by putting in more effort into the service of the king after making the life changing decision.

she never made it past the eighteenth year. well, for her to live was christ to die was gain, the theme of the book. as we analyzed the book, with one of my mentors, that’s where the idea of the twenty fifth year slowly colonized my fearful mind. get off the pulpit jp!

well, at the time a statement flew from my mentor’s wise mouth that genius guys like jp- but do i say- never get past their twenty fifth year. it was innocent, but my mind wasn’t going to treat such wisdom like chaff, especially when it came from my mentor. i just realized the other day that the statement never escaped my sharp subconscious since.

i know you are wondering, jp a genius? holy joe! i wont blow any jp trumpet but a simple “blogeometer” could give us indications. one of our bright bloggers around is still fighting wars with kasneb, the accountancy body. jp zoomed past that before he could say kcse, the secondary education in kenya. if that does not make jp a genius then i don’t know who a genius is. i think it goes without saying. please don’t come for my jugular, i had a rough day and i am just having fun with words.

other than the fun of flying past the twenty fifth goal post, it was an eventful year. i once had a chat with an old friend moments before he passed on and the words that came from him if written down would give solomon’s recital of vanity of vanities a run for his fame. one thing he felt so sure is that we all have a mark of … somewhere in our bodies. some form of expiry date if you know what i mean. he felt this strongly for he spent a fortune sealing what he and his doctor felt were the life escape routes only for one unnoticed, undiscovered dent to quickly and surely usher him to the gods.

in my twenty fifth count i happened to get an injury and many a times i feel herein lies the mark of …. no, i aint scared as it sounds in words; i believe i have at least seven more decades to count.

the downhill to thirty has begun in earnest with a well orchestrated effort to have jp start passing on the gene button. it started casually with extended relatives and now the nuclear gang has taken on the rallying call to have the family pedigree longer and bigger.

the nuclear gang has gained ample support in the embodiment of the “sinful nature” which is pushing jp to an edge, almost breaking the leash of the mosaic law. i adeptly support job of the book in one of his declarations. compliance rates to the “job of the book” covenant call don’t really matter a lot, what matters is the spirit. I think if there are any deviations, they are not statistically significant.

job made a covenant with his eyes that they will not lustfully look at a cutie. i believe the only way out for dudes who subscribe to this school of thought is to have the cutie legally, religiously and societically–excuse the battering of the queen’s language. and therein lies jp’s dilemma, yet he is determined to surmount all.

"If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."