Let’s auction some GOK bandwidth

There has been an awful lot that has been said about digital migration.

We are still getting water-boarded by thunderous editorials about what it means for the freedom of the press to have all channels in control of Signet and Pang, and it is obviously bad to have all signals being carried by regulators who are in government control.

However, there is a way most people can win. The idea of booting out transmissions from certain bands and squatting TVs on certain frequencies for digital networks seems to be that we are running out of bandwidth. We aren’t, really.

A lot of frequencies are reserved for exclusive government usage. We aren’t told which sector of government uses them, but the government has a lot of frequencies it has allocated itself.

A lot of the spectrum assigned to the military for emergency purposes is not used most of the time. Why not turn it over to civilian usage, which is more pressing? When the bombs come raining down the government can have them back.

HUNGRY TELCOS

Telecommunications companies are the ones who are hungriest for spectrum to send data on.

In fact the analogue TV spectrum is going to be used to roll out “4G LTE” services. (The words are in quotes because as you undoubtedly know 4G is a marketing gimmick, not a telecommunication standard.)

There is an obvious way to get round the demands of data for telecommunication companies. In densely populated areas like Nairobi you could use short-range Wi-Fi receivers connected to fibre optic cables to deliver data. That way you could bypass spectrum and still ensure Instagram selfies can be uploaded and everyone is happy without taxing the airwaves.

You will remember that 3G was rolled out in towns before going to certain urban areas. For the most part there are still more 2G cell phone masts than 3G, and “4G” will also start off in towns.

So there really is no logical reason to turn off analogue apart from meeting the global deadline.

We aren’t ready to move to 4G, so there really should be no hurry.

I think the government should tell us how much whitespace there is in the airwaves and then allocate more of it to persons willing to fill it.

It could even auction the airwaves and make several billion shillings out of it. TV operators want it and internet companies need it. So why not?

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DIGESTING ALCOHOL

Pregnant and drunk? Holy Moly!

I try not to be a moralistic old fogey. I really do. The moment you start talking of “children of nowadays” you are past it and need to become a church elder. If you see me crusading against teenage habits, write to my editor and ask him to boot me.

However, in a bar at Kasarani recently, I saw a very sickening sight. As I downed a bottle or two and made merry with friends, a very pregnant woman walked in and ordered her poison. She had at least two before I left in disgust.

Surely, aside from people below the age of 18, we shouldn’t sell a drop to women who are pregnant. Foetal alcohol syndrome is a great concern and represents a risk that the children did not volunteer for.

Children should not be born with hooch coursing through their tiny little arteries.

Compared to their counterparts in Rwanda and Uganda, Kenyan women do not drink as much. That is a good thing. However, we should recall that the effects of drinking are not split evenly between the sexes or the races. (We are unlucky that Africans, for the most part, are excellent at digesting alcohol, unlike, say, people from the Far East.)

A woman who drinks as much as a man faces more physical problems because of human physiology. The problem is compounded by pregnancy.

Controlling alcohol consumption in women is about brain-addled babies. Mututho should latch onto this issue and rid our bars of pregnant women. Also, there is no mood killer worse in a bar than the sight of a pregnant woman walking in as you chat up a lady.

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FIGHTING WITH ISIS

Girls fled comfort of London to become handmaidens of Islamic State militants

We live through what is a dreadful period of hard news and we were reminded so last week, when three Muslim teenage girls ran off from London and headed to Syria to join Islamic State.

They were inspired by their 15-year-old friend to go to what is turning out to be the most hellish country to live in.

It seems odd that a group of teenagers below the age of majority can just board a plane and decide to go to a foreign conflict without anyone asking them where their parents are.

It is understandable why men run off to join conflicts. Adolescent boys will always have a bit of wanderlust about them and a quest for adventure. Wars are fought by young men because they half-think they are invincible.

Men are attracted to the martial values of obedience to a cause, discipline and strength.

Also, the warrior code that is the biological heritage of every boy growing up means that they will always look favourably on war. But why would women do so? Why would they run off to become handmaidens of IS?

PATH TO DEATH

The Islamic State is properly evil. Its members have decapitated people but then realised that decapitations are not shocking enough, so they decided to raise the threshold of shock.

They sentenced someone to defenestration and recorded him falling to his death.

Then they put a captured Jordanian pilot in a cage, doused him in petrol and immolated him while recording the whole thing on camera before putting it on social media.

With each successive atrocity IS ensures that they will be defeated. When you immolate someone and post it on social media, it becomes a rallying cry for the victims.

The reason Texas is today in America and not Mexico is that the Mexican government slaughtered hundreds of the state’s defenders. They rallied under the call to “Remember the Alamo” and set the course for the lone-star state to join the United States.

People will not rest until they defeat IS for all their evils. Jordan won’t rest with their bombing sorties and world opinion will coalesce against them.

The path they are on only leads to their death and destruction because there can be retreat.

In August last year I saw a documentary on what life is like under IS. There were dead thieves crucified in public squares.

There were rows of heads of Syrian soldiers stuck on spikes. Even the head of Al-Qaeda Ayman al Zawahiri condemned IS actions.

All the while religious police harassed women walking with their men about their coverings.

They asked for proof of marriage and generally hassled and intimidated the men and women they encountered.

WOMEN ON THE WARFRONT

I am still stuck with the idea of teenage girls from the West who should be worrying about materialistic trivia and being narcotised by consumerism running off to join a global jihad in a country where they will be second-class citizens and be forced to dress and act in a certain way.

Girls have always been attracted to fascists and military types.

Women volunteered by the thousand to fight in Vietnam in its wars against France and the United States, and during the Moscow bombings in 2004 I recall several potential female suicide bombers from Chechnya.

Hitler had women serving in the frontline who loved the Fuhrer and were eager to commit atrocities in his name.

However, for all its evils, Nazism celebrated Aryan women. It reduced stigma on things like children out of wedlock and accorded women a modicum of respect.

Jihadis patently hate women, all women, and want to enslave them.

I still do not understand the reasoning of these London girls.