Sh100 million was paid out last year by Paddy Power, an Irish betting company, to customers who had predicted that Hillary Clinton would be the next president of the United States.
How? The company was so confident on its prediction that it decided to pay the bets even before the actual election took place. The business of predicting the future however proved less exact than Paddy Power anticipated.
Were political betting as big in Kenya as it is elsewhere, there would be quite some money riding on the Nairobi county contests.
Come August 9, either Kidero or Sonko will be governor of Nairobi. Many will be confounded and dismayed, whichever way it goes, so fervent are the passions of the two camps.
If Kidero will win a second term, he will need vigilant policing to deliver on his promises. If Sonko, on the other hand, managed what some consider inconceivable and bags the election, he, perhaps more than any other governor in the country, would require the most persistent and relentless ‘prefecting’ to stay on course.
That is why the next Senator for the capital city has his work cut out for him. It will be city lawyer Edwin Sifuna or former TNA chairman Johnson Sakaja.
While the credentials of Sifuna to check either Kidero or Sonko are of the type to encourage calmness, Sakaja’s are not. It is unlikely the man who keeps saying that he was instrumental in authoring the TNA manifesto has much follow-through left in him.
Judged by the promises in that manifesto that have come to pass, he has performed well below par. More interested in posting photos of himself hobnobbing with the President instead of taking him to task over unfulfilled promises, it is unlikely that Sakaja can handle Sonko the governor.
What is very likely is that Sakaja would embark on a half-a-decade-long photo op session rather than confront a governor whom many would be afraid to cross paths with.
It is not hard to envisage Sakaja paying lip service to senatorial duties. Going by the evidence of his stint as nominated MP, Sakaja has not been one to ruffle feathers in his own camp.
Even when it came to the NYS scam, where he would have been hard-pressed, as the face of the youth in Parliament, to at least make the right noises, he was an active agent in ensuring a motion of impeachment against Anne Waiguru was never brought to the floor of the House.
Such silence in the face of evil is complicity to the point of being indistinguishable from the evil itself. Contrast that with Sifuna, who has not been too keen to pay homage to political correctness.
Two instances illustrate this: He is on record taking the governor to task over collapsing city buildings. This is the action of a man who understands what a Senator’s role is.
When the doctors were on strike, Sifuna was on the panel that brokered the back-to-work agreement. Strange thing is that he was on the doctors’ side.
And he did not go soft on the governors because the majority of them are from ODM, a party Sifuna strongly identifies with. He stood tall against the governors.
For a man who refers to himself as a youth, Sakaja remains strangely hung-over about the past.