Nairobi News

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The People’s Champion January 31,2014

January 31st, 2014 2 min read

Quail qualms

Stories about the many people in the county and even countrywide who have turned poultry farmers overnight — keeping quails in their thousands — are worrying.

They keep the birds for their eggs and meat, which are said to have medicinal value and the high demand, which has unfortunately waned.

What I would like to have the environmental watchdog (Nema) address is the issue of ecosystem balance, say in the event that these farmers will get to a point of releasing the wildlife when it gets expensive feeding them without a ready market for the products, says Mwariama James.

I can imagine billions of such big birds flying all over the Kenyan sky, enjoying their newfound freedom before thinking of what to eat and heading to our shambas.

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Language query

I understand and support the idea of the Educationalists advocating for lower primary school children to be taught in their mother tongue before graduating to being taught in English, Miriam Mwang’ombe writes.

I found it easy to learn English grammar after first being taught in my local primary school all the Kitaita grammar (the tenses, adverbs, adjectives, nouns, etc) before going on to learn similar grammar in English.

The other thing Mwang’ombe finds good in this that you have to start from what a child knows deeply (the mother tongue) to the unknown to cultivate a foundation for them to study anything new.

If you met a Greek who understands none of the languages you know, you would not be able to teach them even addition itself because of the language barrier. That’s where vernacular helps.

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Suburb services

People who live in newly built up Nairobi County suburbs without a sewerage system, garbage collection services or even roads to be swept should not pay taxes as high as others.

There are so many services that the county government gives others that such people in Rongai, Kitengela and such other areas don’t enjoy, writes Moses Mworia.

If it is the garbage, we burn our own, take care of our own septic tanks that we have to build and even dig drainage outside our compounds.

He wonders why County Hall cannot attempt to improve the places because they fall in their docket. Mworia particularly wonders when the estate roads in his Kitengela neighbourhood will cease to be muddy.

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 Long-distance travel?

How  many kilometres qualify a journey to be long distance (in relation to the night travel ban)? Mary Mutero asks.

She wants to travel from Nairobi to visit a child in school in Kitui and she is sure, after meetings with teachers during the academic clinic, she will not leave the school before 5.30.

She now wonders whether any matatu will dare start the three-hour journey at such a time or she will have to spend the night in the town.

Not forgetting the extra expense and that she is expected at her office desk at the city centre by 8am the next day, she has genuine worries which the Transport ministry can address.

Could she take a matatu to the next town and then another to the next and end up reaching Nairobi, even as late as 9.00pm?