The Nation (Nairobi) COLUMN August 21, 2003 Posted to the web August 21, 2003
By Charles Onyango-Obbo Nairobi
Understandably, The Sunday Times didn't want to alarm men with this news, so it didn't run it on the front pages where it would have been more appropriate: Men are doomed to extinction and women will rule the planet supreme, so says Bryan Sykes, professor of human genetics, Oxford University.
It's the logical consequence of the well documented decaying of the human Y-chromosome, the only piece of DNA that men possess and women don't.
The Y-chromosome's main function is switching on the male embryos in the womb. However the bloody thing cannot repair itself nor arrest the steadily accumulating damage. Therefore it will become extinct. However, life would still continue, as all reproduction would be assisted genetically. All children will be girls, and there will be only female couples.
The only comfort is that the end is not coming on New Year's day. The last male will expire, according to Prof Sykes, in 125,000 years - that is by 127,003. Guys, still a lot of time left to party.
Even if the Y-chromosome didn't let us down, men are already killing themselves off in war, accidents - and for women. None more dramatic than David Wackett, a shopworker in Brigend, South Wales. He had a crush on fellow worker, Nadine Jones. Jones didn't know just how strong Wackett's feelings were until recently when, devastated that his love was not being returned, he tied a nylon rope around his neck and to a lamp post, and drove off in his car. As he drove away, the rope tightened, tearing his head off.
But not all is lost. Two British men, Tony and Barrie Drewitt-Barlow are setting an interesting, albeit highly controversial, example. Tony and Barnie caused quite a storm when they became the first openly gay surrogate parents. Between them they fertilised 24 eggs that had been harvested from egg donor Tracie Matthews, and another woman, the birth mother Rosalind Bellamy, carried two embryos to term. Lo and behold, they got twins. The twins are now four years old. Their third child, born by a similar process, was due yesterday. The couple spent Pounds 200,000 (KShs 24m) to get the twins.
Another sign that the gods are against men, and have sided with women came by way of the fate of Penthouse magazine, that peddler of female nudity. Penthouse has filed for bankruptcy. At its peak in the 1970s, its circulation reached 5 million. In 1984 Penthouse ran a pictorial of the first black woman to hold the Miss America title, Vanessa Williams. The controversy forced Williams to resign, but launched a lucrative singing and movie for the soul sister. That issue alone generated for Penthouse a profit of $14m (KSh 1 billion), the highest ever in its history. That is nearly equivalent to the amounts of money the Municipal Council of Mombasa, and Nairobi City Council together owe in unpaid worker's deductions to their savings and credit co-operative societies over the past so many years.
The Guardian last week had a story about the continuing confusion in the male kingdom. A group of transsexuals were thrown out of a bar in Thornby, Northamptonshire. The bar owner kicked the group out after one of them used the ladies' toilet. They went to court, claiming sexual discrimination on the grounds of their sex. The judge tossed out their case, ruling that by the time of the incident last March, they were perceived as men dressed as women, as only one of them had undergone a sex change operation. John Gawthorp the bar owner, speaking triumphantly after the judgement, was more blunt than the judge was: "The law has run sensibly", he said. "You shouldn't have male genitalia in the ladies' lavatories. It's as simple as that". The African bishops, who have no time for people like transsexuals and gays, would no doubt strongly approve.
We leave these matters, with an update on American basketball superstar Kobe Bryant. As nearly everyone knows by now Kobe, recently got himself in a mess with a woman in his hotel room. Kobe appeared at a press conference, sobbing and doing everything else, to say that he did not rape the woman. That something went on between them, yes, but that it was by mutual agreement. With his beautiful wife beside him (they were holding hands), Kobe confessed to adultery, but not rape, and asked madam to forgive him. When he appeared for his indictment in court, his good loyal wife was there and, as only Tina Brown would write in The Times, looking "all wounded and gorgeous'. In America, such devotion doesn't come cheap. Two weeks later, Mrs Bryant was sporting a $4m (KSh 304m) rock on her finger. From Kobe of course, as atonement for his sin!
On an unrelated topic, we have been reading that perhaps nowhere in the world was the recent blackout in New York and other cities in the US and Canada watched with interest like in Iraq. Ever since the war, most of Iraq has no power. Where there is power, like in the capital Baghdad, they have daily outages that last hours. Since Saddam Hussein was ousted, the US-led occupation authorities have promised, and failed, to restore regular supplies, and the Iraqis are angry. Mr Ali Hussein, a diner in Baghdad, is quoted in The Times worrying about events in America. "[The US is] meant to be a superpower, they have put people on the moon, but they can't get the electricity working. If they can't fix their own power, what chance have they with ours?" he asked. Fat chance.
The Independent meantime went underground, where tens of thousands of illegal immigrants are toiling in fields, building sites, and factories in poor conditions and for slave wages. The paper's reporter posed as an illegal worker, and was paid Pounds 40 a day. He was horrified, and called it "rubbish money". Agreed. An illegal immigrant who labours every day for a month at those wages would get Pounds 1,200, the equivalent of KShs 145,000. Consider this. According to a recent survey of executive salaries in Kenya by PricewaterhouseCoopers, at the lower end of the scale, that is what CEOs in some Kenyan companies are paid a month.
And there is this. Norway is the place to be for criminals. Because there is a shortage of cells, and the Norwegians don't want to pack prisons with inmates, burglars, drug dealers, robbers, and conmen (though not murderers and rapists) have to wait for up to five years to serve their sentence.
The number of convicts waiting to do time has trebled to 2,762, nearly as many as the prison population of 2,900. It's not unusual in Norway for someone who's been sentenced to a prison term to clean up his ways, fall in love, marry, have children, be profitably employed, and then one day at dinner receive a telephone call telling him they have found a cell in some prison for him, could he please come in tomorrow morning. So when all is said and done, in the end crime rarely pays.
Mr Onyango-Obbo is Nation Media Group's managing editor for media convergence and syndication.
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===== ***************************************************************** Cognitive dissonance is the inner conflict produced when long-standing beliefs are contradicted by new evidence.
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