Mama Grace (not her real name) is a parking attendant in Woodvale Grove in Westlands. To supplement her monthly wage from the City Council of Nairobi (CCN), she offers taxi drivers a discount of KES 40 to 80 off the parking fee, and then pockets the cash. She is unapologetic about this (if a bit circumspect about any inquiry), because she has three children, a nephew and a husband to take care of.

Mama Grace is quick to point out that several other parking attendants do the same and that her supervisor takes a cut of all of what they bring in. “Everyone eats a little something,” she says in Kiswahili, “even the bigwigs in City Hall. But them, they don’t eat a little, they eat everything.” This is a sentiment shared by most Nairobians. Ask anybody. Paying the kanjo a little something to get your car unclamped is an everyday experience. But motorists blame the supervisors and administrators in City Hall, not the little guy on the ground.

Philip Kisia, the outgoing town clerk, made a big show of cleaning up the streets when he assumed office, both literally and metaphorically. His predecessor, John Gakuo, left office due to a corruption scandal, which involved illegal payments of up to KES 283 million to purchase land for a cemetery in Mavoko municipality. So the new town clerk’s position was certainly well motivated. Despite the big promises, things seem to have taken a turn for the worse. Roads are poorly maintained, Wangari Mathai’s precious Uhuru Park is turning to dust, and there is more garbage on the streets and more street families than there were during the reign of Mr. Kisia’s corrupt predecessor.

Last year, Mr. Kisia was prosecuted by the National Environment Management Authority (NEMA) for failing to collect garbage on Enterprise and Lunga Lunga roads, and for non-compliance with a lawful order by NEMA to stop dumping garbage on city sites. However, the high courts suspended this prosecution and, instead, the politicians are pointing fingers and slinging mud. Mr. Kisia complained that NEMA’s purported case was an attempt to sully his reputation, now that he’d decided to vie for the governor of Nairobi seat.

He also claimed that the acting director-general was seeking to “prove that he is effective and competent to fill the vacant post.” The former town clerk claimed that he lacked the funds to be effective. The main sources of local revenue, evidenced in the 2010’s CCN budget, are land rates, business permits and parking fees. All of these areas are dogged with corruption problems. The Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission has been investigating, on an ongoing basis, several CCN employees. “Just this year we prevented a loss of about KES 800 million through irregular issuance of single-business permits by Nairobi City Council guys,” says an EACC agent, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Corruption is entrenched in City Hall, and perhaps always will be, but the first step to tackling this problem is transparency. A request for public records filed last month has yet to be met. I have been bounced from one department to another without any real success, and been greeted with wary looks and one menacing sneer—this last from the corruption report centre next to the entrance at the intersecting corner of Muindi Mbingu and Mama Ngina streets. “Reports filed here are taken to the Town Clerk’s office,” the lady at the desk said, before dismissing me to deal with “actual complaints”.

The Town Clerk’s office was the first place I had gone looking for the public records. Bureaucracy of this kind—circular, exhausting, forbidding—is often designed to shield the actions and transactions of those who operate within it. It sanctions corruption, seeds it and allows it to flower. Meanwhile, the money keeps flowing through a broken system. “I share my earnings with my supervisor,” Mama Grace says, “and him with his. Ni biashara tu.” Just business.

The Storymoja Reading Revolution is spreading throughout Nairobi, and it will not stop until every school has a proper library. The “Start-a-Library” movement is on a mission to create a smarter nation, one that values knowledge and creativity. This begins with giving kids the opportunity to read stories that take them beyond the confinements of the classroom—and into the alluring world of fiction.

“The campaign’s aim is to facilitate access to books by starting up libraries in primary and secondary schools, and stocking them with extra-curricular books,” says Martin Njaga. The coordinator for Storymoja, he is running the project with a passion. “Kids love exploration and are naturally curious. The books we donate give them the chance to do that.” Getting the libraries up and running is not an easy task.

But, for Martin, every stride is worth the effort, especially when considering the fruits of their labour. “It’s a remarkable thing to fill a school library in a month,” he declares, with a sense of pride in his voice. This first place to benefit from the project was Little Rock Early Childhood Development (ECD) Centre in the heart of Kibera. Little Rock’s head teacher, Lily Oyare, is grateful for every book that was donated, excited to finally have a library within the school. However, the library has a vast predominance of foreign books— something she would like to change.

“We lack Kenyan storybooks and would be so happy to be able to feed our kids with stories they can connect with.” For more information on Start-a-Library , visit www.startalibrary.wordpress.com.

In order to arm the male UP readers with the tools they need to find love, we asked two beautiful Nairobi “It girls” what today’s woman wants from men. One, an old-fashioned romantic, said, “Women want that special guy. She wants him to be the ‘man’ in humanity, the fondant in her chocolate , as well as the kerosene in her lighter.” The second, a modern, fun-loving girl, set the bar a little lower:

“What I really want is a shiny, top-of-the-range iPad that I can stick in my oversized handbag and use to Google Idris Elba and Ryan Gosling. [All the] while pretending to read about the very serious implications of the collapse of the Eurozone or human rights abuses in China.” However, an accurate sociological portrait requires independent data from more than two women. So, we conducted a survey among men at Gypsy’s on a Friday night. This quickly revealed that both these women were utterly deluded—and lying.

What women really want is a front row view of his ”dangling diamonds”. What we want is to spend the evening flopping them this way and that way, for the delight of their owner. Plus, skinny jeans make you look amazingly manly, particularly when worn with pointy-toed, patent-leather boots. We love it when a guy talks about his ex-girlfriends with us. We are fascinated by how much he loved them, who gave the best blowjobs and who he really regrets letting go. Most of all, we need graphic sexual details. We want everything, including how he still tingles when he thinks about how his mother used to change his nappy.

It appears that bathing wearing clean clothes and brushing your teeth is not in style. Any attempt at oral hygiene speaks of homosexuality. A tongue should be green and we love it when you kiss us with your eyes closed, swirling your tongue like a puppy searching for a nugget of poo under a bed. And what about the act of love? Imitate an angry chef trying to get a strawberry out the bottom of a blender with a wooden spoon. Hair gel should be visible, ideally aping the younger Gaddafi’s. Your jeans should have matching greasy patches on the buttocks to indicate you do not indulge in hand washing, another pointless—and probably gay—exercise. How about not calling the morning after, the night before, or ever? Women love that. Women much prefer the thrill of being woken by a rattling doorknob when a man has run out of money for Tuskers, or is bored with masturbation and has run out of airtime for YouPorn. Women love that.

We love going for weekly bikini waxes, because we know we have to look like the suicidal porn stars who our men spend 30% of their time watching, with our airtime, so that we can’t download movies that feature women who can talk. We love that. Women all want to have a man’s baby, but only in an “open relationship”. We like our babies to know that their fathers only stick around long enough to have their dangling diamonds flopped from left to right. How else are they going to raise the next generation of men who go to Gypsy’s? We hope you have enjoyed this survey and that you feel it matches up to the quality of our previous survey, “Why Chips in Peptang Taste So Good.”