Disclaimer – The thoughts on BAKE Awards 2016 are 100% my thoughts as Odipo Riaga and got nothing to do with my position on this website as the Managing Editor. Note: Kennedy Kachwanya to whom this website belongs is the Chairman of BAKE (Bloggers Association of Kenya) and he probably does not approve of this article.
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BAKE Awards 2016 took place on Saturday the 14th May 2016 as from 7 pm to 10pm at the Radisson Blue Hotel, Upper Hill, Nairobi, Kenya. It was packed. It was the best of the BAKE Awards I have attended since 2014 and definitely the best BAKE Awards that has ever happened since the first BAKE Awards went down in 2012. Great experience, great people, great sponsors. The only thing that was missing was great entertainment. In the future I would like to see variety of entertainment. I would like to see two to three musicians, two to three comedians, two to three magicians, two to three dancers, and/or two to three any other artists invited to grace the BAKE Awards with musical performance, crack the audience to the bones with never ending laughter, and entice BAKE Awards attendees into longing for the next BAKE Awards.
Then there is the issue of the BAKE Award winners who never show up despite winning the award every other season. We realized Jackson Biko of bikozulu.co.ke didn’t show up once again after he bagged in the Award for the Best Creative Writing Blog. And as I expected, this year he also took home the most prestigious BAKE Award, the Blog of the Year Award, which prompted the guy sat next to me to ask,
“Is it fair that the most pompous time is missing the man of the hour?”
“No” I answered firmly.
“I think BAKE should have given the award to another nominee”, he continued
“How?” I asked.
“By calling an urgent meeting and declaring another nominee the winner”, he explained.
“That’s wrong in several ways”, I told him.
The thing is, there are those whom Jackson Biko call the Gang who have always voted for Bikozulu.co.ke because he deserves it. After voting, they always sacrifice to buy BAKE Awards tickets, show up for BAKE Awards, not for anything else but to see Jackson Biko receive that award; to relate to him; to feel his presence; and to appreciate that their time for voting and effort to show up for the BAKE Awards was not in vain. Every year, these loyal Gang members always end up disappointed. My neighbor at the BAKE Awards was obviously among the disappointed Gang members.
Lastly, I hope BAKE Awards will be big, way bigger than it has ever been. I hope BAKE Awards will be big such that prizes for the best blog of any category will be in hundreds of thousands of shillings – and big such that the blog of the year could walk home with a prize that has a million sound in there. I know this is also the dream of BAKE team, and I wish them well.
After the Bake Awards 2016, it was time to go home, and Uber was on standby to take us home. I called on one who arrived six minutes late, and this one showed me how a Fraudulent Uber Driver could take advantage of the App and charge higher prices.
Immediately I got into the the cab, the driver said Hi. He apologized for being late as he picked my request while dropping another customer. I understood. Then he talked about his phone. His phone, he said, was problematic. It wasn’t responding to requests – or rather, it wasn’t allowing him to register a trip – so he decided to cancel the trip about a minute after the trip had started. What this meant is that the App wasn’t going to calculate the cost of the trip – meaning he was going to charge me off-head.
“Where are you headed to” he asked.
“CBD”
“From here I know the App will have calculated the cost to be shs 500”
“Okay”
Within two or three minutes we were in CBD since there was zero traffic. That’s why I decided to give the guy shs 400 reasoning that probably the App could have charged the minimum fare of shs 300, but from humanity point of view I decided to give the guy an extra shs 100. “That’s a good bargain”, he said.
Yesterday morning I decided to get the estimated fare from Radisson Blue Hotel to CBD, and I was surprised that when the there is no traffic at all, the fare doesn’t change from the base fare of shs 300. Meaning if I paid the Uber Driver the shs 500 he had requested for, he could have defrauded me of shs 200 – that is, thanks to my humanity, the Uber driver was able to defraud me of shs 100.
What does that imply? It implies that a fraudulent Uber Driver can decide to cancel a trip immediately a customer gets into his car, and charge the customer an amount that is way above what Uber could have charged under the circumstances. But this could be stopped if Uber implemented certain punitive measures against such an action. For example, when the driver is the one who has cancelled a trip, are they required to offer an explanation? Are there “normal” number of cancellations they are allowed to do? Are they fined when they cancel trips without any rational reasons at all?
Biko has attended Bake award shows in the past. There are pictures to prove this