Author: NLM Correspondent

There has been plenty of excitement around Jumia, the e-commerce company which became something of a flawed Rorschach test for how one defines African start-ups. The debate around Jumia came to a head in the run-up to its largely successful initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange. It was “Africa’s Amazon” in many headlines in international press trying to get their readers to quickly understand why this retailer was worth reading about. E-commerce is often discussed in the context of consumers and customer satisfaction but for many investors and analysts most of their focus is spent looking under…

NLM Writer Per the World Bank Doing Business Indicators 2019, Kenya rose from position 80 to 61, in ease of doing business rankings. Amongst the indicators were resolving insolvency, protecting minority investors and registering property. The business environment has been on the upward trend after experiencing a decline for the last several years. At the same time, the country has been facing infrastructure constraints. According to the World Bank, Kenya faces a significant infrastructure financing deficit estimated at Sh218 billion annually or roughly half of the required expenditure of almost Sh416 billion (4.5 percent of GDP) per year. But, despite…

We are only as strong as we are united, as weak as we are divided. BY Antony Mutunga Africa’s largest economy, Nigeria, finally signed onto the AfCFTA – the continent’s most promising attempt yet at a continental free trade area – after months of holding off. To also sign on the day was Benin, leaving Eritrea as the sole country yet to come on board. It’s obvious why Nigeria’s participation and endorsement is significant. It’s not just Africa’s most populous country with some 200 million people; it’s also the continent’s largest economy, with a GDP of more than USD 405bn.…

Africa’s economic outlook is on the up, with the African Development Bank in its 2019 African Economic Outlook report forecasting sustained rise in the average GDP (gross domestic profit) growth rate for the continent – from an estimated 3.5 percent in 2018 to 4 percent this year and 4.1 percent in 2020. Growth in investment is one of the major factors contributing to this, with private equity (PE) investors letting the money do the talking and PE funding for African businesses having increased from 2017 to 2018, by around U$300 million (Sh36 billion). East African Perspective Over the course of…

Justice Maraga was appointed to the Supreme Court Bench in 2016. He was viewed as a “safe pair of hands” after an “activist” Willy Mutunga, who had introduced radical changes to the Judiciary much to the chagrin of the Executive. His judicial philosophy could not be discerned easily from his past judgments but on first instance, began by a dress down of judges in Naivasha in 2016 for “issuing injunctions on the Executive” thus forestalling government projects and. This, and the reintroduction of colonial-era robes, put off most.  He has, however, grown into his role as the President of the…

By Dennis Ndiritu The Constitution of Kenya was enacted in 2010. It has been termed as a transformative constitution because its architecture and design is meant to address historically ignored wrongs. Walter Khobe in his article, ‘Reflections on five years of Transformative Constitutionalism in Kenya: Chimerical or viable?’ notes that the present Constitution was developed with a historical and social background, to address the authoritarian regime of law epitomised by human rights abuses, social exclusion, unequal power relations and arbitral dispossession of property among other numerous wrongs. It doing so, it established institutions meant to assist in this agenda. Such…

By Kevin Motaroki When he was making the case for the ratification of the Constitution of the United States, Alexander Hamilton wrote, “The Judiciary…will always be the least dangerous branch to the political rights of the Constitution.” Hamilton believed that the courts would stand above the political fray and act as a bulwark against tyranny from all directions. This is the test of the independence, impartiality and objectivity of judicial institutions everywhere. It’s difficult to defend the Kenyan Supreme Court on these grounds today. As far as judicial and rank niceties go, its patently naïve, unreasonable, even outright dangerous, decisions…

By Geoffrey G. andHomi Kharas It is difficult, if not foolhardy, to attempt to succinctly summarise such a broad-ranging and complex subject as the future of neoliberalism in emerging markets. So, in these brief concluding remarks we do not seek to offer anything close to a final word on the topic, but rather to sketch out some guideposts for ongoing discussion. One initial takeaway is that current debates on neoliberalism and the future of capitalism in the US and Europe do not always easily map onto emerging markets’ experiences. In many countries in the West, this debate is often framed…

BY Shadrack Muyesu Socio-political Given a choice between family and stranger, the average man, no matter how sophisticated, is likely to choose family. It’s a natural survival instinct; creatures gravitate towards their own kind, for that is where they find sanctuary. In sociology, relationships expand outwards. We move from the nuclear family, constitutionally recognised as ‘the natural and fundamental unit of society and necessary basis of natural order’, towards the extended family. Extended family units coalesce to form a clan several of which come together to form a tribe and ideally, the nation. Essentially, political preferences are choices between families.…

By Kevin Motaroki “When I was growing up, I always felt my father didn’t know how to do things “easily”, and I actually lacked respect for him because I found that every time we were in a difficult situation, he would take the difficult road. He wouldn’t give bribes… He didn’t know how to do it. I just couldn’t understand him, as a child, and when I compared him with other parents, who gave money to get things done, I wondered, ‘why can’t he just do it?’ I didn’t understand until very late in life that my father abhorred corruption,…