Author: NLM Correspondent

By Kevin Motaroki The surest sign that there is something fundamentally wrong with the path the country is taking is if its people are overwhelmingly pessimistic about their odds. Odds of landing a job, of eating a decent meal, of getting their children a proper education, of buying gods and services at reasonable prices. An Infotrak survey in June showed at least 48 percent of Kenyans feel the country is on the wrong trajectory. It is gloomy news in almost every way. Kenya’s official unemployment rate stands at 12.2 percent as of 2018; some sources quote higher figures. Out of…

By Alexander Opicho Conventional history on nationalism and the struggle for freedom from colonialists and a series of post-colonial brutalities in East Africa does nothing else but worship men as the freedom fighters. And they are, but that is not the end of that conversation. It is also a historical skewing of facts. Patriarchal heroism has means the history of East African politics has been written by circumlocution around male hero-worship. The truth is women fought, women have been fighting and women are fighting for freedom from social and political oppression in East Africa. Silence about them is a disservice…

By NLM Writer Deputy President William Ruto’s frequent ‘Tangatanga’ tours across the country give the chance to meet voters whose votes he will be seeking in 2022. His staff and army of bloggers in his office call the travels all sorts of names including ‘#MashinaniEmpowerment’, and the people who attend the political rallies disguised as development initiatives, the ‘Hustler Nation’. But these almost daily countrywide rallies come with a cost to the taxpayer. As of June 22, 2019, reports put the number of tours made by the deputy president at a record of 300 in just 18 months since the…

By Boniface Mwangi For seven years, President Uhuru Kenyatta led Kenya with his head buried in the sand as looting went on all around him. He gave repetitive speeches, issued empty threats, launched a website to report corruption and then deleted it, talked tough on social media about fighting corruption and then deleted all his accounts. He promised lifestyle audits and polygraph tests that were never implemented. We got used to his ‘all bark with no bite’ routine. This week, however, someone was bitten, someone so powerful that, had it not been July 22, we would have thought it was…

Kiir bans singing the anthem in his absence South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir has banned anyone from singing the national anthem unless he is present, a minister said last month. Information Minister Michael Makuei said different leaders and institutions were playing the anthem “at whim”, which was an abuse of the national tune, according to the Presidency. “We are seeing now even a minister, undersecretary, even governor or state minister, whenever there is a function the national anthem is sung. For the information of everybody, the national anthem is only meant for the president, in a function only attended by…

The Germany Africa Business Forum (GABF) announced last month it has, in collaboration with private partners from the energy industry, launched a multi-million Euro funding commitment to invest in German energy startups that focus on Africa. The funding commitment, which pledges funds to German startups with exposure to African energy projects, will be the first such intra-regional initiative. “Our initial goal is to support the investment in German companies and to start with funding allocations by the end of this year”, said Sebastian Wagner, co-founder of the GABF. “Through our partners, we will immediately get involved in investing in solutions-driven…

By SGI Oriaro Dr Ekuru Aukot has been a reputable legal scholar and teacher. I personally will forever be grateful to him and others who served in the Committee of Experts that saw through the Constitution of Kenya, 2010. Sadly, I find the Ekuru Aukot of Third Way Alliance pretty different. We lost him. It may not shock Kenyans that a person who has read widely on democracy and the rule of law testified to the Supreme Court that it is constitutional for elections not to be held in 25 of 290 constituencies, a departure from what the constitution that…

By Prof John Harbeson Ethiopia and Kenya remain among the world’s more fragile states according to the 2019 Fragile States Index produced annually by the Washington-based Fund for Peace. They rank 16th and 17th, respectively, among sub-Saharan African countries and 23rd and 25th among the 174 states in the survey, even though they were the 1st and 2nd most improved countries in the world in the 2019 survey. At the same time, though their specific circumstances differ quite dramatically, they are two of the few countries that have been currently contemplating changing their constitutional political systems. Though nominally one of…

Reflecting on socio-politics worldwide, Prof Francis Fukuyama’s conclusion in ‘The End of History and the Last Man’ holds that the strongest democracies are those with fewest social differences (read, the fewest tribes). There are always going to be biases, but where they are harder to identify, politics becomes a little bit more sophisticated. It’s no longer a choice between “our people and their people” but rather, a question of “who amongst our people is better”. It is the reason western and Arab nations manifest a stronger sense of nationalism compared to say, sub-Saharan Africa. The richer the people are, the…

The Judiciary occupies a hallowed place in any system of laws. As the final arbiters, courts are not only tasked with guiding the country through process but they must also stand out as fierce custodians of rights. It’s an important mandate they can never hope to discharge if they are timid and uninspiring. Nor can they if, acting in concert with other organs and on account of political correctness, they breach the very principles they are sworn to protect. To borrow the celebrated words of Justice Brandeis in ‘Olmstead et al v United States’, in a government of laws, the…