Author: NLM Correspondent

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,…

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…