Author: NLM Correspondent

The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is a unique and timely opportunity for the continent and offers more benefits than other trading arrangements with regions outside the continent, says Andrew Mold, Acting Director of UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) in Eastern Africa. Mold indicated that the AfCFTA marks a fundamental step towards dismantling barriers and reducing costs to intra-African trade, boost industrialization, improve productivity and competitiveness of Africa for the creation of the much-needed jobs on the continent. He was speaking in a two-day conference discussing the Industrial Policy of Rwanda for the Next Decade, a meeting organized…

Official development assistance, defined as grants or concessional loans provided for the purpose of development, is in scarce supply. Donors are naturally concerned with how to allocate aid resources most effectively. Economics has much to say about how to allocate scarce resources, but there is surprisingly little use of economics, as opposed to politics and international relationships, in practical aid allocation models – research shows that aid allocation models have found political factors, such as voting alignment at the United Nations, colonial history, and even membership on the Executive Board of Directors of multilateral funds, to be significant An early…

By Ahmednasir Abdullahi, SC Reading history, there are only a few times when leaders have been received with such relish and optimism as when Kenyans welcomed the Kibaki presidency. After 27 years of a stagnant economy, an over-reliance on Western donor support, rampant corruption, land grabbing, general impunity and a limited political space, anyone else other than Moi was always going to be good. Hours into the Kibaki presidency, citizens were arresting bribe munching police officers and presenting them to court. Kibaki followed cue and set up two commissions to investigate the rot – the Ndung’u Commission, to deal with…

Ugandan pop star-turned-MP Bobi Wine last month returned home after receiving medical treatment in the US for injuries he suffered in custody. Wine – real name Robert Kyagulanyi – who was charged with treason following campaign violence during an election in August, has warned that democracy in Uganda is on a dangerous backslide and said he had come back to fight, telling a BBC reporter, Fergal Kane, who received him at the airport, he would get “freedom or die trying.” Wine’s political significance spills outside his Ugandan homeland, as he represents a class of emerging youthful change-movers all over Africa.…

By NLM Writer T here are about two hundred judges and less than four hundred magistrates serving some forty four million Kenyans. The result of this is a crippling backlog of cases which has seen some matters stand in abeyance for decades. Corruption has also grown increasingly rampant with many litigants willing to do anything that will fast-track their cases. The Innovating Justice Awards To alleviate the crisis, the Hague Institute for Innovation of Law (HiiL)  has partnered with local companies, tech-preneurs, innovators and the Judiciary with a view of finding the next big idea that will enhance access to…

South Africa’s National Council of Provinces (NCOP) has come up with an exciting way of serving the masses. Themed “impact of migration – deepening cooperative governance for accelerated service delivery and development,” the programme is promising to capture the interest of the people of Gauteng province. According to the council’s chairperson, Thandi Modise, the programme will from time to time enable the people to engage one another on all issues thereby broadening public participation by communities that would ordinarily find it very difficult to have access to Parliament. Modise added that the NCOP may even make rules and orders concerning…

By NLM writer The inaugural Intra-African Trade Fair (IATF) will take place from the 11th to 17th December 2018 in Cairo, Egypt. The 7 day trade show will provide a platform for sharing trade, investment and marketing information and pooling buyers and sellers, investors and countries to meet, discuss and conclude business deals. This was reached at on 13th September 2018 at the Intercontinental Hotel in Nairobi during a business engagement that brought together IATF, the Export Promotion Council of Kenya (EPC) and the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank). Whose highlight was a discussion panel that featured Mr Kiprono Kittony, Chairman…

The legal arena is not saturated and neither is it narrowing, but lawyers challenged be prepared for a dramatically changing legal landscape. The Mount Kenya University Parklands Law Campus has been fully accredited by the Council for Legal Education (CLE). The university was accredited on 30 July and celebrated this milestone with a luncheon in mid-August. The luncheon at a city hotel featured well-known legal minds as speakers. These orators posed all manner of questions to fellow lawyers and universities that train them. The gist of their presentations was that opportunities to practice law abound and have not been fully…

By Joel Okwemba The pride of a people is judged by the level of diplomacy held by the state. In the recent past, there have been efforts by Kenya to secure important positions and promote certain agenda at the multi-lateral level – the African Union and the United Nations. A notable success however was that Kenya co-chaired and led the negotiation process that culminated to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals passed in September 2015. A pending and looming challenge is to secure the Non-Permanent Membership to the United Nation Security Council (2021-2022) as expressed by the Cabinet Secretary in…

Contracts are an important part of our lives. We need to sign them if we want to have a job, a place to live, medical services, insurance, a bank account, a loan, or to send our children to school. The list goes on. But, contracts always seem to be documents “written by lawyers for lawyers”. They are dense, complex and hard to read even if you’re very literate; and are largely impenetrable if you have low literacy skills. In addition, contracts are usually available only in English, a language spoken as a first language by only a minority people. How…