Author: NLM Correspondent

Kenya Power has announced plans to start importing cheaper, clean and reliable electricity from Ethiopia, saying the move will help it reduce cost of electricity as well as accelerate its goal of connecting over 1.5 million Kenyans to the national grid by 2020. “We are in plans to commence importation of cheaper and clean energy from our neighboring Ethiopia to boost the manufacturing sector and connect more Kenyans to the national grid,” said Eng. Mungai, General Manager and Business Strategy of Kenya Power. Kenya Association of Manufacturers has lauded the move saying cheap, reliable energy will lure more foreign and…

By Leonard Wanyama For all the youth, women and constituency development funds allocated over the course of recent years, Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) have performed dismally as an agency of sustainable development in Kenya. Competition from cheap imports and high costs – be they of energy or other kinds – have contributed to making success difficult for many small businesses in the country. Indeed, despite the fact that there is relative ease in the registration or starting of entrepreneurial exploits, it seems the environment makes it very difficult to maintain operations in the provision of goods and services…

By Olukoye Michael “The power of the lawyer is in the uncertainty of the law” – Jeremy Bentham As per the Sexual Offences Act (herein the Act), Kenya, rape is termed to have been committed when a person, intentionally and unlawfully commits, an act that causes penetration with his or her genital organs. Such penetration has to have been obtained under duress or lack of consent thereof. Thus the actus reus is non-consensual penetration. In most cases, the victim is female. However, this paper seeks to interrogate whether, in the case where the victim is male and the perpetrator female,…

By Ali Abdi The extension of psychology to a broader array of legal issues is inevitable. Law and psychology occupy a special place in the “law and” pantheon. That is, psychology and law share a common purpose: both constitute efforts to predict and control human behaviour. Law, on the one hand, has historically relied on ad hoc accounts of human behaviour that are motivated by ideology, anecdote, and historical accident. Psychology, on the other, offers an empirical, scientific source for theories of human behaviour. So far, we have only begun to see how the scientific study of human behaviour is…

By Kelvin Njuguna Mugwe Desperate times call for desperate measures, so the saying goes. The honchos of the ruling coalition ascended into power exceptionally desperate to win over residents of the Coast region of Kenya. This was after they received lukewarm support from the residents of the region in the 2013 elections. The UhuRuto partnership had been derided by the opposition throughout the campaign period for being the reason the region is engulfed by numerous land problems. Much to the chagrin of the President Uhuru Kenyatta, the Coalition for Reforms and Democracy (Cord), skilfully advanced the notion that the land…

BY CHRISPINE AGUKO Do you ever wonder why those gangs that control parking slots in Nairobi’s CBD never get arrested? Well, that is because Nairobi City County officers  are in on it. Rogue county officials work in cahoots with parking gangs to collect extra fee on cars all over the city, but particularly within the CBD. The often-given excuse used to extort motorists is that the parking boys have to fend off vandals. And the business has become more lucrative with the increasing number of cars on the roads today ‒ it is never easy finding a parking slot, particularly…

Daniel Benson Kaaya “Some people make a claim that I will paraphrase as follows: ‘…a lot of votes could affect an election. Therefore, it is important that you vote, because the votes add up. Because a lot of votes matter, each individual vote matters.’  This argument is an example of the fallacy of division. This fallacy is committed when one asserts that what is true of a whole must also be true of a part of that whole” – Mark Brandly, Professor of Economics The right to vote is the foundation of any constitutional democracy. The respect and observance of…

By Kenyatta Otieno I grew up in the former Western Province. I first learned the Idakho dialect in Ikolomani then Tiriki in Kaimosi and Maragoli during my time in high school. Later, in my quest to understand Luhyas, I realised that they might not be a tribe after all. This was after travelling to Kakamega as an adult and listening to West FM broadcast their breakfast show in Kiswahili. At a deeper level, the languages of the eighteen sub tribes have similarities even where its members may not understand each other. Last year, Cotu Secretary General Francis Atwoli came up…

Shadrack Muyesu International Humanitarian Law was supposed to inject much needed morality into the element of war. But, on the evidence of matters, IHL has so far failed in this quest. Why? Some blame the text in IHL instruments, some the lack of goodwill in implementing otherwise decent laws, and yet others the insensitivity of humanitarian law to emerging realities. But who is right? The IHL regime is complex, hazy and no doubt backward in light of everyday innovation. However, erroneous interpretation and application of IHL as it is presents a far greater stumbling block in the clamour for moral…

BALBINA, a woman from Mombasa, Kenya’s main coastal city, remembers fetching her neighbour Abdullah’s body from a police station. “It wasn’t so terrible,” says Balbina (not her real name). Surprisingly, “there was not even any blood.” The wound was hidden at the back of his head; his face was serene. He was killed by police, in what they claimed (but she does not believe) was a shoot-out. “Abdullah did wrong. He went to Somalia, maybe he killed innocent people.” But he deserved justice, she says, not to be shot in the back of the head without a trial. Such stories…