Author: NLM Correspondent

By Bephine Ogutu Last month, pictures of a young boy sitting on the ground bleeding, about to be lynched, went viral on social media. Most people couldn’t stand the sight of the pictures, which were extremely graphic. For those who had the guts to watch the video, it was beyond painful; it was traumatising. The boy was only 10. Mob justice is a brutal part life in Kenya and elsewhere. Administration of instant justice to suspects and accused persons is an “accepted” way of fighting crime in Kenya. But the question is, how do you stop crime in a community…

By Francis Monyango It is not a secret that technology has disrupted the media industry. In the past few years, media houses have downscaled operations, leading to loss of jobs. As well, media houses have changed their approach and joined the muddled battle for clicks. Every media organisation now has a news site even though the quality of news that they post leaves a lot to be desired. In this new age, media houses do not just compete amongst themselves but also against blogs for traffic. As they say, all is fair in love and war. In this online war,…

By Timothy Machasio Kenyans were treated to a shock recently when the Cabinet Secretary for Education released results for the 2016 Kenyan Certificate of Secondary Education (K.C.S.E) examinations. The reason? In addition to the fact that they came a mere six weeks after the conclusion of the examinations, the results were probably the worst recorded in the history of 8-4-4 (Kenya’s education system encompassing 8 years of primary school, 4 years of high school and 4 years of university). Only about 15 % of the country’s candidature obtained a mean score of C+ and above, and only 141 students out…

By Tom Odhiambo Memoirs always offer the illusion of telling the reader the “private” end of the narrator’s life. In many cases, the writer assumes that the reader knows a bit of the “public” end of the story. It is this private, secret, as-yet-to-be-known aspect of the memoir that makes people buy such books. Otherwise, why would anyone be interested in someone else’s story, especially if that person has been or was a very “public” figure? The illusion of getting to know what hasn’t been known before leads one to read what essentially can be a very ordinary story to…

By Lanji Ouko Dear Mheshimiwa, I do hope this finds you well. The weather is great in Nairobi, and so are we. All is well. Just busy planning our Christmas festivities despite being unemployed. My neighbour, too, is great, since you last checked on the wananchi via Skype. Busy too. You know how it gets, planning Christmas alongside a burial. Her loved one passed away last week, at Kenyatta National Hospital. We do hope he rests in peace. Mheshimiwa, it brings me great joy to hear about the doctors on holiday. Forgive my lack of exposure but I had a…

By Jane Wachira The effects of the 1945 Hiroshima-Nagasaki atomic bombings are felt to date. Studies show that incidences of Leukaemia among survivors increased noticeably five to six years after the bombs were dropped. About a decade later, survivors began suffering from thyroid, breast, lung and other cancers at higher-than-normal rates. Indeed the rise in cancer patients and types of cancer has become alarming over the years, not only in Asia where the bomb was dropped, but in Africa as well. Could this be attributed to the 1945 bombings? Present life is always reflecting outcomes of historical happenings; a political…

By Khalid Khalid    What motivates the elected representative to steal? The frequency with which this question has been asked has given it rhetorical semblance. However, if examined carefully – and juxtaposed with the facts at hand – it leads not only to an answer but also to a plausible justification. Leaders are born and raised in culture, by people and a surrounding environment. The culture at the centre of this piece is the Kenyan culture. At every level of leadership we have leaders and those leaders have peers. The majority of Kenyans have the habit of being in haste, of…

By Nadrat Mazrui The recent decision by the UK to leave the European Union has led other countries in the block to rethink their membership. There have been recent whispers about a Dutch exit, and frenzied talk that Italy could follow the lead of the UK. Far-right parties are said to want to capitalise on the momentum of the referendum victory on December 1, 2016, to call for Italy’s exit from the Eurozone in coming months. “The Euro and Europe are not the same thing. We only want for Italians to decide on the currency,” Alessandro Di Battista, a party leader in…

By George Marenya I was at a friend’s house when his sister said she liked Donald Trump because he is kichwa ngumu (stubborn). That got me thinking. If this woman, thousands of miles away in Nairobi’s Greenspan, was so enamoured of Trump, for no apparent reason at all, how many more of her lot existed out there? More so, how many of such women (and men) were American voters? So it came to pass that when results were finally in, Trump had triumphed, after all. Where had the Clinton machine gone wrong? What was her strategy? Did it backfire? Was…

Dr Charles Khamala Issa Shivji (2009) recalls how “European renaissance marked the beginning of the dis-membering of Africa; her body and soul were torn apart as her resources were raped and her beauty disfigured”. He laments how “Four centuries of slave trade dis-membered mother Africa into the continent and diaspora, as a century of colonialism dis-membered it into, what Mwalimu (Julius Nyerere) called, vi-nchi (statelets).” In Re-membering Africa (2009), perennial Nobel Prize in Literature nominee Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, captures an important intellectual moment in the long struggle of African people to re-claim and recover our collective memory. He argues first,…