Author: NLM Correspondent

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,…

By Leonard Wanyama Let me paint you a picture. Sometime in 2015, Kenyan Members of Parliament roundly rejected the nomination of Dr Monica Juma as the next Secretary to the Cabinet on malicious grounds. Dr Juma had, in her previous position as Principal Secretary in the Interior Department, strongly asserted herself, thereby blocking avenues for graft that were specifically perpetrated by Members of Parliament and other powerful forces. This was in the early days when the President Uhuru Kenyatta had first begun to express his frustration with corruption in his office, which resulted in the transfer of a number of…

By Shadrack Muyesu Revolutions take many forms. But generally they are the rapid transformations of the political and socio-economic climate of a state. The most accepted rationale behind revolutions can be drawn from the histories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Explaining the relationship between the societal base and its superstructure, they predicted the fall of the bourgeoisie state at the hands of an enlightened proletariat starved of wages due to advancement in the means of production. Revolutions of this nature would be spontaneous, requiring only the input and leadership of the starved workers keen on replacing the exploitative capitalist…

By Antony Mutunga Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has – Margaret Mead The year is 1848, the spring of Nations. A revolution like none before takes place in Central and Western Europe. Its cause? The people had grown tired of the endless degradation in the economy as well as the increasing cost of living that threatened their way of life. The revolution became a famous point in time as it revealed the power of a united people. In 1968, yet again a similar…

By Shadrack Muyesu Constitutions have been defined as political charters that define relationships between the governors and the governed. As such, constitutional amendments are nothing more than political concessions that evidence supervening political moods. The place of the Constitution, however, demands that they be sufficiently rigid so as to rid the right to amend of mala fides, as well as safeguard its certainty. The truth of this statement not only suggests an inherent imperfection of the Constitution, it also alludes to the existence of superior rules independent of or within the Constitution which constitutional amendments bona fide ought to adhere…

By Newton Arori In the September issue, readers were treated to an article with the incredulous headline “Unconstitutionality of the Constitution”. Now, the very notion of an unconstitutional constitution is slightly bizarre, more like saying that the Bible is unbiblical, but I will let it pass. In the article, the author, Shadrack Muyesu, puts forth arguments to support the idea that a constitution can be unconstitutional. It is those arguments that I take issue with. As we shall see, his case is superficially appealing but begins to break down upon closer examination. The aim of this article is to correct…

By Shadrack Muyesu Under the title “Why a constitution cannot be unconstitutional”, the October 2016 issue carried an antithesis of my “controversial” work, “Unconstitutionality of the Constitution”, that ran in the September 2016 edition. The author, Newton Arori, questioned the idea that there exist superior norms within and without the Constitution, against which constitutional amendments ought to be gauged for constitutionality. Citing an array of sources, Arori provided an alternative in the rationale that constitutional clauses were all complementary, with none being superior to the other. He also noted the absence of a constitutional forum within which the constitutionality of…