Author: NLM Correspondent

By Kelly Malenya ‘Migrants and refugees are not pawns on the chessboard of humanity’- Pope Francis The Kenyan government has announced its intention to close the Daadab refugee camp by end of year.  The planned closure has elicited different reactions, but of concern is the applause the Kenyan state has received because of the very able reason the government has given – national security. The other reason – escalated costs by the state to maintain the refugees is a veiled justification, which only supplements the first reason. The calls to close the camps have been echoed by government more particularly…

By Sunday Memba For the advancement of the dictates of our nationalistic covenant, the JSC, under the Chief Justice, must act in a manner that actually proves their ethical mettle I am a man who reads. And a man who reads needs to keep reading. As the world literati gear up to celebrate Chinua Achebe, I made a solid decision to reread all his works. It deemed proper for me to start with his masterpiece, Things Fall Apart. I am tempted to paraphrase Unoka – Okonkwo’s impecunious and improvident father – and yet I purpose to discuss him some other…

By Kelvin Njuguna The ruling coalition must by now have lost count of accusations that have been levelled against it; they range from runaway corruption to their atrocious penchant to disregard the rule of law, as well as abject failure in most aspects of their leadership, among others. Opinion polls – the issues of their financing and motive aside – have not offered much consolation. Studies have repeatedly painted a bleak picture of the state with most Kenyans polled feeling that the country is headed in the wrong direction. It cannot be gainsaid that the Jubilee government faces massive shortcomings;…

By Edward Odhiambo Okello One of the fundamental developments in the history of post-independence Kenya was the adoption of the Constitution in August 2010. The Constitution, which was a product of a protracted and negotiated process, created the Second Republic thus leaving an indelible mark in the country’s history. It has not only radically transformed the governance structure and relations, but also provided impetus for crystallisation of good governance in the country. The unanimity among the governance practitioners and scholars on the value of the supreme law was that it restored a sense of pride and social re-engineering in accordance…

By Enock Wabwoba In the recent past, we have been treated to assertions, especially from the Opposition, Cord, that sovereignty belongs to the people and therefore the action of physically storming the IEBC offices with intention to eject the IEBC commissioners from their office is part of the exercise of the people’s sovereignty. It is against this background that I write this. It is true that sovereignty in our Republic belongs to the people, and can be exercised directly by the people or indirectly through elected representatives. That sovereignty of the people as was pointed out by Justice Ringera in…

By Kibe Mungai As solemnly stated in the Preamble, the ultimate purpose of enacting the Constitution of Kenya, 2010, was to achieve the “aspirations of all Kenyans, for a government based on the essential values of human rights, equality, freedom, democracy, social justice and the rule of law”. To ensure that the achievement of this collective aspiration would not turn into a false prospectus as it happened with the Independence Constitution, the latter document provides for ten key safeguards and obligations of key state officials. One, Article 1 of the Constitution codifies the revolutionary notion of people’s sovereignty, which may…

By Shadrack Muyesu Having started out on the same platform, we suddenly find ourselves more than fifty years behind the East. Pointedly, our mercantilist policies are to blame, with the biggest symptom being the land problem. As a young nation, we distinguished ourselves as capitalists, but only in theory. Far beyond subscribing to market ideals, the independence government sought to nationalise and regulate state resources, and when it had to distribute them, it did so only to a few “government-friendly” individuals. Recovered crown land was, for instance, shared out to a handful of Kikuyu henchmen who never developed it, leaving…

By TNLM Writer In January this year Bob Collymore committed a mortal corporate sin: he hijacked a business sector working document and presented it at State House as his own and then proceeded to make himself the de facto leader of an anti-corruption crusade that sought to cast other CEO’s as weak and less transparent in the war on corruption and that he was the only one who could be trusted to offer leadership in this area from the private sector. Mortal sin because the private sector response to the broader problem of corruption had been developed over many months…

By TNLM Team A rather innocuous debate took place in the United Kingdom recently.  It was a protest by members of the British Parliament against the use of British aid money going to finance elitist projects in poor countries as opposed to the money targeting the very poor in these poor Third World countries. The organisation at the centre of the controversy was Actis, which is the beneficiary of British aid money through CDC. The debate followed a serialisation by leading British media of Actis investments in various parts of the world that showed that Actis was only investing in…

Dr Charles Khamala Huruma’s six-storey building was a corruption-infested construction engineered to collapse. It killed at least 49 people and seriously injured many others. Frantic 175-hour operations deployed the National Youth Service, Red Cross and military with sniffer dogs to rescue more than 140 victims. Crowds witnessed numerous power tools, two excavator vehicles and even bare hands yanking agonising bodies and crushed corpses from beneath massive concrete rubble. What distinguishes this disaster from Kenya’s previous building tragedies is a heavy downpour. Moreover, its sheer magnitude sent catastrophic pictures splashing over global airwaves. Reportedly, demolition of its 198 dwelling rooms was…