Author: NLM Correspondent

On May 17, the Daily Nation and its sister publication the Business Daily dared Safaricom and printed twin stories highlighting findings of a KPMG audit which has revealed massive corruption deals at Safaricom. Safaricom promptly punished the NMG by withdrawing all media spend to all its outlets! It is the longest, and the only one of its kind, supervised gagging practice in Kenya.  Even the Presidency does not invite such fear in editorial rooms. But NMG has defied this prohibition and in hard-hitting pieces decided that “the Truth” will always eventually work in its favour by maintaining the credibility of…

All is not well with the Sh14.5 billion police security communication system that was single-sourced to Safaricom. Government officials have all dissociated themselves from the contract fearing the legacy issues that may follow. First, the barter trade that was originally touted as the payment method has been quickly abandoned by the National Treasury. Government financial regulations do not permit off balance sheet transactions. As originally crafted, Safaricom had proposed to finance the rollout of the system whose cost was to be repaid by offsetting against the 4-G frequency spectrum fees, which Safaricom would have been due to pay in future.…

By Jesse Kisenya The telecommunications industry in Kenya has been on a growth spurt and has expanded admirably in a short span. According to the latest regulatory data, Kenya’s mobile phone subscription now stands at 37 million, translating into a mobile penetration level of over 87 per cent. This growth is driven by the players’ need to continue growing market shares, thereby promoting products geared towards luring and retaining subscribers to their networks. Players are investing heavily in technology to promote and facilitate innovation. Each operator looks to capture shares from the other through aggressive promotions and new value-added propositions,…

Tens of thousands of people in western South Sudan have been forced to flee killings, gang-rape, torture and other abuses by government soldiers, leaving entire neighbourhoods empty, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said last month. It said South Sudanese soldiers were “getting away with murder” and called for government to halt abuses and support creation of a war crimes court to investigate and prosecute. Attacks on Fertit civilians in and around the town of Wau in the Western Bahr el Ghazal region surged in December following a deployment of soldiers from the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) to the region, HRW…

Prof. John Harbeson Kenya recent renewed commitment to shut down its Dadaab and Kakuma refugee camps deepens the impoverishment and puts at risk the survival of more than four hundred thousand refugees from Somalia and other eastern African states. On its face, the Kenya policy violates global and African Union refugee protection conventions, to both of which Kenya is a signatory, along with almost all sub-Saharan African countries. At a deeper level, in further shredding the fundamental bonds that enable peoples to acquiesce in being governed together as one community, violations of these conventions threaten to deepen and enlarge at…

Cord protests, renowned political analyst Mutahi Ngunyi believes, have nothing to do with the incompetence of the IEBC. According to him, they are simply part of a wider scheme to discredit all arbitrating institutions as we approach elections so as to legitimise mass action and guarantee a stake in the next government should Raila lose. As far as Ngunyi’s politics goes, far from the widely perceived position that Raila wanted UhuRuto jailed at The Hague, his desire was to actually see them freed as this would allow him to sell his own version of the “ICC is compromised” narrative by…

By Victor Adar Bringing services closer to people is a phenomenon currently sweeping across many arms of government. Law Society of Kenya (LSK) too is in the mix, bringing to light the need to accelerate growth of its members if the inauguration of LSK Council positions in March is anything to go by. It established a branch that is intended to become the first point of reference for advocates in Nairobi and Thika, to deal mainly with matters of welfare and practice, litigation, Alternative Dispute Resolution “in-house”, and legal academia. Aside from seven others, the Nairobi Branch is the 8th…

Kenyatta Otieno Once upon a chilly morning at the Upper Kabete Campus of the University of Nairobi’s College of Arrogant and Violent Students, students gathered for a Kamkunji. The agenda was to eject Professor Mukunya as the Principal. The erratic but conniving professor literary ran for dear life upon confronting the students and his office was locked. To make sure he did not come back, students picked the Dean Faculty of Agriculture, a diligent man of few words, and appointed him the new Principal. Then Vice Chancellor Prof. Chrispus Kiamba was called in to witness the change of guard pending…

By Kevin Motaroki Kenya’s economy accounts for close to 43 per cent of East Africa’s Gross Domestic Product. This is about as much as Tanzania and Uganda combined, which make about 27 and 20 respectively. Rwanda accounts for eight per cent and Burundi two. When analysts cast Kenya as a regional powerhouse, therefore, it is not without basis. Last year, National Treasury CS Henry Rotich presented a Sh2 trillion budget for the 2015/2016 financial year. Nairobi, Kenya’s most important county, and the nucleus of the country’s economy, was allocated Sh12.7 billion in the current financial year. The county has also…

By Prof. John Harbeson That post-Cold War democratisation has peaked in Africa since about 2005 and has been stalled or even retreating in the succeeding decade has been observed so frequently that one may reasonably ask if partial democracy is now the new normal in the region and perhaps elsewhere as well.  For example, a recent essay in an influential US publication suggested that democracy only needs to be “good enough,” implying that the aspiration to full democracy prevalent not so long ago has become unrealistic, if indeed if it was ever realistically unattainable. Perhaps for that reason, studies of…