Author: NLM Correspondent

Prof. Paul Musili Wambua v John Katiku and 3 Others, civil suit no. 40 of 2015 On February 18, 2015, Professor Musili Wambua in Civil Suit No. 40 of 2015 moved to the High Court seeking orders to have the LSK Disciplinary Committee be barred from hearing a dispute in which his former partners at Wambua, Katiku and Musyoka advocates accused him of theft of the company funds and misrepresentation. He also sought temporary orders barring his former partners from transacting in any manner with the company funds pending hearing and determination of the substantive suit. Per the suit, to…

Ernest Garai The appetite for narcotics all over the globe seems to be insatiable, and it is growing every year. The visibility of Kenya’s involvement in a global trade system, estimated to be worth $352 billion (Sh35 trillion) annually, has increased both in participation and effect.  Risk acceptance and its evasion is perceived to be the main challenge for individuals associated with the trade, which has created an allure among those willing to play the high risk high reward game that is international drug trafficking. Popular discourse in Kenyan media and general social interaction tends to revolve around naming prominent…

John Ndar Immediately the results of last year’s controversial Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education examination were released last month, a series of interesting developments occurred. President Uhuru Kenyatta, in a terse statement from State House, announced that government had put special measures in place to end the problem of irregularities in national examinations, stating a special committee had been set up to do this. Days later, Deputy President William Ruto reiterated that cheating in national examinations would soon be relegated to the dustbin of history. To emphasize it, the DP outlined a one-month timeline within which the problem would presumably…

Dr charles khamala Karl Popper (1945) proposes that the Director of Public Prosecutions should articulate an annual prosecution policy. However, for the police bureaucracy to succeed in prosecuting the poor, Chambliss argues, they must covertly and selectively forgo investigating certain elite crimes. Unsurprisingly, our courts have only belatedly awoken to construe the 2003 Economic Crimes Act as shifting the burden of proof onto suspects to account for their unexplained assets. Furthermore, many crime victims are silenced. By conducting original interviews, Kippra attempts to rectify unreliability caused by the “dark figure” of unreported crime, which invariably distorts official statistics. In sum,…

Malice is the only thing one reads from the National Assembly’s amended Public Accounts Committee (PAC) Report on the special audit of Judicial Service Commission that required that six commissioners, including two judges and a magistrate, be investigated for financial impropriety. The report’s grave but hollow and unsupported recommendation making it to the cover of the local dailies is particularly telling. That report, together with amendments made on the floor of the House has far-reaching recommendations including that a Supreme Court judge, his Court of Appeal counterpart and a Chief Magistrate vacate their positions in the Judicial Service Commission (JSC)…

Shadrack Sharu Muyesu A century of pages later of what, according to me, was very thorough research work, all I did obtain in complement from my dissertation supervisor was the cold warning: “Thou shall not shall not loose heed of the centuries-old constitutional values in the quest to sound controversial… thou shall not sacrifice the old rules of law at the altar of innovation!” Yet even that couldn’t wipe the innocent glee of satisfaction off my face because all I heard was the shouting praise of novelty, albeit one delivered in such subtlety. Why? Because he had just confirmed everything…

Sunday Memba If the August House passes the Election Laws (Amendment) (No.3) Bill of 2015, (which is expected) it shall have done a dishonourable thing. It is an open secret that parliament is not made up of the best brains. Be that as it may, if Clause 23 of the Bill forms part of our law, it shall demonstrate that no modicum of common sense was even considered. But it is of no surprise as the Bill is introduced by one of them. Parliament enacted the Election Law Act no 24 of 2011 by virtue of Article 87(1) of the…

Newton Arori “…an election once held, is not to be treated in a light-hearted manner, and defeated candidates or disgruntled electors should not get away with it by filing election petitions on unsubstantial grounds and irresponsible evidence, thereby introducing serious elements of uncertainty on the verdict already tendered by the electorate. An election is a politically sacred public act, not of one person or of one official, but of the collective will of the whole constituency. Courts naturally must respect this public expression secretly written and show extreme reluctance to set aside or declare void an election which has already…

Tijan Jens Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump took monumental steps towards clinching the Democratic and Republican party tickets respectively, to battle it out for the most powerful seat in the globe in the November 8 presidential elections. Trump won in key states in the March 15 primaries such as Illinois, the home state of US President Barrack Obama, North Carolina and Florida – where he also floored home state Senator Marco Rubio, who immediately bolted out of the race. But for Trump, the victories gave him more grease to continue rolling the wheel ahead of the November polls. “This was…

Kenyatta Otieno Yoweri Kaguta Museveni recently won presidential elections in Uganda against former allies Dr Kiza Besigye and Amama Mbabazi. The social media was busy with both Ugandans and Kenyans doing their best to put their points across. Kenyans were laughing at Ugandans while Ugandans tried to make head or tail out of a choreographed election. Very few people expected Museveni to lose, but that did not take away the action. One of the attractions was the sexual imagery poetic prose by Makerere University Lecturer Dr Stella Nyanzi in support of Besigye. To borrow her line of thought, the unromantic…