Author: NLM Correspondent

By Mohamed Dakane Donald L. Horowitz defines ethnicity as a kind of group identification, a sense of belonging to a people, usually experienced as a greatly extended form of kinship. Negative ethnicity, on the other hand, is the use of ethnic affiliation as a basis to amass wealth and resources, as well as to gain political and social supremacy to the exclusion of other under-privileged ethnic communities. This never-ending vice has made Africa the laughing stock of many, and earned it the description “epicentre of war and crucible for gross human rights violations”.  This unfortunate reality peaked when Rwanda degenerated…

By John Harbeson Democratisation in African countries, including Kenya, has appeared to reach a plateau.  The plateau appears unstable to many observers because visible indications of actual democratic reversal have seemed more numerous than less visible continuing efforts that many are continuing to make to advance the democratic cause. The major unanswered questions about this apparent democratisation plateau have been and continue to be what accounts for its clear emergence and what can be done about it. Answers to the latter question may lie in encouraging academics as well as country policy makers and aid agencies to think about democracy…

When the ideal of media freedom is discussed, it is usually in the sense of tolerance for divergent opinion and ideas as a key aspect to democracy. This primacy of this concept today is derived from the fact that we live in the age of the Internet, where social media enables ordinary persons to add their voices to those of formal media. But the dream that the information age would bring greater enlightenment and compel better accountability is turning out to be just that; a dream. Government is haunted by an aggressive media. For as long as anyone can remember,…

The Reverend Timothy Njoya, one of the architects of the Saba Saba movement, has recently coined a very articulate metaphor to describe the political situation that we are witnessing today. “The lion and the leopard are not as clever as the hyena. When a lion kills a zebra, a pack of hyenas will come to the scene of the kill; they will tease and pester the lion to chase one of the hyenas and in doing so leaving the killed zebra unattended. The hyena may not be as strong as the lion or leopard, but it is much cleverer.” The…

By Content Production Media You were elected as the new Public Accounts Committee (PAC) chairman in April this year. There are other committees that you would have gone for. Ambition aside, why did you go for PAC specifically? Chief among my reasons are the circumstances that led to the dissolution of the former PAC and the potential of negativity impacting on MPs’ work, combined with the stereotyping of MPs as people driven by self-interest. The actions of some members of the former PAC went against the tenets of public service. I want to demonstrate that the leadership of the committee…

By Content Production Media In February of 2005, you resigned as the Permanent Secretary in charge of Governance and Ethics and left for the UK. At that time, you said that whereas the government was preaching to the public how it was fighting corruption, the situation was actually getting worse. A day or two after US President Barrack Obama recently left the country; you said that corruption in the country is spiralling out of control. We are losing the fight, aren’t we? Yes. My comment was that corruption is worse now than it has ever been. The recent report by…

By Content Production Media You have written extensively on culture, entrepreneurship, youth and technology in your newspaper articles and blog posts. These fields appear to be so far apart… Those fields are all inter-related. I have written extensively on culture, linking it to economic growth and I have looked at the theories of economic growth from the 18th century. In most cases, what they said is that, in addition to industrialisation, culture was vital. Technology played a key role in changing the culture of people of the Western World into what they are today. And even if you look at…

Last month, the World Bank announced that this year, for the first time on record, the percentage of the earth’s population that is living in extreme poverty is likely to fall below ten per cent. As recently as 1990, the proportion was more than a third. “This is the best story in the world today—these projections show us that we are the first generation in human history that can end extreme poverty,’’ Jim Yong Kim, the head of the World Bank, said in a statement accompanying the release of the new figures. The transformation certainly is remarkable. Twenty-five years ago,…

By Jaafar S. Abdulkadir Islamic financial services operate on well-defined principles that seek to combine the goals of economic efficiency and social justices at all times. These principles include the prohibition of interest in transactions, the sanctity of contracts, investments in permissible ventures only and the restrictions of excessive risk-taking behaviour and speculative conduct that is driven by greed and blatant disregard for ethics. The application of these principles in the Islamic Finance industry is hinged on many factors that include the quality of governance and the robustness of the information technology infrastructure and systems. Information and communication technology has…

By Paul Otieno Onyango I wish to start this reflection by citing part of the interview done by Jeff Koinange in his Thursday programme of The State of the Nation in JKL aired on KTN, in which he interviewed the emblematic PLO Lumumba and Barack Muluka. Jeff to Barack: When you see a headline saying (that) already 2017 is a two-horse race, I mean (are) they just selling (News) Papers, or is that the feeling on the ground? Barrack: I think the media should also refrain from limiting the choices of the nation… Sometimes as a journalist and trainer of…