The indignation demonstrated by some politicians, Cabinet Secretaries and busy bodies in the Kenya Kwanza administration about the admonition they received from Catholic bishops this week sadly demonstrates growing intolerance to alternative views. Governance, they have forgotten, is not about acknowledging only cheerleaders and ‘Yes’ men who do not have the guts to tell the political elite what it needs to hear; it is about cultivating the grace to receive, accept and act on feedback, even when it is delivered in unflattering terms. That is why it is important to remind those in positions of authority, who are now bristling…
Author: Mbugua Ng’ang’a
Celebrated lawyer and judge Lee Gacuiga Muthoga has become the latest legal practitioner to release his memoir, Audacity And Sacrifice: My Life & Career. Published by Writers Guild Kenya in November, the book traces his life from his humble beginnings as a child growing up in a rural setting to becoming one of the judges in the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (UN-ICTE) and later the United Nations Residual Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals (UN-MICT). “In this book, Lee enables us to see the embryonic days of his life and the twists and turns, beginning from under a…
Yesterday was a big day for the US, with more than 161.4 million voters casting their ballots in what promised to be a watershed moment for democracy globally. America represents a classic case of what French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss described as “the raw and the cooked.” Through this theory, he sought to demonstrate how humanity struggles to strike a balance between its dualities: the good and the bad, the just and the unjust, the true and the fake, the elected and the appointed, the real and the contrived, and other such dichotomies that characterize human societies. America found itself at…
Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party candidate, and Donald Trump of the Republican party remained neck and neck as the clock ticked towards the November 5 election date, with analysts predicting that the election will come down to razor-thin margins in a few key swing states. According to FiveThirtyEight’s daily election poll tracker, Harris, 59, held a narrow lead in the national polls, with a 1.4 percentage point advantage with about a week to the polls. This was a slight dip from the previous week when she was ahead by 1.7 percentage points. Seven key swing states were tipped to decide…
Just this week, traders in Eastleigh closed their businesses — a very rare occurrence — to protest the killing of a mother, her daughter and a niece. To understand what the protest means for the economy, Eastleigh contributes 60 per cent of all M-Pesa revenues in Nairobi and five per cent of the platform’s transactions nationally. For context, 59 per cent of Kenya’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) flows through M-Pesa, so one can calculate how big a role Eastleigh contributes to wealth creation. So, when businesses in that neighbourhood are shuttered for their owners to take part in peaceful protests,…
In recent weeks, the citizens of Kenya have been treated to a new trend of conducting government business in the middle of the night, which is one of the political aberrations that the 2010 Constitution sought cure but which has now been normalised by the National Assembly and the Senate. It started with the Speaker of the National Assembly, Mr Moses Wetang’ula, who on the night that the National Assembly impeached Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua published a Kenya Gazette past midnight to announce the outcome of the controversial vote. That notice later became part of the documents that the Senate…
South Korean author Han Kang, 53, has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 2024 “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.” The accolade makes her the first Asian female Nobel laureate and the second Korean to win a Nobel prize. According to the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, Mr Mats Malm, Han Kang’s works confront historical traumas and invisible sets of rules, and, in each, she exposes the fragility of human life. “She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead,…
Safaricom stands to be the biggest loser should the Government implement the controversial proposal to turn till and paybill numbers into electronic tax registers. The two platforms, hailed as ground-breaking innovations when they were first unveiled, have attracted hundreds of thousands of core users — mostly small businesses — by offering them an alternative to cash payments. Both are convenient and easy to use and eliminate the risk of theft and fraud, which were rife when businesses were only accepting cash payments. Because they offered a solution that the market badly needed, the uptake was quick and this, in turn,…
During the recently concluded Nairobi International Book Fair, a reader of the political mood pointed out that Kenya is more polarised today than it was in 2007. Surprising as that observation was, it quickly gained traction among those present. This, for those of us who watch the goings on in the political and public affairs arena, provides instant food for thought given the impending impeachment of Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua. All indications are that MPs will vote in favour of the Motion and there is little that the Deputy President or his lawyers can do or say in his defense…
One must have a heart of stone not to be moved by the suffering that hundreds of thousands of ailing Kenyans — particularly the poor and the elderly — are having to endure due to failure by the new health system to ensure they get timely treatment. The whole point of changing, reforming or tweaking with public programmes, such as the National Health Insurance Fund (NHIF), is to make provision of health services seamless. What has happened, instead, is that Kenyans in dire need of urgent health services have been subjected to regrettable pain because the Government appears to be…