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…
Author: Mbugua Ng’ang’a
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…
Whereas the Government — through its disciplined services — enjoys the legal monopoly to unleash violence, and whereas it has a duty to compel compliance using these instruments of violence, it has no justification whatsoever to unleash mindless violence against its citizens. The officers authorised by law to carry — and deploy — arms derive the legitimacy to be called disciplined services from a mindful and measured application of these instruments. When they deviate from this established norm, they lose that legitimacy and ought to be called rogues. Sadly, that is the space that the police service finds itself in.…
The ‘Murima’ region has literally and figuratively become the rocky mountain of Kenyan politics, and at the epicentre of it is Deputy President Rigathy Gachagua, the self-style “truthful men” who finds himself caught between a rock and a hard place. The first strand of this rocky relationship between the Mountain and the Centre started soon after the 2022 election, when the Deputy President asked newly elected Nairobi Governor Johnson Sakaja to allocate four County Executive seats to “shareholders” from the Mt Kenya region. Mr Sakaja gave him none, instead opting to reward allies of Mr Raila Odinga, whose ODM party…
Schools are, by their nature, expected to be safe spaces where children can learn without having to worry about their safety or other mundane problems of life, such as hunger. But when school dormitories become halls of death, the heart of every parent shudders, because the worst nightmare for a parent is receiving a call from their child’s school only to be told that the child is no more. As a country, we have invested a great deal of money in conducting inquiries into how we can make schools safer and how we can mitigate disasters such as fires. We…
It is distressing that 3,056 Kenyans died in road crashes between January 1 and August 27, a worrying increase from the 2,910 fatalities reported over the same period last year. There are no prizes for guessing that this unfortunate toll will continue to grow for as long as road users continue to obey traffic rules in the breach. Nowhere is this more evident than on the Nakuru-Nairobi highway, which is turned into a scene from hell every weekend as motorists break all the rules imaginable, beginning with overlaps that create up to five lanes one way. This, for me, is…
Driving around Kenya, one is accosted, in every county, by the large number of public institutions that are going to seed because the national government and counties have failed to budget for repairs and maintenance, particularly of buildings and installations. A case in point is the Kipchoge Keino Stadium in Uasin Gishu, which is not only abandoned with the work less than half done but which has probably earned its place as Kenya’s top monument of shame. Uasin Gishu prides itself as “the home of champions”. Its athletes have made Kenya proud by their sterling achievements on the global stage.…