BY TOM ODHIAMBO If you opened the literature and culture pages of the Saturday Nation, you’d imagine that there is a national disaster in the country. There are endless complaints about the state of the English language and Literature in our schools. There are cries about the poor use – or is it usage – of English. Apparently thousands of school going children in Kenyan can’t write or spell in proper English. We don’t hear much about Kiswahili though. There are tens of outpourings of nostalgia, of the days when Kenyans apparently spoke proper and clean English. But there…
Author: NLM writer
BY DAVID WANJALA “The moment the words ‘sentenced to death’ are pronounced in court on your judgment day, life changes forever. It is total confusion and despair. Between choosing to believe the reality of what you’ve just heard and resisting it hoping the nightmare will soon end paving way for normalcy, you are whisked away as the devastated family members present give up hope on you. The world ends there,” says Antony Ongulu Deba, a death row inmate at the Kamiti Maximum Prison. The father of three was sentenced to hang in February 2012 on charges of murder. The Court…
..Notwithstanding the completely false historiography by its present intelligentsia, the West has shown that it usually takes a revolution to bring about a new political thought-system into line with the econo-intellectual base that has given rise to that new thought. All the important liberal regimes in the West took power through revolutions, some of them extraordinarily violent and destructive. A political party which allows itself to be criticised through its own medium clearly shows that it is conscious of its strength and maturity. Unluckily for Kenya’s ruling party, this strength was vitiated beyond redemption by the party’s own contumacious…
BY DAVID MATENDE You risk being dismissed with a derisive wave of the hand in Kenya if you proclaim membership to a watchdog group. The word watchdog has become so meaningless that it now belongs to the family of the hackneyed. Why? Because the institutions charged with the responsibility of watching over the Executive on behalf of the people are anything but watchdogs. Last month, both Parliament and the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC) sunk to new lows with revelations that some of their members are gleefully eating with the looters of public money in a classical case of…
BY KEVIN MOTAROKI Patrick came home one evening to the welcome of a shocking conversation between his two sons aged 9 and 11. He did not immediately make his presence known but from what he gathered from their hushed tête-à-tête and his interrogation of them afterwards revealed that they had picked up a condom packet on their way home from school and decided to keep it. One was asking the other to produce “the stuff” so that they could examine it, and the other, probably elder of the two, conscious of his father’s presence in the house, wanted his brother…
BY MAORE ITHULE Towards the end of last year, the controversial tetanus vaccine turned Kenyan clergy pyrotechnic. Shockingly, men and women of the cloth claimed that the jab could render women infertile. The standoff between officials at the ministry of Health and the Catholic Church over the vaccine was finally resolved after experts found the jab safe. Now an expert says there is yet another danger to your fertility; that delicious meal and drink you crave so much, and which you are likely to over-consume throughout your life, and mainly during festive seasons. Erick Ngereso, a nutritionist at Kenyatta…
BY TIJAN SCHWEIN A vibrant league and clubs naturally translate to a formidable national football team, rightly so because the clubs act as a feeder programme to the senior side. They not only identify and nurture talent but also train the players on the basics regarding their career. World over, football powerhouses have some of the best run leagues – talk of reigning world champions Germany, five-time World Cup holders Brazil as well as Argentina, and you realise that these countries not only boast of well-run leagues but also efficient youth feeder programmes. Closer home, Ivory Coast – the reigning…
BY ODONGO WATTA Sometime towards the end 2013, Athletics Kenya (AK) convened an unusual seminar in Eldoret that brought together athletes and a number of experts in banking, investment, insurance, nutrition, medicine, and retirement schemes. At the time, AK vice president David Okeyo said the move was borne out of the need to educate athletes on how best to invest their monies given that some of them had, in the past, blown away their earnings due to lack of investment knowledge. A first of its kind, the idea was well received by the media and other stake holders as being…
BY PHILIP OCHIENG One of our basic assumptions rises from the premise that society’s collective good is what is served by the punitive measures that our courts of law impose on all convicted individuals. The question is: What social good did the courts serve when, the other day, one of them sentenced a 100-year-old woman to a prison term for “contempt” of the same court? The answer that the run-of-the-mill judicial official is likely to give for such a sentence is that it is what the law lays down for a particular range of crimes. Thus the letter of…
By Prof John Haberson When civil society advocacy becomes contentious in a constitutional democracy such as Kenya, which came about in large part through the exertions of those advocacy groups, it is time to re-examine the origins, significance, and issues raised by this phenomenon. It comes as no surprise that an authoritarian regime, like Ethiopia’s, would take draconian steps to all but suppress civil society advocacy, as indeed it has. So what, once again is this thing we call civil society, and why is it so important? The first question concerns the definition of civil society, and the short…
