Did President Uhuru Kenyatta and his Jubilee party win the 2013 and 2017 elections fairly, or did a dubious UK-based consultancy company help them win by using unethical means? RASNA WARAH explores possible reasons why the Kenyan media has remained mum about Cambridge Analytica despite the international uproar about its use of dirty tactics.
I don’t yet know how to make peace with the fact that I had a hand in legitimising probably the worst administration this country has had the misfortune of enduring. I will never deserve that peace.
The edifice of elections is crumbling in Kenya. As internal divisions eat away at the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission’s shiny surface, taking down several of the IEBC’s leaders, a softer, murkier layer of corruption scandals, mismanagement and political bias lies exposed. It is tempting to try and prop up what is left of the […]
January 30th 2018 enters Kenya’s history books alongside September 1st 2017, the day when, for the first time, an election in the country was nullified. Many dismissed the opposition coalition NASA’s threat to swear in the principals Raila Odinga and his deputy Kalonzo Musyoka as a PR gimmick. Yet, as the new year rolled in, […]
On November 3, 2017, Kenya’s main opposition party, the National Super Alliance (NASA), spelt out to its supporters the names of three companies whose products they ought to boycott because of these companies’ association with the ruling Jubilee party. The three companies were: Safaricom, the giant money-minting mobile telecommunications company; Brookside Dairies, the largest milk-producing […]
The epic legal battles which have defined Kenya’s presidential contest this year ended, not with the loud bang of the Chief Justice David Maraga’s gavel, but with a whimper and muted celebrations. In the end, it seems, even the resolute Justice David Maraga-led Supreme Court succumbed to political intimidations and Jubilee secured a hard-wrung, bloodstained […]
Political culture is an elusive creature. It is pervasive but invisible, like the oxygen that energizes our social organization and economy. It is also colorless and odorless, the carbon monoxide that suffocates the public interest. Like the quanta of particle physics, it inhabits a difficult to pinpoint state straddling legal-constitutional rationality and people’s behavioral orientations. […]
I visited Kawangware, the sprawling ghetto on the outskirts of Nairobi city, days after it had quieted down from a “political showdown” – a euphemism for brutal ethnic fighting- following the October 26 repeat election. The air was sombre. There was an uncanny feeling that this was not your normal, bustlingly busy Kawangware. The people […]
During a transition into a new presidential tenure such as Kenya is going through at this point in 2017, it is expected that people – certainly government and governance scholars – will review the outgoing tenure so as to highlight the needs of the incoming tenure. If such reviews become a habit, then the next […]
