In the last days of 2008, Erich Rebasso, an Austrian lawyer, sent a letter to the main Vienna headquarters of the Federal Criminal Police, the country’s top law enforcement agency. Its purpose was unusual — the father of four young children was blowing the whistle on himself.
The Laundromat wasn’t just a money laundering system. It was also a hidden investment vehicle, a slush fund, a tax evasion scheme, and much more.
Luyias have never been able to take advantage of their numbers to gain or forge strong, collective political mileage. They have been unable to put their eggs in one basket to negotiate for their community. To understand the story of the Luyias of Kenya, one has to analyse their history from pre-colonial days to date, and particularly the impact of colonial events, ideology and administration.
Somali women enjoy few rights in a society where clan identity is passed down through male lineage. A woman who marries a man from another clan, for example, cannot pass down her clan identity to her children. It is for this reason that Somali women’s rights activists often refer to Somali women as the invisible “fifth clan”.
As long as Britain continues to support repression with grants to and training for rogue regimes and their armed forces, the status quo will remain. In turn, Britain will be able to balance its books. In this way their austerity will continue to be exported to Uganda and other African countries characterised by weak public administration, little public oversight of government, and a widespread culture of bribe-taking in international commerce – all underpinned by repression.
The question that has been boggling many Kenyans' minds is: What exactly led to President Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga…to suddenly make peace? Was this a spontaneous reaction of two leaders who had suddenly been imbued with an undying desire to save their country, which was on the verge of ethnic and geographical fragmentation?
A public law model retrieves Kenyans’ hopes for a different and better way to manage and administer land as the commission enters its next phase.
Courts, individuals, movements, state human rights organs and government health agencies have already established Kenya’s legal consciousness on how continued criminalisation of homosexuality undermines our constitutional principles and goals.
The Western reaction to the Ebola contagion is, once again, a deeply colonial one. The more enlightened and civilized countries of the Old Continent (and the New one as well) are patronising impoverished African countries who keep paying the price of their own underdevelopment. The Ebola epidemic just confirms the underlying narrative engineered by centuries of oppressive politics – that this disease is the result of a “plagued” environment where even animals and the forces of nature carry some form of sickness.
In other countries, it is understood that the intention of terrorists is to make crowded spaces “empty” – to terrorise the public into retreating inwards in fear. But in Nairobi, where inclusive, truly public spaces have long been “designed” out, where the attack happened in one of the most insulated, formidable-looking, closed-off, “safest” places, the horror of urban terror attacks runs deeper.
