The wealthy elite know that banning elections wholesale would be suicidal. It is for this reason that they use different forms of low-level, extralegal violence against ordinary people to produce the elections results that they want, or to negotiate power with each other at our expense.
Voter suppression, a biased Supreme Court and foreign interference could help Trump win the 2020 election. However, a groundswell of anger among American youth might just tip the scales towards Biden. But with Trump having been infected with the coronavirus, it is hard to tell what November 3rd will bring.
Brutal incarceration has the primary means by which the Kenyan state has engaged with its citizens. Without fundamentally reforming and rebuilding the logic of the state, changing how it deals with Kenyans will be impossible.
Malawi can alleviate poverty and become a model for development and democracy by investing in and improving the quality of human capital, the quality of infrastructure, and the quality of institutions.
Kenyan prisons today carry the DNA of their forebears – the colonial prisons and Mau Mau detention camps. They are about brutalising prisoners into submission and scaring the rest of society into compliance with the state. And like their colonial predecessors, they are also sites of forced labour.
Based on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in Western Kenya, Mario Schmidt argues that local interpretations of Give Directly’s unconditional cash transfer program unmask how the NGO’s ‘myth of unconditionality’ obscures structural inequalities of the development aid sector. Schmidt argues that in order to tackle these structural inequalities, cash transfers should be ‘ungifted’ and viewed as debts repaid and not as gifts offered.
NGOs have been notably absent in the fight against COVID-19, despite claims they exist solely to ensure accountability and transparency by government.
The undermining of the 2010 constitution by the Executive and an emasculated opposition that has failed to defend constitutionalism threaten to unravel thirty years of constitution-building in Kenya. Will the Kenyan constitution die as a result of this? The quick answer to this question depends almost entirely on who the country chooses to be president in 2022 and on who will be the two speakers of Parliament.
Efforts by Kenya’s Executive to undermine the Judiciary point to a regime that is intent on concentrating decision-making power within itself. Part of the reason why the Judiciary is under pressure is because Parliament is not playing its constitutionally-mandated role in checking the Executive’s power.
The current wrangles in the senate on the revenue allocation formula are a classic example of how the constitution is designed to respond in order to protect itself.
