President Museveni and his cabal ignore these political developments at his peril. In calculating the breaking-point, both he and the international lending agencies that enable him would do well to take the experience of Mobutu Sese Seko in Democratic Republic of Congo and the more recent ejection of Blaise Compaoré from Burkina Faso as case studies of what lies in wait.
If you read and listen to the coalition of business groups and finance pundits in Kenya, you will by now know that the nullification of the results of the August presidential elections made Kenyans $1.2 billion poorer. This narrative is driven by the view that, for some reason, Kenya’s economy is supreme and that other […]
When the Supreme Court of Kenya made its ruling annulling the August 8, 2017 Presidential Election, a new-high water mark was reached in the constitutional development of the country.
“What would you have done?” This is the question that the main character Hanna Schmitz (convincingly played by the British actress Kate Winslet) in the film The Reader asks the judge who is presiding over a case where she is charged with Nazi war crimes. It is a critical moment in the film as it […]
After the 2002 general election that brought the Mwai Kibaki-led Rainbow Coalition into power, the church in Kenya took a vow of silence. Following the 2007 disputed election and its violent aftermath, Oliver Kisaka, a Quaker minister and vice president of the National Council of Churches of Kenya, alluded to the church’s 2002 vow of […]
The August 8, 2017 Kenyan presidential election, which was invalidated and nullified by the Supreme Court of Kenya on September 1, 2017, not only led to a flurry of hastily cobbled up contrite statements by international observer missions and some Western-based media houses, but also opened up a Pandora’s box that critically questioned the role […]
Time is an important part of indigenous conflict management processes. The Meru Njuri Ncheke, for example, would often send the disputing parties away, sometimes repeatedly, in order to force them to further review their case. This encouraged the parties to eventually sort out their problems by themselves, thus sparing the elders of the need to […]
Corruption is Kenya’s favorite political pastime. It is the grease that oils the machinery of the extractive colonial state and an effective stick for the opposition to whack the government with. It generates screaming headlines, dominates talk on the airwaves and in public meeting places across the country. From Chickengate to MAfyaHouse to AngloFleecing to […]
And the loser of #ElectionsKE2017 is… The People. The poor plebeian people of Kenya time and time again are worked in to a political fervour of religious proportion by the elites, with the same old promise of “Freedom” from the terror of grinding poverty and all manner of ills that were created by the self-same […]
The Kenyan Supreme Court surprise decision at the beginning of September to annul the country’s presidential election wrong-footed most commentators. It has left egg on many, including the diplomatic corps as well as local and international observers, who had prematurely declared the election free, fair and credible, wiping egg of their embarrassed faces. But perhaps […]
I attended a private high school, Girls’ College, in my teens. It is situated in the leafy suburb of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. We received what was deemed “the best education”, which is to say, distinctly British. We had etiquette lessons in form one, at age thirteen, where we were taught how to talk, how to walk, […]
There we go again. The Election Observation industry has generated a sharp backlash from Kenyans in being reported and perceived to have assertively blessed a hotly contested election process that was ultimately thrown out by the Supreme Court of Kenya as not meeting the minimum standards of the Constitution and Election Law. Soul searching is […]