9 min read. A proposed mobile phone lending platform called Wezesha and described as a “collaborative initiative to bridge the access to credit by micro and small enterprises”, will be managed by five banks under the leadership of the Kenyatta Family-owned Commercial Bank of Africa. The Huduma Number initiative is central to the new scheme, and could explain the government’s insistence on rolling out biometric Identity Cards.
8 min read. If both Parliament and these nascent movements fail to forestall the efforts of the ‘system’, it is certain to use the Chebukati report, the boundary demarcation process, the population census and the Building Bridges Initiative to entrench itself and it will be interesting to see how the ‘hustlers’ respond to this direct challenge to their ‘turn to eat’.
9 min read. Famine in Turkana and other Kenyan counties may not have yet caught the attention of the international media, but domestic dissatisfaction with the famine response may force the government to alter its food security policies. The more likely scenario, however, is that this government will, like most Kenyans, pray for the rains, and hope that the food crisis will go away all on its own.
8 min read. To budget anything from a quarter to a third of the country’s annual GDP for stealing — to then borrow it, steal it, feign outrage, compromise parliament, and diffuse public anger with ineffectual corruption investigations, again and again and again - defies corruption. It is a crime against humanity.
12 min read. Why has the UK establishment so farcically mismanaged Brexit? The answer has eluded her politicians because it lies deep within a political system no longer fit for current purpose.
10 min read. Two decades ago, a group of eighty Kenyans spent the better part of two years thinking about where the country was headed. The product of this effort was Kenya at the Crossroads: Scenarios for our Future. Where is the country now and where is it headed?
15 min read. Unserved by policy makers whose grand energy priorities lay elsewhere, 600 million rural Africans for decades lay off-grid. When new technologies and global investment arrived, this emerging market became the site of competition and fantasy between indigenous solar technology traders and a white saviour industry backed by billionaire philanthropy investors.
10 min read. So ingrained is the Old Boys’ network within the UN that persecuting whistleblowers is part of a culture of male privilege. Will Sec-Gen Guterres turn the tide?
8 min read. The reason our ballot papers have security features that are equal to, if not more than, our currency is because of the trust deficit among the electoral stakeholders.
8 min read. The decision by President Mohamed Abdullahi Farmajo’s government to put Somalia’s oil reserves on the predatory oil and extractive industries’ market argues RASNA WARAH could prove to be a resource curse and a recipe for disaster in a country that has suffered from more than two decades of civil war, fledgling state institutions, absence of checks and balances and which has few or no regulatory frameworks or laws in place to manage its oil in the interest of the Somali state and its people.
