Did the Jubilee government loot $20 billion during its first term? The equivalent of 10 Eurobond issuances, the money has disappeared from the government’s loan portfolio. Technically broke by its own admission, Treasury has blamed, unconvincingly, everything from devolution to the wage bill for the state of its finances. DAVID NDII delivers another damning indictment against the pirates of pillage.
Forgive me, comrades If I say something apolitical And shamefully emotional But in the dark of night It is as if my heart is clutched By a giant iron hand: “Treachery, treachery” I cry out Thinking of you, comrades And how you have betrayed The things we suffered for – Dennis Brutus During a 1998 visit […]
On March 9, 2018, at around 1.00 pm, Kenya’s tepid political weather experienced a sudden and powerful jolt when President Uhuru Kenyatta, the country’s elected president, and his political opponent, Raila Odinga, the so-called “People’s President”, were shown walking together and shaking hands on the stairs of Harambee House. The fiercest protagonists of the recent […]
In December 2010, my mother was admitted to an established private hospital in Nairobi for what we considered a routine surgery. This surgical procedure was the culmination of a series of medical tests that begun in July that year in Kisumu where she lived and ended up in a referral to a sister hospital in […]
In my country Kenya, being a ‘youth’ officially ends on attaining 35 years. Once one gets to this age, you are no longer eligible to benefit from the ‘affirmative action’ policies and laws put in place to ‘uplift’ young people as a disadvantaged demographic. Mid this year (2018), I shall be officially departing from this […]
We cope with the oppressive system of Capitalism by eating our children’s futures before eating them alive. Grace Ogot captures us in her 1968 classic Tekayo, literally a story of cannibalism, metaphorically one of abuse of trust by a man in a position of authority. Authority of kinship where girls now live in fear of […]
The little girl, knees buckling, made it to the grass verge and set down her twenty-litre jerrycan. The year is 2016. Nothing says “Third World” louder than a yellow plastic 20-litre jerrycan. The jerrycan has become a symbol of underdevelopment. The girl tells me where she got the water and where she is taking it. […]
The current social and political engineering in South Sudan is an exact replay of the political processes that plunged the Sudan into the first civil war in 1955.