Two brilliant African graduate students Shiro Wachira and Phuthi Tsatsi are from the University of Stanford, with plenty of experience in development sector in Kenya and South Africa. The two chronicle their career journey in the sector and how they got quite disillusioned. Why do they no longer want to work in development organisations?
While conservation NGOs have condemned the violence meted out against the Maasai in Loliondo, they do not want herders or subsistence hunters on land that they seek to control and profit from and will fight to retain their power with the immense resources at their disposal.
By incentivizing manufacturers of disposable diapers, the government has sacrificed the gains made with the banning of plastic carrier bags in 2017 and worsened the problem of plastic pollution throughout the country.
Ethiopia’s peoples must be allowed to choose: either to make Ethiopia a consensual nation-building project or to let it go. Any national dialogue that does not acknowledge this reduces itself to a wrestle for power between political elites.
In Kenya, women account for 23 per cent of the National Assembly and the Senate. This figure includes seats reserved exclusively for women representatives. With more women encouraged to vie during the August 2022 general elections, it remains to be seen whether the results will fulfil the constitutional two-thirds gender rule.
In the second of a three-part series, A.K. Kaiza reflects on the work of anthropologist Frank Knowles Girling whose research—now published in Lawino’s People— was buried by Oxford University and whose prediction of the impact of British rule in Acholi came all too true.
As long as we focus on the tribe, we will lose the nation and be stuck in the tribal mire. Kenya will cease to be a society. We will lose our sense of collective responsibility and find in its place a culture of competitive victimhood.
People are waiting for the Supreme Court to drop the other shoe and rule that other civil rights are not protected by 14th the Amendment.
Civil society organisations have in the past played a key role in the democratisation process of Kenya. As the country moves toward the polls, will we see a robust civil society at the forefront championing electoral justice? The Elephant in conversation with Wambua Kawive, an educationist, a literary scholar and a writer.
Differences over plans to reshuffle Somaliland’s licensed political parties and the sequencing of elections have cast doubts over the electoral calendar since December 2021. In light of the legal and technical timelines, it is now an “open secret” that Muse Bihi’s elected term would expire before presidential elections can be held. Based on past experience, it is inevitable that the House of Elders (Guurti) will extend the President’s term in office. The question is: On what terms might this happen, to what end, and for how long? Unless addressed through consensus, Somaliland not only faces prolonged political uncertainty, but also a constitutional crisis that could inflict lasting damage to its widely respected electoral democracy.
Cartoons
The harrowing execution of Patrick Lyoya, a Congolese refugee in Michigan, and the unfulfilled promise of resettlement in America.