Category: Public Square

The Malindi doomsday cult is global news and the Kenyan Government is keen to catch up. The Shakahola massacre was revealed not by police detective work but by media stringers and correspondents who doggedly tracked the weird goings-on at the Good News International Ministries ranch of Pastor Mackenzie Nthenge. This year, during a four month…

Maps have long been a staple of election reporting. The US Presidential election, for instance, is one of the most mapped anywhere. Be it the presidential election or the midterms, maps help voters everywhere to digest and understand results. Typically, results are reported from precinct to county, to state, and then nationally. Use of more…

You might have seen it. A sustained Twitter campaign by @HoneyFarsafi targeted at Nairobi County governor Johnson Sakaja to fix drainage in Korogocho, an informal settlement to the east of the city. This week, @HoneyFarsafi reported that the part of the slum she’d been campaigning for had been attended to, posting pictures of concrete drainage…

Nairobi has a long, complicated history with slums. Their origin, according to this handy inventory of slums by Irene Karanja and Jack Makau, can be traced back to the refusal by colonialists to permit and provide for African workers to live with their families in the city, skewed land distribution among racial groups and subsequent…

There’s a traffic accident reported every hour every day every year in Kenya. As a result of these hourly accidents, between 9 and 11 people die each day. During the same 24 hour period, a further 14 to 29 people will be left seriously injured after a traffic crash. Finally, every day, we can expect…

The tragic happenings at Mukumu Girls and Butere Boys schools in Kakamega have shed light once again on the state of boarding schools in our country. They come more than five years after the Moi Girls School, Nairobi fire killed 10 students, and other deaths following caning, illness, more illness, suspected suicide, unknown causes, and still…

The recent orchestrated “invasion” of land belonging to the Kenyatta family has once again highlighted the highly sensitive and contentious issue of land in Kenya, particularly among the Kikuyu of Central Kenya, whose grievances date back to the colonial era when British settlers took over their land and dumped them in “reserves”. Post-colonial elites further…

It is a Sunday afternoon and the sun is playing hide and seek with a lazy cumulus cloud that stubbornly hovers above Uhuru Park, Nairobi. The park is teeming with a sea of humanity. For hours, they have been singing, clapping, dancing and cheering.  Now, oblivious of their own near-exhaustion, they are totally captivated by…

“I need to retire from retirement.” Sandra Day O’Connor A rather intriguing provision in Kenya’s Presidential Retirement Benefits Act 2003 provides that “A retired President shall not hold office in any political party for more than six months after ceasing to hold office as President.”  This legislation was enacted in 2003, in order to address…