Today, October 10, 2020, is Moi Day, the first without former President Daniel Arap Moi, who passed on early in the year. In 1986, David Goldsworthy published the book Tom Mboya: The Man Kenya Wanted to Forget. Someday, in the future, somebody is probably going to echo Goldsworthy and issue the title Daniel Arap Moi: […]Read More

The demise this week of Mzee Abdallah Mwasimba symbolizes the fading away of a unique universe that he was a part of. We, who were children in the 1960s and 70s, remember his rich lyrical baritone on the Voice of Kenya radio. We recall the poems and skits he inspired us with, full of vivid […]Read More

Benjamin William Mkapa will forever be remembered in East Africa as a peacemaker par excellence. Together with Dr. Kofi Annan and Graça Machel, they pulled Kenya back from the brink when the country suddenly erupted, in the wake of the flawed presidential elections of 2007. Mkapa also made peace between Southern Sudan and Khartoum, as […]Read More

It has been thirty long years since Saturday July 7, 1990. Thousands of Kenyans dared their way to the Kamkunji Saba Saba rally that never was. I was a young man in my early thirties. We had done a long rough journey as a nation. We yearned for a better country. No risk was too […]Read More

This article was first published in the Saturday Standard on 04 July, 2020. If I was to be the person to recommend only one book that everyone should read, it would be William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954). Over the past six decades, I have been privileged to read hundreds of books – thousands, […]Read More

Published in the Saturday Standard on 27 June, 2020 It is difficult to cry over the fall through the air of Aden Duale, until this week Leader of the Majority in the National Assembly. Yet, the thing tolls with the ring of sinister bells. The tumbling of the Jubilee legislative strongman rings with the sound […]Read More

We are living in a dark moment in Kenya. Our terrifying past is raising up its ugly head from the ashes of misrule, like some sinister phoenix. The darkest of our historical landmarks are fledging. I have previously decried the capture of the Legislature by the Executive. Last Saturday I worried over railroading of Parliament […]Read More

I want to remind my dear reader, of the powerful words of two great Americans in gone times. “Some things are right, and some things are wrong. Eternally so, absolutely so.” These were the words of Abraham Lincoln, in his 1858 debates on slavery, with his arch rival, Stephen A. Douglas. Dr. Martin Luther King […]Read More

_First published in the Saturday Standard in May 2020. _ Odd dilemmas of the kind that humankind is going through today call up the memory of Franz Kafka. The 20th century Bohemian writer was an outstanding novelist and a master of the short story. He had the rare masterly of bringing fantasy so awfully close […]Read More

Published in the Standard in May 2020 Abraham Lincoln understood that if you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend. In 1842, the future iconic American president (1860 – 1865) was invited to speak to a gathering that hoped to help people considered degenerate alcoholics. The […]Read More