The top brass around power is either a cocktail of perfect dissemblers, or they are simply dead. Whatever the case, they are to be pitied. “We are the dead,” Winston Smith says at the moment of rapture in George Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four. An invisible metallic voice frightfully echoes him in affirmation, “You are the dead.” Kenya’s […]Read More

This NASA moment bears both the bright character of an epiphany and the dull outlook of yet another false promise – a political de ja vu. What will it be, in the long run? The principals of Ford Kenya, ODM, Wiper and ANC parties have signed a unity pact. Concurrently, they have given Kenya a […]Read More

The season of frantic peace prayers is here again. As usual, it comes fully loaded with hypocrisy and denial. There are whispers of fear and loud pleas for peace, as the clock ticks towards the new year. People are worried about the likelihood of violence in the electoral season that the new year heralds. Accordingly, […]Read More

Exactly a week from today Kenyans will join the rest of the world in welcoming the New Year.  We will shout away the ending year and shout in the New with the usual pomp. We will even proclaim it a happy new year, as we have always done. Kenyans are ending 2016 in hostile style, […]Read More

In the arts we appreciate both form and content. What you do is just as important as how you do it. Sometimes your style will even say more than what the substance is saying.  Appreciation of this duality is as old as ancient antiquity. Aristotle (384 – 322 BC) elaborately discussed form and content in Rhetoric and […]Read More

We have not handled the health sector well. The ongoing doctors’ strike and its impact is the price society pays for mismanaging a highly sensitive sector. It is a factor of an insensitive National Government usurping devolved functions and funds without intending to give back anything, except cosmetic tokens and official mirage. We are wallowing […]Read More

Education Cabinet Secretary Dr. Fred Matiang’i and his team caught us all flatfooted. They say that old habits die hard. And ours don’t just die hard. They are bad habits that seem to be only second to our nature. For, we are accustomed to repeated cycles of life, after the same pattern of bad things, […]Read More

It is a beautiful world we live in, although we rarely enjoy the beauty. We are too preoccupied with unending angry thoughts to cherish the beauty. You look at the high and mighty. You see portraits of unbridled anger. The world is not bending to their will. The only thing they can do, therefore, is […]Read More

Worrying clouds are gathering over Kenya. They will need to be nipped in the bud. Make no mistake; the country’s political adrenaline is in free flow, our negative energy levels on the rise. We need to heed the panic bells. From Murang’a to Kisii and Gucha; and from Nairobi to Kirinyaga, the emerging mood is […]Read More

The Americans have done it. They have given the world Donald Trump. Such is what a combination of fear, hate and narrow nationalism does.  It thrusts on to the global stage mavericks that will leave the world order transformed beyond recognition – for better or worse. Trump’s campaign marked him out as an unpredictable war-mongering […]Read More