The briefcase Maraga bought

It never occurred to me that Judge Maraga's political campaign would be roiled by a sex harassment scandal in which he did not sexually harass anyone. But here we are.

When Judge Maraga announced his intention to seek the Kenyan presidency, few thought that he had a realistic plan. He was not, and doesn't seem to have become, a politician. His only claim to fame was that he had served as Kenya's second chief justice under the 2010 constitution, had presided over a presidential election petition that had annulled a presidential election, and had written to the president directing him to dissolve parliament for failing to give effect to the two-thirds gender rule of the constitution.

His putative presidential campaign started off with visits to court rooms where young Kenyans were being prosecuted, frequently on trumped up charges, or Gen Z rallies where the only notable thing about the rallies was that Judge Maraga chose to attend. His campaign team, staffed by young people and at least one failed politician, was notable for its lack of experience. In the end, Judge Maraga chose not to set up his own political party and instead chose to hitch his wagon to the United Green Party.

The current allegations against Judge Maraga's leadership point to a presidential candidate who still thinks he is in the exploratory stage. His accusers seem o have a had a personal relationship with him and seem to have expected. that the personal relationship would lend weight to their allegations against Judge Maraga's associates whom they accuse of sexual offences.

Only one of the accusers has chosen to reveal her identity, though whose she accuses and what the accusation is remain unsaid. She was at the forefront of the 2024 anti-Finance-Bill protests that ended up in widespread violence at which dozens of Kenyans were killed by police and forced the government to capitulate and withdraw the proposed changes to the tax laws. She would be considered a member of the Gen Z movement and her public profile seemed to be on the rise when she joined Judge Maraga's exploratory committee.

From the initial social media posts by the young people championing Judge Maraga's presidential candidacy, one got the sense that there was a conflation of the professional and personal, and the blurring of lines seemed to have been widespread. The political inexperience of all concerned was apparent. If it was not a sexual harassment scandal, it would be something else that roiled the campaign.

The United Green Party is not known to be a mass movement party by any measure. It has no elated parliamentarians, or other elected officials holding state offices. It does not even appear to have party offices at the grassroots. Barring his occasional appearances at rallies and whatnot, Judge Maraga does not appear to be interested in the presidency. He only seems to be more interested in saying that he intends to stand in the presidential election in 2027.

And the fact that victims of sexual offences within his party are receiving the "go see the HR manager" line, it doesn't even appear like he is interested in building up the internal infrastructure of his political party to help him secure victory at the presidential election. Worse still, he does not appear to have a slate of potential candidates who wish to stand in the elections to parliament, county assemblies or governors' offices. In short, he appears to have bought himself a briefcase and nothing more.

School tragedies won't end

 I - It is not a question of expertise, is it?

I am not an expert on education. I am not an expert on physical and land use planning. I am not a parent. However, seeing this, maybe I know a thing about laws.

School tragedies are shockingly commonplace in Kenya. Regardless of whether they are supported out of our taxes or private, national or ho-hum, well performing or at the bottom of the exam rankings, tragedies strike them all without discrimination. It has nothing to do with how wealthy or poor Kenya is, tragedy will find a school.

II - The thing about systems

Schools, like so much else in Kenya, exist and operate in a system. The system is broken. It has been broken for decades. We know the ways it is broken. Crucially, those who know better, know how to fix that which is broken. But equally crucially, those with the power to do anything about it don’t. More often than not, it all boils down to money. Specifically, tax shillings, collected and spent by the government.

The only governments we believed we had a say in how they came about, whom they appointed to high office, and which we thought represented our aspirations as a people are Mwai Kibaki’s, Uhuru Kenyatta’s and William Ruto’s. Daniel Moi’s and Jomo Kenyatta’s governments were renown for the extremes they went to suppress the aspirations of the people. We even called them “imperial presidencies” in recognition of how they treated the people: as subjects, rather than citizens.

III - Hopes, dashed

But in 2002, Kenyans voted overwhelmingly to cast aside presidential imperialism. In 2010, Kenyans voted again overwhelmingly to cast aside constitutional imperialism. And in 2013, knowing what we knew, elected the first government under a new freedom-espousing constitutional order, repeating the feat again in 2022.

So far, the only difference between the Jomo/Moi era and the Kibaki/Uhuru/Ruto era is the slick PR machine that springs into action to pull the wool over our eyes whenever our children are maimed and killed in school tragedies. In my opinion, in order to safeguard the lives and welfare of our children, then we must be prepared to rend asunder the national economic compact that says it is better to wastefully spend billions on roads for corrupt UN fat cats instead of the necessary infrastructure to properly and adequately educate our children in safety and security.

IV - The money we have, the money we waste

The Appropriation Act, a constitutional requirement under Article 221 of the Constitution, is the most important tool in directing how we spend the taxes we collect. All the mealy-mouthed excused about World Bank/IMF conditionalities and repayments of loans are just that - excuses. If we want to spend public funds to educate our children in safety and security, then we must take a hatchet to all the wastefulness contained in the annual Appropriation Act. So long as this not done, no amount of handwringing by the political classes will ever provide the necessary resources. And tragedies will follow. To paraphrase the devolution windbags - lack of money follows tragedy

History as farce, history as tragedy

In 2020, when it became apparent that the Government would not chart an independent path in dealing with the spread of the Covid 19 virus, a decision was made to revoke and replace the Petroleum Development Levy Fund Order of 1992 (Legal Notice No. 10 of 1992). What replaced it, the Petroleum Development Levy Fund Order of 2020 (Legal Notice No. 124 of 2020) created the “fuel subsidy” that came to bedevil the Government’s finances.

Paragraph 5 of the new Order stated:

5. 5. The levy shall also be used for matters relating to the development of the oil industry including to stabilize local petroleum pump prices in instances of spikes occasioned by high landed costs above a threshold determined by the Authority. The Cabinet Secretary may by writing to the administrator, request for a draw down from the Petroleum Development Fund to stabilize local petroleum pump prices where he deems it necessary.

It would be instructive to remind ourselves what the purpose of the Petroleum Development Fund Act was. Section 4(4) of the Act states:

(4) There shall be paid out of the Fund such monies as are necessary for the development of common facilities for the distribution or testing of oil products and for matters relating to the development of oil industry as the Cabinet Secretary may direct:

Provided that the funds are not used for purposes in competition with the private sector.

The subsidy programme did not fall within the broad purposes of the Act, to wit, the development of common facilities for the distribution or testing of oil products and for matters relating to the development of oil industry, but because fuel prices had spiked so sharply because of the supply chain shocks caused by the global pandemic, few Kenyans were willing to push back on the Government’s decision.

So it beggars belief that another global supply shock that has occasioned a sharp spike in fuel prices has not motivated the Government to draw down from the Petroleum Development Fund to stabilize local petroleum pump prices. The situation may not be exactly the same - pandemic versus war - but the outcome is the same: high fuel prices. The fund exists. The power to draw down from the fund remains. The reluctance by the Government to do something meaningful is baffling. Unless, of course, the Fund is “empty”.

Kenya is a very strange place, from a statutory perspective. It has a plethora of tax laws that seem to affect the price of fuel, the most obvious being value added tax, excise duty, import declaration fee, road maintenance levy, and petroleum development levy. It has a byzantine system for importing petroleum products: anyone who can explain what the G-to-G system is and what it does and how it provides for predictable (and low prices) deserves an actual Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

Despite all that, and the shenanigans of the Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority, there is not predictable way of cushioning Kenyans from high fuel prices and the knock-on effects on the cost of living. Instead, we get haughty harangues from the Cabinet Secretary for the National Treasury and stoic silence from the Cabinet Secretary for Energy. We get snooty highfalutin screeds from the chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors. We get spectacularly tone-deaf social media posts from pro-government “bloggers”. What we don’t get is any form of amelioration for our challenges.

And because the “united opposition” is composed of a deposed deputy president with he support of probably only his wife and immediate family, a perennially red-eyed doddering geriatric in charge of the “biggest opposition party”, the first serious woman presidential candidate long past her prime, an ex-CJ presidential candidate with the support of a thimbleful of GenZ activists, a narcissistic activist-senator who never seems to do any work in the Senate, an ex-VP with a massive chip on his puny shoulders, and an agglomeration of political wannabes and has-beens, amelioration will not be forthcoming any time soon. Many Kenyans now feel like Robert Baratheon on his death bed.

The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers

The Constitution of Kenya was written by lawyers. And it shows. It should have been written by ordinary Kenyans first, and then the lawyers could thereafter have had their way with the legal weaselling...reasoning. The Fourth Schedule to the Constitution deals with the distribution of functions between her national government and county governments. Paragraph 1 of Part 1 states that the national government shall perform functions relating to foreign affairs, foreign policy and international trade.

The Fourth Schedule contains a list with 48 items, 34 functions of the national government and 14 functions of county governments. The lawyers who compiled the list were not thinking of the opening words of the Preamble of the Constitution - We, the people of Kenya. It is why functions relating to how humans live and work are treated as afterthoughts - while things that inevitably lead to the exercise of governmental powers take precedence.

You can see this in the way the Africa Forward Summit (Africa-France Partnerships for Innovation and Growth) held on the 11th and 12 May, 2026, was conceived, promoted, and held, and how the decisions by the international worthies were made. Some commentators have thoughtfully explained the implications of the whole kit and caboodle, especially in light of the violent fracturing of Françafrique in West Africa and the weight of colonial history that the Summit attempted to slough off its shoulders. If the lawyers had resisted the powerful instinct to lawyer-ise the Constitution, we may not be having such a difficult time in explaining why neo-Françafrique poses such fraught questions for us.

Many well-meaning lawyers, such as the indefatigable Dr. Willy Mutunga, first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Kenya, tried their best to place We, the people of Kenya, at the heart of the Constitution. They did not succeed. They did not even come close to succeeding. because their fellow-lawyers had laid such terrible constitutional traps for them to evade.

Take the question of who is and who isn't eligible to stand in a Kenyan election. Kenyans are staring in horror at the lawyerly protection conferred on all sorts of shady men and women. The words all possibility of appeal or review of the relevant sentence or decision has been exhausted found in Article 99(3) and Article 193(3) are a warm security blanket that lawyers sitting in the constitutional court will wrap around the shoulders of the put-upon politicians with dodgy criminal records seeking elected office. If We, the people of Kenya, had been asked to decide who should or shouldn't be eligible to stand in a Kenyan election, no way would they have added that caveat about appeals and reviews. No way, José! But we were not and at least two alleged child sex abusers (that we know of) sit in the national legislature.

One of the most egregious signs that the Constitution was written by lawyers is the Preamble. Kenyan lawyers, even the ones who have had the opportunity to attend the very best schools, universities and colleges the world has to offer, are notorious for copying other lawyers' work. The Preamble is a pale imitation of the United States Declaration of Independence, the Indian Constitution's Preamble, and the South African Constitution's Preamble, garnished, garishly, by a smattering of Kenyan-style constitutional lawyering. It is a a dog's breakfast, redeemed only by the fact that it is mercifully short. If there were any lawyers that said, "Let's not," they were either not persuasive, or they were easily ignored. I find the allusions to an Almighty God of all creation particularly crass because if we truly believed in the rights of ALL Kenyans to think and believe as they wish, We, the people, would not be declaring as a fact that [a] there is a God, [b] that the God is "almighty" and [c] the God created "all". We, the people, I would like to think, would have asked, "What about my fellow Kenyan who does not believe gods exist?"

In another twenty to thirty years, Kenyans will replace this Constitution. I hope that they will have learnt hard lessons: keep the lawyers away from the process. Better yet, in the words of Mr. Shakespeare as written in Henry VI, Part 2 - Act 4, scene 2, The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers!

The west is the bad guy

It is almost impossible to avoid adopting the language of the war-mongering "west". But every now and then, someone says something that gives you hope that it can be done. I watched a recent YouTube video in which a UK radio talking head called Shelagh Fogarty was interviewing Prof. Mohamed Marandi about the US-Israel war on Iran. She described him as being "close to the Iranian regime". When he called her out for the way she had phrased things, she tried to walk it back by saying that he had "access to Iranian government officials" the same as she to UK government officials. But when he asked her why she referred to the Iranian government as a "regime" but did not call the UK government a "regime, she swiftly moved on to a different topic.

We have been programmed to accept the presumption that the "west" are the good guys in all wars and that whoever they happen to be waging war on is the bad guy. We have also been programmed to accept that the Jewish state, located in West Asia, is part of the "west" and, therefore, any country it wages war on must, of necessity, be the bad guy and the Jewish state is the good guy. Obviously, among many quarters, that presumption is considered to be arrant bullshit.

We are encouraged, even today, to consider the nature of the Islamic Republic only through the lens of the "west" aka the United States and Israel, and to ignore everything the "west" has done to the Islamic Republic since the end of the Second World War. When viewed particularly through the lens provided by the United States, the Islamic Republic is made up of terrorists whose perfidy is beyond doubt because US nationals were taken hostage in Iran during the 1978 revolution that brought down the puppet regime that had been imposed on Iranian people by the United States and United Kingdom.

The liberation movements that the Islamic Republic has supported, particularly in Palestine, have been branded "terrorists" for opposing the continued occupation of Palestine by the Jewish state and for the continued illegal dispossession of Palestinians through so-called "settlements". Those with historical perspectives can see parallels in the way the British continue to occupy Northern Ireland and the United States refuses to relinquish its hold over the Chagos Islands.

So it is no surprise that a Briton, steeped in the [un]righteous assumption that White Is Right, would automatically brand the government of the islamic Republic as a "regime" with all the negative connotations of that branding and not do the same with the government of Perfidious Albion, a government that has supported in word and deed the waging of an unjust war of aggression against the Islamic Republic.

The world is slowly abandoning old assumptions because of the way the "west" has conducted itself in West Asia. The scales are falling from our eyes as we witness nuclear-armed belligerents fail, time and again, to browbeat the Islamic Republic into submissions, a failure that stretches back to the Islamic Revolution, a failure that has laid bare the impotency of their nuclear arsenals. Maybe the "west" will prevail, but even if it does, it will be at great cost to it and its peoples. More significantly, more and more peoples will begin to accept the assumption that the "west" is really the bad guy.

Charles Kanjama is one more reason to abolish the Law Society of Kenya

Charles Kanjama, Senior Counsel, was elected as the 7th president of the Law Society of Kenya on the 19th February, 2026. He is a throwback to previous chairmen of the Law Society who could not be trusted to take a firm stand if it meant taking a stand against the excesses of the government of the day. Instead, they would find well-reasoned arguments for why their hands were tied and how Kenyans should seek succour from other institutions of government like the police, the statutory human rights organisations, national and international NGOs and, when all those had failed, the Law Society. In their minds, the Law Society was always the last resort.

Little of the campaign for the LSK presidency was interesting. All the candidates, regardless of their human rights bona fides, were united in one mission though: the construction of Wakili Tower, a multi-million shillings white elephant "to be financed out of contributions by members". Since the Erick Mutua presidency, every single LSK council has assiduously worked towards a grand real estate project. First it was at the LSK's South C property and now it is the Gitanga Road HQ that is being turned into a construction site.

Focus for Mr. Kanjama and his new council, will be on the construction of Wakili Tower and anything that draws focus away from it, like human rights campaigns, will receive only a cursory glance, if at all. The Law Society is a pale shadow of the force of nature it was in the 1980s when its leadership and its members risked life, limb, freedom and livelihoods to campaign for the rights of prisoners of conscience and other victims of human rights abuses by the state and agents of the state.

The outgoing president, Ms. Faith Odhiambo, did her best with a dying Law Society. She led a brave campaign in 2024 to hold the government accountable for enforced disappearances, unlawful detentions, malicious prosecutions and other forms of state-sanctioned criminality. But it was clear that she stood mostly alone; few of the members of her council were as publicly committed as she was and fewer of the LSK branches were as dedicated as she was. Mr. Kanjama has inherited a presidency that is no longer a beacon of hope for the oppressed.

The decline of the Law Society can be traced, ironically, to the triumphal election of Mwai Kibaki in December 2002. His election pulled the wool over our eyes that because Kanu had been defeated, Kanu-ism was over. Instead, Mr. Kibaki moved swiftly to consolidate his political power and one way he did this was to co-opt the leadership and senior members of the Law Society into governmental institutions culminating in the biggest prize of them all: chairman of the Public Procurement Administrative Review Board which heard disputes between the government and private contractors where billions of shillings were at stake. Needless to say, the rule of law provided a very wide fig leaf to hide the alleged corruption in the Kibaki regime that ensued.

Dozens of lawyers became fabulously wealthy because of the contracts they won from the government. The Law Society became quieter and quieter even as Kenyans continued to be abducted and murdered by policemen and intelligence officers. Mr. Kanjama does not inspire confidence that he will lead the Law Society to reclaim its role in holding the government to account for the acts of omission and commission of the government and agents of the government that have led to the loss of life, grievous injuries, corruption and human rights abuses.

Members of the Law Society also do not seem interested in rebuilding the image of the Law Society. They have been sold a bill of goods that the Law Society is a "trade union for lawyers" and that the Law Society should focus more in ensuring "better terms for lawyers" as if the Advocates Remuneration Order did not exist and ignoring the fact that the practice of law before the courts is the exclusive, monopolistic preserve of the members the Law Society in good standing.

The Law Society is an anachronism. It is time we admitted this to ourselves, repealed the Law Society of Kenya Act, abolished the Law Society in its current iteration, and rebuilt the Law Society anew as a professional body of advocates holding its members to the highest professional and ethical standards - and campaigning with vim and vigour for the highest attainable standards of human rights and fundamental freedoms.

The last days of white supremacy

From the moment Jesse Jackson (1941 - 2026) sought the nomination of the Democratic Party to run in the 1988 US presidential election, the US has been reorienting its racism in ways that would camouflage how deeply abhorrent it felt about Black peoples. One of the ways in which it reorganised was to sort out the tokenism that had prevailed since 1968. That tokenism culminated in the election of the whitest Black man as the 44th president of the US, a man who served two full terms and cemented the latest iteration of white-power racism in the US.

President Obama was the wrong Black man at the wrong time. If the US had wanted to wholly break with its racism, it should have nominated and elected Jesse Jackson instead of George H.W. Bush. It didn't, and set the stage for the most racist modern US federal government since Ronald Reagan's. What is worse, because it elected the empty suit that is Mr. Obama, it set the stage for the least educated and most racist president in modern times to be elected twice over, and because of his spectacular illiteracy, the world faces the spectre of global war.

The world is much changed since the last global war. Yet so much remains the same.

The white man, in his infinite and bottomless arrogance, cannot fathom a world in which the Black and Brown man could deign to defy his feudalistic and capitalistic dictats. While the white man's gunboats of the 18th century were actual boats with guns, the gunboats of the 21st century are intercontinental ballistic missiles with multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles bearing multiple multi-tonne nuclear warheads capable of destroying the wold a thousand times over. The old gunboats could lay siege to a city at a time. The modern ones have laid siege to the whole world for nigh on fifty years.

In 1953, US and UK capitalist interests connived to depose the democratically elected government of Iran, setting off a chain of events that resulted in the Islamic Revolution and the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1978 and a state of war between Iran and the US that shows no sign of ending in peace. The US, in addition to the other colonial wars it has waged since 1947, has waged a political, economic, cultural and military war against Iran that has resulted in great instability throughout West Asia. The war has often been fought through, and by, proxies. In June 2025, the war became a direct war when the US and Israel launched attacks on the Iranian homeland.

The publicly stated reason for the attacks was Iran's so-called nuclear programme. The real reason is that the white world needed a military lesson to teach the Blacks and the Browns. The white world needed to remind the rest of the world that it could inflict punishment, severe punishment, as and when it chose and for any reason, and that no amount of hand-wringing about "international law" would have any kind of meaning to the white world. White supremacy has seen the writing on the wall: in thirty years, it will no longer be a world power. In fifty years, it will no longer be the wealthiest. In seventy years, it will be a footnote of history. As it had been for the 1,800 years before the first Spanish, Portuguese, French and British "explorers" set sail for the "new world".

The natural order of things has always been for the peoples of the world who have had no reason to pillage and destroy to be the ones to prosper and bring civilisation to the uncivilised and barbaric white world. I recently heard an interesting statement: wherever the white man finds himself, his natural instinct is to destroy. Look at East and Central Africa as an example. The white man found entire cultures that were flourishing and chose to destroy them, their languages, their religions, their forests, their wildlife...their very way of life...in the name of Christian civilisation. That instinct to destroy has not changed in 500 years and, going by the recent war on Palestine, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon and Iran, that instinct will never change.

The US is the modern bellwether of white supremacism. Mr. Obama, the token Black president, is proof. The rearguard attempt by white supremacy to paint a veneer of racial comity failed abjectly. The US elected an uneducated misbegotten monster as its white champion in the hopes that he would lead the charge in forestalling the decline of the white man. Instead, the US has affirmed for the whole Black world to see, that white supremacy is dying, and dying much faster than they thought.

These are not serious people

The Orange Democratic Movement Party of Kenya (ODM) is a pale shadow of the political movement that defeated the Banana side during the 2005 constitutional referendum. It has been in steady decline from the date it buried the hatchet with Mwai Kibaki's Party of National Unity and joined a Grand Coalition Government. It started kicking its last kicks of relevance when it led the Coalition for Reforms and Democracy into a defeat, and cemented its place as an also-ran political party when the Azimio One Kenya fell to the Kenya Kwanza onslaught. On the 11th February, of 2026, it affirmed to itself that it is no longer a serious political party and should be treated with the same pity one treats the slow learners in school.

The decision by the party's high command to turn a stop-gap arrangement in which the geriatric Oburu Odinga was a placeholder for a young a dynamic leader into a permanent sinecure was to be expected. The late Raila Odinga had tried to build a cadre of young politicians who could challenge for senior leadership in the political party and failed. So, in the absence of credible young guns to take Raila's place, Oburu was the most logical, if stupidest, choice. It wouldn't be so bad if he had any sort of dynamism about him. He doesn't and it is quite terrible to see.

What is worse is the foolishness of the political party to thin its leadership ranks simply because it does not know how to manage ambitious politicians. The decision to sack Edwin Sifuna as its secretary-general is asinine; his replacement by an unknown councillor is imbecilic. Sifuna is a hard-charger. You only need to watch videos of him savaging Kenya Kwanza infants on TV for you to appreciate what he could have brought to the political party. He has charisma by the bucket and for all his manoeuvring and conspiring, he appeared committed to the political party that had given him a national profile.

The shortsighted men and women in charge of party strategy - Junet, Wanga, Nassir, Winnie and Oburu - are so focussed in keeping their noses in the Kenya Kwanza trough, they no longer seem to care that Kenya Kwanza is hell-bent on turning itself into the new KANU with the intention of ruling Kenya for the next twenty-four years. If that happens, not only will the ODM-ites lose their privileged access to the trough, they will lose everything they have amassed over the past fifteen years and they will be lucky if their leading lights don't spend the entirety of the Kenya Kwanza reign fighting all sorts of criminal charges in the law courts.

The red herring that ODM is chasing after - Uhuru Kenyatta's meddling in the Azimio leadership and whatnot - reveals the dearth of strategic thinking at the highest levels of the political party leadership. Uhuru is not the equivalent of Cardinal Richelieu, pulling strings behind the scenes to achieve some grand political agenda; he is a very young ex-president with too much money and time on his hands and a massive chip on his shoulder about the man who bested his pet project at the hustings in 2022. Uhuru's games with Azimio will not bear any sort of fruit beyond stymying District Focus Gachagua's stillborn ambitions and giving Uhuru something to do so that he doesn't lose any more of his good humour in his post-presidency.

ODM is paying attention to the wrong things instead of building a political machinery to replace the oversized influence of the late Raila Odinga. It is not recruiting new members. It doesn't appear to be raising a campaign war chest to defend the seats it holds, to take back the seats it lost in 2022 and 2017, or to poach the unsafe seats held by Azimio and Kenya Kwanza. It is sacking young men who had the measure of the party, who kept many of its secrets, and who executed many of its plans - and all because the party's ancien régime has its back up because Sifuna will not swear fealty to a decrepit political party infrastructure marching in the wrong direction. These are not serious people. They deserve to lose everything they hold dear.

Missing the mission for the wrong customs

Were the poor members of the Judicial Service Commission - and their long-suffering staff - ever to encounter my curriculum vitae, they will swiftly arrive at a terrible conclusion: while my confidence as a legal practitioner (though not a litigator of any kind of note) is unparalleled, my determination to eschew and elide many of their foibles and customs will horrify them to their very core. It is only this past week that I have had a chance to reacquaint myself with the expression "judgment per incuriam" and only because I was curious to confirm whether memories from twenty-one years ago were sharp as a tack or blunt as butterknife. I'll spare you the mystery: the memories are as blunt as a butterknife.

There was a recognition of the place of Gen Z in the judiciary. One of the members of the interview panel; declared that they form the majority of the workforce. The interviewers were obsessed with the question of how interviewees would manage this cohort of workers and it brought to my mind a sense of dread. No matter how had it has tried to demystify itself in the eyes of the public, the judiciary is stultifyingly bureaucratic, pigeonholing different cadres in neat boxes and bestowing on them qualities that satisfy the decision to pigeonhole them in the first place. I am, as my elected representatives tend to put it, of a contrary opinion.

All organisations have distinct cadres, with unique attributes and needs, and whose recruitments was undertaken to meet distant institutional needs. The aim of the institutional human capital development system is to forge them into a team and point them in the same direction. Institutional needs supersede demographic identities. Since the fateful anti-Finance-Bill-2024 "Gen Z protests", this demographic has been imbued with mysterious powers and bestowed with inexplicable needs, instead of seeing them as part of the continuum of public officers, an unbroken thread of recruits going back tot he founding of the Kenyan civil service. If change is to visit the judiciary, the change is to visit all cadres and hierarchies of the judiciary, to bring old doggies up-to-date with the artificial intelligence and ChatGPT world, and acculturate the Gen Z whippersnappers into the mysteries of the civil service. The aim, as always, is to forge a united workforce that is dedicated to achieving the institutional mission.

But in a Government festooned with buzzwords and "it" catchphrases, certain traditions are no longer followed, and the consequences are there to see: unhappy cadres at all levels of the civil services, dissatisfied at work, yet unable to depart for greener pastures because the world out there is wildly competitively cutthroat and only the most ruthless survive. Career in the "private sector" are quite often short-lived; the days of working for a single employer all through ones career are over. Indeed, more young people work more side hustles in a year than certain kinds of civil servants have done for thirty-five years.

And so in order to try and recreate customs long dead, there is a terrifyingly stuck-in-place generation of jurists who still cling onto a world where lawyer, and the advocates they became, memorised Latin phrases even if they no longer held onto the meaning behind the phrases. I could give you a reasoned explanation of why a court decision is considered invalid or not binding because it was made in ignorance or forgetfulness of a relevant statute or a binding precedent, leading to a demonstrably wrong conclusion, and why such a wrong decision would not be considered as precedent-setting. But I would not think it necessary, unless someone was truly determined to resurrect Cicero, to fall back on per incuriam to make my case.

Customs, particularly the customs of professions, must evolve. It is the only way that practitioners can keep up with a changing world. Principles, on the other hand - truth, justice, integrity, professionalism, hard work, dedication, honour - all those must hold strong. But, like the wigs and robes of yore, if you cling onto the wrong customs, you will draw the wrong lessons about the different cadres in your institution, and fall under the spell of catering to the needs of small, ill-defined fiefdoms - instead of building an effective institution to achieve a singular mission.

Lord Acton was right

Prof. Makau Mutua and Dr. David Ndii have one massive thing in common: their understanding of a "presidential system of government" is that under the current Constitution of Kenya, the president's mandate under Article 132 is expansive, and should not be fettered by constitutional and statutory interpretations regarding transparency or fiscal prudence. Obviously, the Katiba Institute is of a contrary opinion.

The constitutional and statutory limits of the the president's mandate under Article 132 will be canvassed by legal teams all the way to the Supreme Court and the decision by the High Court to annul the appointment of twenty-one advisors will not be the subject of this screed. Instead, we can attempt to examine why Prof. Mutua and Dr. Ndii are expending so much energy to re-establish the imperial presidency Kenyans buried on the 27th August, 2010.

Prof. Mutua's volte-face is particularly surprising; Dr. Ndii's not so much. The latter has been pretty open about his motives and motivations, and by and large, he has achieved his objectives. Prof. Mutua spent a considerable amount of his professional live as a lawyer, constitutional expert, political commentator and sounding board to the political opposition in staunch opposition to the establishment, perpetuation and expansion of an imperial presidency. He has cavilled against the idea that a president has the freest hand in how he forms his government, whom he appoints, what he pays them, and what the presidency is allowed to do without seeking a popular mandate from the electorate (or the citizenry) to do it.

Prof. Mutua is one of the dozens of constitutional thinkers who shaped the language in Article 10 of the Constitution, particularly the inclusion of the words "sharing and devolution of power, the rule of law, democracy and participation of the people" in paragraph (a) of clause (2) of Article 10. Prof. Mutua's inclusion among the coterie of advisors appointed by the president, to advise him on constitutional affairs, was a surprise, particularly as the president had among his team Mr. Kennedy Ogeto, the former Solicitor-General, to advise him on the same matters and, more importantly, the president has ready access, day and night and on short notice, to the Attorney-General and the entirety of the State Law Office.

It was clear that Prof. Mutua was taken on as part of the president's rapprochement with the late Prime Minister, Raila Odinga, which rapidly took shape after the 2024 anti-Finance-Bill Gen Z protests. Mr. Odinga got the chance to include in the Cabinet and the Executive office of the President his acolytes and confidants, such as Prof. Mutua. Had Prof. Mutua carried on in the same vein he had when he was advising Mr. Odinga on what we needed to do to live up to the highest ideals of the Constitution, we would not be having this conversation. But he seems to have adopted the president's and the president's other advisors' views on the expansive powers conferred by Article 132, and set aside his own long-held views on the need to limit presidential power. The dissonance is blindingly glaring.

Dr. Ndii's position is not untenable. He is a political mercenary. If he ends up being paid a pretty shilling, that is the price we pay for not waging a successful counter-insurgency against his political machinations. I will not begrudge him his victories just as I will not begrudge Katiba Institute its successes in the High Court against Dr. Ndii. But for Prof. Mutua, one must wonder: did he ever believe any of the things he said and wrote in his decades in the constitutional wilderness with the fighters of the Second Liberation and the army of constitutional lawyers who made impassioned submissions on the need to limit the power of the imperial presidency?

It is a truism that once a person is sucked into the very heart of the Government, it is almost inevitable that they will be seduced by the power, pomp and circumstance. Nothing quite prepares you for the way the power is wielded and how it shapes destinies. It is quite devastatingly powerful and few can resist its allure. You snap your fingers, and shit gets done. Doors are flung open for you. Red-carpet treatment is laid out for you. Everyone - and I mean, everyone - answers your phone calls. Promptly. And if you have a keen ear, you will hear them answer your phone calls at attention. It is enough for you to start thinking, "I deserve this. I am meant to be here. This is what I was made to be." Until Katiba Institute blows up your dreams into a million pieces. We should heed the warning by John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton, 13th Marquess of Groppoli.

Starting to cope with Baba's absence

Even Mr. Rigathi Gachagua has the good sense to pretend that he loved Raila Odinga unreservedly. The late Mr. Odinga was a force of nature, a political phenom. He shaped and reshaped Kenyan politics. He became an institution. It didn't matter what power presidents thought they had, if Raila Odinga adopted a position on any matter, the president had to figure out how much political pain he was willing to endure to try and prove Raila Odinga wrong. More often than not, the president chose peace.

So it is no surprise that men and women of little political consequence are today pretending to have been Mr. Odinga's closest boon friends, that they stood with him even when he was tilting at windmills, that they were the wind beneath his sails, and that they espoused the same [often radical] politics he espoused. In the days after his state funeral, you have seen these political dwarfs lining up at Mr. Odinga's grave, laying wreaths, and paining themselves as the spiritual; successors of Mr. Odinga's politics. It is a wonder Mama Ida Odinga has not chased them from her who with a kiboko.

We are still coming to terms with Mr. Odinga's death. We should have been better prepared; even international icons die. Mr. Odinga was quite aged, and it was unreasonable to expect that the would outlive us all. And because we were not prepared, we are trying, in our own way, to shape the post-Raila-Odinga era, with charlatans and scallawags taking on airs and pretending to being the Second Coming of Raila Odinga, while others try, in underhanded and scurrilous ways, to erase from the historical record the vile and hateful things that said about, and did to, Raila Odinga.

I don't know who among the contenders will inherit Mr. Odinga's political kingdom. But in the 22 months to the next general election, Mr. Odinga's shadow is going to loom quite large. In his political party, the Orange Democratic Movement, no amount of PR engineering is going to Make Mr. Oburu Odinga, Mr. Odinga's elder brother, a charismatic leader. Neither will it make Ms. Gladys Wanga, Homa Bay Governor, any more popular now as she was when Mr. Odinga anointed her as the Homa Bay gubernatorial candidate. The true battle for the leadership mantle in ODM is surely going to be between Mr. Edwin Sifuna, Secretary general and Senator of Nairobi, and Babu Owino, Member for Embakasi East, isn't it? No one knows.

Kenya's political opposition is practically dead. The Minority Party exists in name only. It does not have a unifying figure to direct its energies. Ms. Martha Karua, indefatigable as she might be, is in the same leaky dinghy as Mr. Gachagua and Mr. Kalonzo Musyoka. No one is listening to her, just as no one is listening to the other two has-beens. Peter Anyang' Nyong'o and James Orengo, the late Mr. Odinga's closet political confidants are over the hill same as Mr. Oburu Odinga; they will not be building a political movement on the memory of the late Mr. Odinga any time soon. Their political glory days are long in the past.

The ODM appointees in the Cabinet will keep their mouths shut; no one with any sense talks with their mouth full. The ODM parliamentary party is going to maintain a studious silence as well. Even there champion debaters will say little worthy of attention. They are all trying to work out if they have a political future now that the political memory of the man who brought them to political prominence is swiftly being co-opted by charlatans and scallawags.

The political moment is in President Ruto's hands to shape or shatter. Only one man has the political charisma to affect how his presidency will evolve in the next 22 months: Uhuru Kenyatta. But will Mr. Kenyatta lose interest? Will he demonstrate the late Mr. Odinga's deft political touch? Or will he foolishly and obstinately insist on the deeply unpopular and unliked Mr. Fred Matiang'i as the vessel of his politics?

The King is dead; Long Live The King.

Junet Mohamed, in his eulogy for the late Second (and Longest-Serving) Prime Minister of Kenya, the Right Honourable Raila Amolo Odinga, Elder of the Order of the Golden Heart, took to heart the allusion to Raila Odinga's "Orphans". He noted that there were so many of them, he would organise them into a group and become their chairman. Amidst the humour is a nugget of truth: Prime Minister Odinga was a force of nature who touched millions of hearts and changed millions of lives.

We will have all the time in the world to parse together the life and times of Prime Minister Odinga. For now, we must contend with the void that his death leaves in the politics of Kenya. Prime Minister Odinga has been a consequential politician since the day he was accused of participating, and sponsoring, the 1982 attempted coup d'état against Daniel Toroitich arap Moi.

Those of us who came of age in the 1990s only came to know of him when he was released from detention in 1991 and the pivotal role he played, first at his father's side, and later as an Opposition politician in his own right, in the Second Liberation of Kenya. Few will deny him his flowers; Prime Minister Odinga was a key figure in the reintroduction of Multi-party Politics in Kenya, the constitutional reform movement that resulted in the abortive 2005 constitutional referendum and the successful 2010 constitutional referendum.

Prime Minister Odinga built a formidable political identity, one that has seen dozens of national politicians gain fame, wealth and power. There isn't a politician sitting in the Parliament of Kenya today whose fortunes were not shaped by Prime Minister Odinga. The same is true of county governors, past and present, and dozens upon dozens of local politicians. One either made their name by vehemently and vociferously railing against Prime Minister Odinga or by riding in his coattails to the seats of political power.

Presidents bent to the inevitable: in order to govern, and govern effectively, they needed Prime Minister Odinga, if not on their side, but not in opposition. The Raila Odinga Handshake was the most reliable political insurance policy a president could have. Moi, Kibaki, Kenyatta the Younger and Dr. Ruto - all of them came to the same inevitable conclusion and their governments enjoyed a stability no other politician, themselves included, could provide.

Now that we have buried Prime Minister Odinga, we are in uncharted waters. Mr. Kalonzo Musyoka, one of the senior-most politicians who transcended the same political period as Prime Minister Odinga lacks that charisma and political sure-footedness that Prime Minister Odinga displayed. Ms. Martha Karua, one of Prime Minister Odinga's lawyers when he was persecuted by Mr. Moi, has the political spine, but not the common touch that endeared Prime Minister Odinga to millions. No one else has even the lickspittle of a chance to become the force of nature that Prime Minister Odinga was. We are in uncharted waters. Will Prime Minister Odinga's "Orphans" find among them a champion to carry forward Raila Amolo Odinga's dreams for Kenya?

What Mr. Imanyara must teach us

Gitobu Imanyara was on the frontlines of the Second Liberation, one of the few principled political streetfighters that Kenya actually deserved. Then he got elected to the National Assembly and it all turned to shit. He is not the first political radical to have forgotten the lessons of revolution, the most important being that while a revolution needs men and women to lead from the front, the revolution needs an institutional movement to make the gains of the revolution permanent.

In the Sunday Standard of the 5th October, 2025, Mr. Imanyara says what has become common knowledge: seven [honest] men will save Kenya. This is disappointing.

There are many men and women who have made sacrifices in the name of Kenya and for Kenyans. They have offered not just their bodies, but their intellect and influence to shape the politics of the country. For the most part, they have achieved many big and small gains. But they have singularly failed to alter the trajectory Kenya has been on since Independence. Kenya has entrenched a form of corrupt ethnic balkanisation that has all but guaranteed that the trajectory of the human development index is downwards.

There was a period, sometime in the 1980s and ending with the 1992 multiparty general election, when the Kenyan political revolution was truly organised. It not only established a broad cohort of men and women who would lead the revolution, it also generated a wealth of political discourse that shaped what would become the first draft of Harmonised Draft Constitution of 2010. The Mwakenya writing, the columnists who wrote for Society and Finance, the "opposition" lawyers who defended political prisoners, the Mothers of Political Prisoners who protested for months at Freedom Corner, the Green Belt Movement that challenged the anti-human environmental policies of the Moi government...the list is long...most of their work has been undermined, watered down, distorted and, in some cases, reversed in the decades since the 1992 general election.

Instead, we have been programmed to believe that what Kenya needs is a saviour, or a group of saviours, who will right the ship of state. We no longer speak of organising or institutionalising the revolution. We place enormous faith, and pressure, on individuals to reform the country without building the necessary infrastructure that will assure success. Political parties, newspaper and news magazine columnists, playwrights and filmmakers, musicians and novelists, public debates and intellectual tradition, everything that we need to institutionalise and organise the revolution is a for-profit arrangement that prioritises extremely short-term gains at the expense of the long-term development of the country.

It is why people are suddenly excited that Mr. Maraga has appointed the United Green Movement Party as his political party briefcase of choice to bring him to the highest seat of political power in Kenya. And why people haven't taken time to ask why a political party that seemed to have sprung to life in 2019 with a slate of registered members from all counties in Kenya did so without running a single recruitment exercise in the months before its establishment and registration. Who are these mysterious Kenyans who had not only heard of and agreed with the political message of the United Green Movement Party, but chose to register with the political party, hand over some of there personal information, and agreed to be entered as founder-members of the political party when it was registered by the Registrar of Political Parties?

Even the few saviours we have elected to Parliament don't seem to know how to understand how the government actually functions. They have ideas. Some of their ideas are great ones. But they seem confused about their role in the government. Indeed, many of them refuse to accept that they are in the government. Take Mr. Omtatah's obsession with public finance. As a senator, he has the power to summon the Cabinet Secretaries responsible for public money to appear before the Senate and account for how they have spent the public money entrusted to them. Mr. Omtatah has not done so even once.

He also has the power to introduce in the Senate legislative proposals (Bills) that would reform the public finance management framework. He has done so only once and the proposal itself was a miss-mash of confused musings about public debt and the public debt management office. Needless to say, beyond publishing the Bill Mr. Omtatah did little to promote it among his Senate colleagues, and ignored the vital role of the National Assembly in seeing to it that it was enacted by Parliament. Instead, Mr. Omtatah has not missed an opportunity to sue the sue government he's serves in whenever it has enacted a Finance Bill. His litigation victories since he became a parliamentarian have been on very narrow points of the law, and have done little to reform the government he serves in.

The point I am trying to make is that Mr. Imanyara's prescription for what ails Kenya is what we have practiced since 1992 without success. If he were to pay attention, even he would admit that the promulgation of a new constitution in 2010 did little to change the way Kenyan political institutions behaved; it just slapped a veneer of legitimacy on them. But, by and large, the corrupt ethnic balkanisation that prevailed in the 1990s continues to poison the body politic in 2025. Given his vast experience in the radical political opposition in the 1980s, what Mr. Imanyara should be helping us to do is to rethink everything we know about political organisation and institutionalisation of the not-yet-over revolution. We need to rebuild, from the ground up, political institutions, political ideologies, political thinking, and political streetfighting. Wow must eschew the narrative that we need Messiahs. No one is going to save us. Only we, the body of Kenyans, collectively, can save ourselves.

The definition of "insanity"

Now that we are all committed to campaigning for the various elective posts in the national government at the 2027 general election, regardless of the fact that we have not implemented many of the promises we made to each other during the 2022 general election, it is time to revise some of my hobbyhorses. One of my obsessions is whether the system we are participating in right now is capable of identifying, promoting, nominating and electing qualified politicians to successfully stand in the general election and effective perform the functions of the State offices to which they are elected. My view, as always, is a mixed one, but the short answer is, "No."

Kenya inherited the Westminster style of politics from the English and, through several constitutional amendments and statutory tweaks, adapted it to the peculiar style that Jomo Kenyatta and the Kiambu Mafia promoted before and after Independence: the Balkanisation of Kenya into tribal fiefdoms with tribal satraps pledging the troth of their tribes to the president, and not to their own tribal interest. In return, the president would appoint the tribal satraps to high public office, usually the Cabinet but also assistant minister, chairman of the board of a parastatal, ambassador or diplomat of some kind, head of a powerful government organisation like the Kenya Police Force, and so on and so forth.

For nigh on forty years a majority of Kenyans believed that if their tribal satrap was "in government", they too, were "in government" and the fabulous wealthy their tribal satrap acquired during his tenure "in the government" was a reflection of the tribe's power and influence "in the government". Obviously, any casual observation of the country the past fifty years shows that this is not true. Urban areas, for their most part, benefited immensely from the "development budget". The rest of the country would get piecemeal "development" as and when the president deemed it necessary to secure a political goal. It had nothing to do with the power of their satrap or the needs of the people that a road or a school or a factory or a dam or a hospital or a university was built in their "area". All that mattered was that the president would get something out of it in the end.

This lesson appears not to have been learnt.

Chief Justice (Emeritus) Maraga has thrown his hat in the presidential election ring. For this, he has chosen the United Green Movement Party as his vehicle to State House. He has promised to "popularise and strengthen the party". It is sad that a man in his mid-seventies, who has been witnessed to epochal political transformations in this country, is continuing in the legacy of buying briefcases and thinking that he is the new broom that will sweep the Augean stables clean. When he fails - and he will fail - he will not have the necessary political education to understand why he failed.

There are no shortcuts to organising a people. It takes time, effort, money, charisma and, sometimes, violence, to get them to see that their fate can only be salvaged if they row int he same boat and in the same direction. The Hon. Mr. Maraga's political party of choice has been in existence only since 2019. In that time, it has done little, if anything at all, to "popularise and strengthen" itself. It has not established a system for subscription-based membership. It has obsessed itself with he "national leadership" and has done little, if anything, to establish grassroots leadership cadres and the village and ward levels. In my opinion, it is not a serious party regardless of its lofty ambitions.

The same is true of all the other political parties. Not one of them is a member-driven subscription-based political party. None of them prioritises the establishment, promotion, support and development of grassroots leadership cadres at villages or ward level. What is worse is that their total focus, to the exclusion of everything else, is the presidential election; all the other elections are of interest only to the candidates yet, in the balance, a member of a county assembly has the ability to improve your quality of life that is on an order of magnitude greater than what the president or county governor can do.

It is irrelevant that counties are organised, largely, on the basis of linguistic and ethnic identities; all of them suffer from the same dearth of political education, political leadership and political knowledge. If this doesn't change, then we will be repeating the same failed pattern of behaviour we have practiced since 1964 when Jomo Kenyatta pushed through the first constitutional amendment and the result will be the same failures we have endured since Independence.

Constitutional lawyers are a menace

Lawyers are a fascinating lot and none is as fascinating as that species of lawyer known as "constitutional lawyers'. These people have such an inflated sense of themselves that they frequently forget that in Kenya, they are the equivalent of rats and lowlifes. Last week one of them pontificated on the reasons for why Kenya's elections are expensive and I swear, he it did not seem like he had given the matter more than a cursory thought.

This is my two-shillings worth of the thing: Kenyan elections are expensive because Kenyan politicians, public officers, parliamentarians, civil society and lawyers willed it to be so. Let me explain.

Unlike in the case of more sensible jurisdictions, Kenyans have built for themselves an electoral edifice that prioritises public corruption over and above all else. The entire purpose of seeking elected office in kenya is to get a chance to stick all ten fingers and ten toes in the public purse; after all, almost every major public tender has a parliamentarian, county elected representative, senior public officers and members of the Black bar as the primary beneficiaries, not the people of Kenya.

Even the election itself is an opportunity for these people to eat. After all, someone has to supply electoral materials, professional services like accountancy and legal services, security, transport, accommodation, food and beverages, and dozens of other supplies to not just the electoral commission, but to every single public entity involved in the election, including the police and intelligence services. The prices of these supplies will be inflated ten-fold, delivered late, if at all, comprising things of such poor quality that of what is delivered, wholly one-half will be discarded. And the thing of it is that no one, not the Auditor-General or the Public Accounts Committee, will enquire to closely at what was delivered, how much it cost, and who ate.

Lawyers, especially, have fomented such a poisonous air of suspicion that to is no longer tenable for basic education teachers and assistant chiefs to be appointed as polling station clerks and returning officers. Lawyers will point at the fiasco that was the 1988 Mlolongo KANU election as proof of their reasoning and leave it at that as if Kenya is still a single-party dictatorship. Instead, every five years, we engage in a very expensive exercise of securing the services of at least 58,000 polling station clerks and returning officers to supervise the general election, all of them drawing allowances, and supplied with airtime, data bundles, communications devices, transport, food, drink and other amenities at eye-watering prices. That, and the fact that we seem to procure an electric voter registration software worth tens of billions of shillings for each and every general election, is the main reason "elections are expensive" in Kenya.

Kenya has entirely too many constitutional lawyers who do little to make Kenya's constitutional experiment function effectively. Our constitutionalism has been sacrificed at the alter of the planet-sized egos of our constitutional lawyers, and expensive general elections are the clearest sign that we need a different way of thinking about constitutional affairs. We can no longer afford to be held hostage to the reckless musings of constitutional lawyers. The cost, in fiscal terms alone, is too high.

Good and evil in Palestine

I don't think there is a Palestinian in Palestine who thinks that the revolt by Hamas fighters on October 7 was wrong. I believe that most, if not all Palestinians, in Palestine on that date believed it to be a righteous response to the decades of oppression by Israeli settlers and the regular pogroms, massacres, killings, abductions, enforced disappearances, sexual violence, maimings, starvations, famines, detentions without trial and race-based discrimination by the Israeli occupation forces in Palestine and Israel.

Kenyans who have adopted the ethno-supremacist Zionist talking points propagated on the right-wing parts of the internet and the US commentariat, are under the impression that the violence by Hamas fighters constitutes terrorism and the violence by the Israeli occupation forces constitutes self-defence. Few of those Kenyans have a complete education on what constitutes settler colonialism, why it is morally and intrinsically wrong, and why occupied peoples have the moral and legal right to resist, revolt, fight back and use all tools at their disposal, including extreme violence, to end the occupation.

The Kenyans who condemn the violence by Hamas fighters frequently repost images of the Jewish holocaust and the expression "never again" as justification for the violence by the Israeli occupation forces and frequently equate the violence by Hamas fighters with Nazism. They are unwilling to accept that the new Hamas Charter, adopted in 2017, eschews the "destruction of Israel as a Jewish state" because it would shatter their self-delusion that posits that "Israelis are the victims". These Kenyans also wish to manipulate the rest of us into accepting the genocide perpetrated against the Palestinians by the Israeli occupation forces as the just outcome of the promise that was made to the biblical Israelites about the land occupied by both peoples.

It never occurs to these Kenyans that it is not possible to blame an occupied people for resisting their occupation, especially when the occupation uses the most heinous methods known to man. I never paid attention to the use of "dual use goods" before; I thought it only applied to military goods. So imagine the utter shock when Israel imposed an embargo on most food items - including chocolate and all forms of candy - from being imported into the Gaza Strip or the West Bank on account that they are "dual use goods". 

Israeli Jews, Jewish Israeli settlers and the Israeli occupation forces have engaged in a sustained campaign of mass starvation for decades (in addition to the violence, including the deliberate targeting of children as young as 10 days old) in order to create the conditions that would lead to the mass exodus of Palestinians out of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and pave way for the total and final occupation of that territory by Israeli Jews. When Kenyans who support the Israeli occupation claim that Palestinians routinely engage in the beheading of infants and children, they invert the victim with the offender because the past two years alone have demonstrated the depravity that the Israeli Jews can sink to as they torment and oppress Palestinians, including beheadings of Palestinian infants, that Israelis have not apologised for.

These kinds of Kenyans are impossible to reason with, even as many of them are otherwise well-educated and well-traveled and know, or should know, good from evil. In 2025, in Palestine, Israel is evil. Palestine is good. It's that simple.

Rethink the proposal for terror to address boda bodas

I am wholly prepared to concede that the boda boda menace has completely gone out of control. Today's fatal accident between a Citi Shuttle and a boda boda that resulted in the death of the boda boda rider and the subsequent attack by his compatriots that resulted in the bus being set on fire harkens back to the early days of the Mwai Kibaki presidency when his Minister of Transport, the authoritarian John Michuki, attempted to rein in the out-of-control matatu industry.

We all remember how the matatu industry came to be so dominant. The fateful decision by Mzee Jomo Kenyatta to accommodate the demands of "investors" in the matatu sector, while simultaneously undermining the urban public transport jointly operated by City Hall and Kenya Bus Service at the time, would eventually end up with the organised criminal enterprise known as Mungiki becoming a law unto itself. Mr. Michuki, both as Minister of Transport and Minister of Internal Security, waged a violent and relentless war to rein in the Mungiki and the matatu sector.

When his war started, it was waged entirely through enforcement of the existing regulatory framework enacted by the central government (Traffic Act) and City Hall (Nairobi City by-laws). The decisions made by Mr. Michuki regarding road safety led to the imposition of new traffic rules on speed governors, night driving for PSVs and seatbelt use by PSV passengers. They were not enough; the road fatalities continued to climb. The Mungiki had morphed into an army and it took great extrajudicial violence to rein them in: Mr. Michuki oversaw a bloody campaign of abductions and extrajudicial killings that finally broke the Mungiki's back.

The war on the Mungiki had terrible knock-on effects. Police forces, especially the dreaded CID, were later on to be unleashed on "terrorists" and "terrorist sympathisers". It will never be known how many innocent Kenyans fell victim to the violence on Mr. Michuki's orders; what is known is that the framework of abductions and murders became entrenched. The allegations against the police forces arising out of the June 2024 and June 2025 public protests hammer home this view.

In the 2025 protests, "goons" were deployed by elected representatives to counter-protest the so-called Gen Z protestors. Many of the "goons" were ferried to protests by boda bodas, and many of the "goons" were, in fact, boda bodas. This was a culmination of a decade of lax regulation of the sector. From as early as 2012, it was clear that without a coherent road safety policy for boda bodas, they would become ungovernable. Half-hearted efforts to control them always came a cropper, whether it was confining them to designated parking spaces in Town or the wearing and use of safety equipment.

What is certain is that the transformation of what we know as public transport has not been followed by a rethinking of existing road transport policies. The design of roads remains rooted in a desire to move large numbers of passenger motor vehicles from one place to another. Other road users - including mkokoteni pullers, boda bodas, traditional taxicabs, digital taxicabs, licensed and unlicensed matatus and traditional buses - are afterthoughts, if they are thought of at all. Their needs are only addressed long after the needs of passenger motor vehicle road users have been addressed and even in this arrangement, there is a hierarchy of motor vehicle roads users. At the top are Government officials in their massive Toyota Land Cruiser Prados and chase cars; at the bottom are the owners of sub-1000cc ex-Japan shitboxes.

The chaos fomented by boda bodas is part of a larger dysfunction in road transport policy. Chasing the boda bodas from public roads will not solve the other parts of the dysfunction. A holistic approach is called for. One area of focus that would improve the situation is the rehabilitation and upgrading of non-motorised transport infrastructure, particularly footpaths and on-street business (otherwise incorrectly called "hawkers"). What public investment that has been set aside for new roads should be dedicated to rehabilitating non-motorised infrastructure to ensure that pedestrians, on-street vendors and non-motorised transportation like mkokoteni are effectively incorporated in the infrastructure. In my opinion, this would eliminate half of the congestion on public roads, with pedestrians and the vendors who serve them being confined exclusively to the pavement, and out of harms way.

Secondly, more off-street parking should be prioritised, and new PSV termini for off-peak parking developed to accommodate the massive number of PSVs that spend half the workday parked on the street, taking up valuable public road space that could otherwise be used to move motor vehicles within the CBD. This should be done concurrently with an upward revision of on-street parking fees. The current parking fee is the CBD and its immediate environs is too low which has the effect of making it ineffective in regulating availability of on-street parking. The proposal to introduce a motor vehicle tax from the 2024 was intended, in part, to solve this problem but in typical ham-fisted, deaf-eared serikali fashion, it was not introduced honestly and was shot down together with that accursed tax law in which it was contained.

Mr. Michuki's draconian tactics to subvert the Mungiki's hold on public transport ended up creating a monster that continues to consume us, more than twenty years after the destruction of Mungiki. Messrs. Chirchir (Roads and Transport) and Murkomen (Interior and National Administration) need a different approach, one that has the highest chance of transforming road transport into a safe and efficient system, and one that does not need coercive force to work. It would also have the added incentive of creating new public procurement opportunities that will create jobs at every level, which is something this Government is determined to address. But proposals to employ tiger same draconian measures beloved of the late Mr. Michuki will not only not work, but will guarantee that the Government is reviled going into the next general election.

Kizuri chajiuza

Daniel Toroitich Arap Moi did not sing his own praises. For that, he had an entire choir composed of stalwarts like Sharif Nassir, JJ Kamotho, Ezekiel Barng'etuny, William Ole Ntimama and the Muungano Choir. Longevity in Kenyan electoral politics - he was first nominated to the legislative Council in 1952 - had turned him into a household name and not even the Kihika Kimanis of the 1970s could deny that Mr. Moi's place in the firmament of Kenyan politics was well-established, if not rock solid.

Mr. Moi's successors were never that lucky. Though, of the three of the them, Mwai Kibaki was the longest in politics, he did not have the political presence that Mr. Moi had, relying instead on his place as the longest leader of the Official Opposition and his ability to unite disparate Opposition leaders into a workable coalition. Mr. Kenyatta, and his successor, unfortunately had neither Mr. Moi's legitimacy nor Mr. Kibaki's broad acceptability, instead being welded to each other with the accusations by the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court of crimes against humanity stemming form the post-election violence of 2007/2008.

What they brought to presidential politics is a PR machine that was unrivalled; Mr. Raila Odinga's Coalition for Reforms and democracy was saddled by old men with very old ideas intended to prosecute old school politics in the twenty-first century. CORD was defeated, but only barely, because despite the PR razzmatazz, the vast majority of the voting public were impressed by neither coalition. Unlike Jomo Kenyatta who was intimately connected to Kenya's independent, the least not by how he and the other members of the Kapenguria Six were jailed by the colonial government, the presidential candidate and his running mate in Jubilee had nothing to point to as their place ion Kenya's political narrative and so they could only sell PR and very little more.

It must frustrate mightily that few people have strong enough feelings to voluntarily sing ones praises, despite ones highly developed sense of worth and importance. You inherit a national government whose coffers are running empty, saddled by foreign debts that threaten to overwhelm, and with dedication and determination, one has found a workable formula to keep the economic wheels turning. And yet, the men and women who should, MUST, acknowledge you political genius continue to pay attention to other less-important things like extra judicial killings, rampant corruption, tens of thousands of kilometres of potholed roads, uneven healthcare services and similar wasteful pursuits. You wonder, "What is wrong with these people?"

So, you make the fateful decision to sing your own praises. The expression, "kizuri chajiuza, kibaya chajitembeza" does not feature in your formidable repertoire of popular phrases. An extensive period of PR driven political manoeuvring is hurtling to its denouement, and the best one can do is say, "I am the best!" None can predict time; so it remains to be seen what good vainglory will bring.