Articles Tagged Life & Society

And so we celebrated our first Mashujaa Day. A nice idea by the constitutional review team – de-personalize the Kenyatta and Moi days, combine them into one holiday, use it to celebrate all heroes, not just politicians whose ‘heroism’ is debatable in any case. A nice idea, but we have some way to go before […]

I am finally, reluctantly, on Twitter, as sunnysunwords I will be posting new articles (and some older ones) from this website, as well as occasional tweets when something worth saying overwhelms my deep fear of banality…

William Ruto, Minister for Higher Education, did us all a favour recently. Not quite in the way he intended, but never mind. Mr Ruto penned an opinion piece questioning the investment of scarce resources in seemingly unproductive educational disciplines, specifically the arts, humanities and social sciences. There was a predictable brouhaha in the land, with […]

This is my 400th article for the Sunday Nation, and to mark the milestone I want to return to a favourite theme: education. A confession first: I was beaten, disciplined and detained many times at school. Not that I was a serial miscreant, please understand. I was punished for multitudes of minor offences: questioning the […]

India’s shame is nearly complete. You will not have failed to notice the utter mess the country has made of the preparing for the ongoing Commonwealth Games. “Shining India” was meant to showcase its newly acquired global prowess by holding an event to make the world sit up and take notice. Well, the world did […]

‘The Peculiar Kenyan’ is launching soon. Come and listen to me discuss Kenyan peculiarities with journalist Pauline Odhiambo this Saturday, 2 October, at 2.00 pm. This is part of the Storymoja Hay Festival, Kenya’s leading literary event, at the Railway Club grounds, Tandaa ICT tent. The festival will have many attractions. For further information see […]

Last week I asked you to think differently about Kenya’s population numbers and demographic profile. Half our population is aged under 18. Good or bad? Consider this: would you rather have the Japan problem? Japan’s population has peaked and is expected to decline for decades. That means fewer workers paying fewer taxes to support an […]

This is an article I’ve been waiting to write for a year. We completed our population enumeration exercise a year ago, and watched the results being delayed many times due to, we are told, “data complexity.” Make of that what you will. I know you are more interested in the numbers your tribe clocked, but […]

Today I’m going to name names. Last month I realised that this SIM-card registration thing is serious, and that I had a data modem that required registration. I was passing through a shopping mall, and found that Safaricom had set up a special table outside their customer-care centre to conduct SIM registrations. Just one table, […]

Jackie Selebi, former police chief in South Africa, was sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment this month on corruption charges. The presiding judge called him “an embarrassment to all right-thinking citizens of this country.” Here, a new team under PLO Lumumba was finally appointed, after a protracted process, to head the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission. And a […]

Following the confirmation of a new constitution, those who were ‘Yes’ are now cock-a-hoop about fresh beginnings, renewals and new dawns for Kenya. But right there during the election process last week, something happened that should tell us the scale of the task ahead. There were press reports indicating that a large and rowdy group […]

“All sovereign power belongs to the people of Kenya…” If that single sentence – the first one in our new constitution – is implemented to its fullest, our twenty-year wait will have been worth it. Those in favour outnumbered those against, two to one, and so we have a new constitution. Those who backed it […]

Next week Kenyans go to the polls again, to say yes or no to a new constitution. On Wednesday, some of us will lose and some of us will win. After Wednesday, we need to know HOW to lose and HOW to win. The recent football World Cup final was an ugly affair. The Dutch […]

It’s all over, and the best team won. Spain, consistently the world’s outstanding football side over the past few years, took home the trophy. Holland came to the final playing kung-fu rather than soccer, and deservedly went home empty handed. And so it’s over. I already see many bereft people in a sorry state every […]

I was planning to write about the World Cup this Sunday, but those parliamentarians of ours had to go and ruin everything. So you won’t get my pleasant ruminations about the world’s greatest tournament; instead you’ll receive my diatribe against the world’s most overpaid elected representatives. Like most Kenyans, I was sickened by Ghana’s tragic […]

We spend too much of our time on big issues and big personalities. We remain engrossed in ‘Yes-No’ politics and huge debates about governance and development. In all this grandstanding, we sometimes miss the fact that all great movements in history stem from small actions from small people. Nothing starts off as a big deal, […]

Hi All I hope you like the all-new Sunwords.com. We have given it a fresh new look and feel, and added modern features. These include video clips, easy links to social networks and sharing sites, better site navigation, and many more. You will also find an attractive version automatically renders when you visit the site […]

For the past two weeks I have been beating the drums for Africa, arguing that the continent’s prospects look very good – provided it quickly does the right things. Those things involve big investments in knowledge and connectivity. Let me wrap up the topic with a closer look at the phenomenon of emerging markets. I […]

Last week I argued that if we want Africa to be lit up, we need to worry about knowledge, not electricity. If we generate and exchange enough knowledge, the electricity (and products and services and incomes) will come, as sure as day follows night. In 1958 a gentleman called Leonard Read wrote a short, readable […]

Dr Edward Mungai is Dean of Strathmore Business School. He likes to use a satellite map of the world in his presentations to current and future students of the school. The map shows the earth by night – which parts are most brightly lit up. As you would expect, North America, Europe and Japan have […]

My fellow “Kalasingas” are not renowned for their social activity. In Kenya, the primary image of the Sikh male is of a hard-drinking, cranky, rumbustious, self-absorbed individual. There are indeed enough Sikh males of this ilk around to feed the stereotype, but the stereotype does not define the species. At London’s Heathrow International Airport a […]

The good people of the United Kingdom went to the polls last week, and a very strange outcome ensued. No party managed to garner sufficient votes to command a majority in parliament. David Cameron’s Conservative Party gained the most seats, but fell short of a majority. Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s Labour got hammered in the […]

There’s nothing like a quiet drive to aid the reflection process. Or so I thought. I embarked on a family trip to the great mountain in the heart of our country recently, and was able to think a little about the land we live in. My first set of thoughts were about our drivers. These […]

Here we go again. The headlines say it all: the coalition government is crumbling, the principals have fallen out, the shilling is sliding, investors are nervous, we are facing another meltdown. But I ask you: what exactly has changed since last week? What cyclone has hit Kenya that our prospects look so suddenly bleak? Have […]

Amidst the carnage of Haiti, a quiet little drama is playing itself out. Baptist missionaries from the USA were arrested trying to take 33 “orphans” out of the wrecked country, ostensibly to a better life in an orphanage in the neighbouring Dominican Republic. Except that many of the children were not orphans at all, and […]

The green city in the sun. That was what our beautiful Nairobi was famously known as. Well, we’re still in the sun (and increasingly so), but the ‘green’ part of the description may soon be hard to justify. Why is no one worried about the pace at which trees are being destroyed in our city? […]

What passes for ‘news’ in this country? I want to put to you that what you are consuming is not news at all: it is pointless and irrelevant trivia. Let me start with an admission: I am spending less and less time consuming Kenyan news, and it is months since I watched a full television […]

For the past two weeks this column has been trying to instil some hope in you, to suggest that maybe, just maybe, things will getter better for Kenya. To end the series, let me move you smoothly to a third reason for hope in 2010: our international position. If you want to understand Kenya’s role […]