Articles Tagged Life & Society

Regular readers may recall I was arrested a while back. Irregular ones may need reassuring that it was for a minor, inadvertent infringement of road rules that technically constituted an offence. I looked the arresting officer in the eye and asked him why he wished to arrest me, a generally law-abiding person who takes great […]

What’s the biggest killer in the developing world? Given our propensity to engage in senseless and unending armed conflicts, you might be forgiven for thinking war was the biggest culprit. Not so. If you have been following much-publicised recent global campaigns, you might also think diseases such as malaria and HIV-AIDs are the most lethal […]

Why do so many of us feel so helpless so much of the time? We think there’s no point in protesting – nothing will change. We think there’s no point in applying – the jobs are already allocated to insiders. We think there’s no point in aspiring to run our own businesses – we’ll just […]

Xenophobia never died. That intense, irrational hatred or fear of “the others” is alive and kicking. It thrives, paradoxically, in South Africa, a country whose rebirth was predicated on the principle that “separateness” was wrong. It emerges, predictably, in Greece, where immigrants provide a convenient scapegoat for self-inflicted economic woes. It even threatens, bafflingly, to […]

Sometimes I wonder: is there something put in Kenyans’ drinking water that makes so many of us mad? This thought occurred to me as I watched a so-called “pastor” invited to a high-ratings show. Nothing wrong with that, you might say: except that this man of the cloth, ahem, was recently exposed as being no […]

A Chinese restaurant in Nairobi was operating a blatantly racist admission policy. It was exposed. Kenyans were understandably outraged. Sensing the the collective anger, the authorities took action. The restaurant is now closed, and the owner faces charges in court. Will we now live happily ever after? I suspect not. Life is never that simple. […]

The need to write something immediately after the horrific slaughter of our students in Garissa was overwhelming. I had to resist, though. An event this brutal and unprecedented requires some reflection and some perspective. And so I have been able to observe the reactions of others. I looked on aghast as the supposed perpetrators of […]

This column continues its campaign to make April Fool’s Day a national holiday in Kenya. This is because we take foolishness to peculiar heights year after year. The Daily Nation, like most newspapers, has a tradition of creating a spoof story every year on the day that honours fools. My point is this: around these […]

Gangland-style executions are firmly with us in Kenya. A spate of recent incidents, all with the same calling-card: professionally executed hits that target specific individuals. Couple that with the ever-present threat of terrorism, and lots of Big People are worried. What is interesting is what the Big People think they should do in response. Members […]

We say so many things so often, that quite often they lose all meaning. Some phrases, however, are used even when their true meaning is the exact opposite of what is said. Here are some to liven up your Sunday. I’m truly humbled. Ah, that favourite of Kenyans, especially when accepting an award. Ostensibly, it […]

Is violence the only way to make a point? If Kenyan university students have a grievance – an injustice, a bad policy, or even just a power cut – they will be out on the streets rapidly. Not protesting, but rampaging: attacking and stealing from motorists and bystanders, hurling stones, destroying property. When Nairobi hawkers […]

Parts of European football have a racism problem. When a black player is on the pitch, some fans in some countries will start making monkey gestures, or throw bananas on to the pitch. Picture this: a grown man in the crowd starts jumping up and down, aping an ape. He makes primitive sounds. He does […]

You must have heard about “nutgate.” In a nutshell, here’s what happened. A passenger aircraft was about to take off from JFK airport in New York. A lady seated in first class was served macadamia nuts. The nuts were served in their bag, rather than on a plate. The lady was deeply offended. She lambasted […]

If you have young children, you are likely to have faced a familiar problem this week, pretty much anywhere in the world. As your children ended their Christmas holidays and went back to school, what happened? It’s safe to predict that virtually every child out there descended into deep gloom as the time to return […]

I had to deliver a eulogy at a funeral recently. Observing endings is a good time to dwell on the meaning of your life. One minute, you are fully alive on earth, working, contributing, connecting; the next, due to some often surprising turn of events, you will be gone. No more, with people gathered around […]

Back in the nineties, Kenyans were really fed up of their leaders. The country was in dire straits, and there seemed to be no light at the end of a very long and dark tunnel. In those days, our only symbols of hope were a group of people not in government: opposition politicians, young activists, […]

A few years back I was sitting in the balcony of a famous game lodge in the Tsavo reserve, taking a short break while running some executive education seminars. I was gazing upon a watering-hole, against the magnificent backdrop of Mount Kilimanjaro, unveiled. Suddenly, the bushes next to the watering hole parted, and a massive […]

I lost a much-valued work colleague this week. Please indulge me this Sunday, for I feel her short life has much to teach the rest of us. How do we extract any meaning from this all-too-brief, seemingly meaningless existence of ours? How do we attach any nobility to life when it seems subject to what […]

Last week on this page I wrote about a chronic problem in Kenya: that we are increasingly unable to trust the certificates churned out by our educational institutions and examination bodies. Some of these certificates are forgeries; others are bought without doing any of the requisite study work; yet others are gained by cheating in […]

There have been widespread reports of cheating in Kenya’s public examinations again this year. As there are in most years. The problem of papers being leaked and sold seems to be rife. In addition, can we trust the certificates being churned out by our educational institutions any more? So many are suspect, being sold by […]

I railed against the hypocrisy of corporate giving on Twitter recently: the self-conscious posturing, the playing for the cameras. A couple of followers pointed me to the wisdom contained in Matthew Chapter 6. A great treasury of wisdom it is, too. Jesus is in full flow against the hypocrites: those who “sound a trumpet” whilst […]

This is my 600th column on this page, and to record the milestone let us take another look at this country of ours – through a different lens. Recently, feeling depressed by the state of the nation – the self-centred, money grabbing politicos and their relentless noise, the unending terrorist attacks, the spiralling epidemic of […]

Many moons ago, a gentleman called Chege ran a food kiosk close to the main campus of the University of Nairobi. Chege’s place was well frequented by students, and was an institution unto itself. Many of these students came from relatively humble backgrounds from all over Kenya, and lacked support systems in the big, unfriendly […]

A friend was visiting Kenya from abroad recently, and I took him to visit his old high school. The place was a shambles, dirty and decrepit. Some of the desks and chairs looked like they had not been changed since my friend last sat on them thirty years ago. And yet there was gold to […]

Edgar Dean Mitchell is a former NASA astronaut. He was the sixth man to set foot on the moon. As he stood on the lunar surface and gazed back at planet Earth, he was profoundly moved. Later, he wrote this about the experience: “You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction […]

I can’t watch the news anymore. I can’t watch any more images of children being maimed and mangled as rockets rain on them out of the sky, because of ancient hatreds that they know nothing about. I can’t watch any more images of people hell-bent on killing other people within their own borders, because of […]

It seems wherever we turn in Kenya these days, we find someone discussing their net worth. On frothy television shows, in newspaper spreads, in glossy magazines: invariably someone is on about their material achievements. Said person will be posing for the camera, expensive watch carefully placed to catch the best angle. And the discussion, usually […]

There’s been much debate in Kenya of late around the subject of skin lightening. As we know, many young African and South Asian women take this option, using skin-harming products to chase the illusive beauty myth that surrounds light skin. Many of them, when challenged, defend the practice, calling it no different from changing their […]