"CEOs can't wait to read Sunny Bindra's articles every week."

I have been full of praise for Kenya’s media during the recent, still-not-concluded, general election. Local media coverage was vibrant and lively, and most importantly, stayed away from the parochiality and bias of the past. I was delighted to see very young anchors and journalists handling very weighty matters with verve and aplomb. Applause. Yet, […]

“Tonight, I will be meeting friends in a restaurant (tavernas have existed for at least 25 centuries). I will be walking there wearing shoes hardly different from those worn fifty-three hundred years ago by the mummified man discovered in a glacier in the Austrian Alps. At the restaurant I will be using silverware, a Mesopotamian […]

“How did it get to be “OK” for people to be late for everything? Because as far as I am concerned, it’s not OK. In recent years it seems that a meeting set to start at 9 am, for some people means in the general vicinity of any time which starts with the numeral ‘9’. […]

Let’s all take a break from Kenyan election mania this Sunday, and focus on something that actually makes a difference in our lives. Regular readers of this column will know that it searches high and low to showcase common people who show uncommon wisdom, unknown people who need to be known, and little people who […]

Once upon a time, this thing called ‘tribe’ mattered a great deal. When all our livelihoods were dependent on soils, rivers and pastures, your tribe helped you secure those vital resources for ‘your’ people. Your tribe kept you safe and kept you fed, so you were right to feel loyal. Once we started to urbanize […]

He was born into poverty, one of seven children. He agitated against the iniquities and elitism of his society from an early age, often violently. He eventually formed a political movement that focused exclusively on the problems of the poor, and it quickly gathered a large following. He was supported to the hilt by the […]

“I recently taught a workshop on crisis communication at a top business school. Afterward, a mid-career executive came up to me with a question. But it wasn’t about how to handle rogue employees, or industrial accidents, or philandering CEOs. Instead, it concerned a far more personal sense of crisis: her overwhelming fear of public criticism […]

She was a bright, determined, hard-working girl from a poor family. She persuaded her father to sell his only plot of land to pay for her dream to become a doctor. She promised him he would never have to work again as a labourer once her ambition was fulfilled. She worked nights in a call […]

The time for Kenyans to select new leaders is upon us again. We go to the polls in just a few weeks time. Will we choose wisely? The precedents are not good. We know very well that most Kenyans do not choose leaders on merit. They choose them mostly on tribe. Your kinsman is your […]

A few years ago, I used to cross one of our now defunct Nairobi roundabouts on my way to work. Every day I would watch most drivers ‘overlap’ by arriving in the wrong lane to turn right, then cut in by force on the roundabout itself. Mostly in full view of traffic police stationed on […]

Kenya, we all know to our cost, has some of the worst driving habits and most dangerous roads in the world. Every single day, we lose many lives and many livelihoods to road incidents. You notice I did not call them road “accidents.” Accidents happen unintentionally and unexpectedly. Our incidents are both intentional and expected. […]

I sat next to a leading Kenyan at a recent visit to the SOS Kenya Children’s Home in Buru Buru. We were told that the organization has a burning goal: to reduce the proportion of support it gets from foreigners versus locals. So far, it’s an uphill task. I discussed this with my neighbour in […]

As Greece’s economic implosion continues, a worrying trend is emerging: the growing popularity of neo-Nazi groups and attacks on immigrants. The increasingly popular Golden Dawn party has been repeatedly implicated in racial violence, though it denies involvement. Its hostility towards African, Asian or Arab immigrants, however, is overt, as it reportedly champions slogans such as […]

New roads. New railway stations. New ports. New connectivity. That’s the Kenya We Want, right? We know infrastructure is at the heart of development, right? We know that infrastructure investments will power the economy to Vision 2030 and Middle Income status, right? Wrong. Do you wonder why we build a new ‘super’ highway only to […]

Trees and development don’t go together? Of course they do. As I discussed here last week, sustained development does not take place at the expense of the environment. Ask Haiti, which in a frenzy of slashing forests for wood fuel, reduced forest cover from more than 60 per cent to under 2 per cent in […]

This is the time of year when Nairobi becomes Jacaranda City. Everywhere you look, the famed trees are in blossom, painting the skyscape a vivid lilac, and precipitating our well-known ‘purple rain’ as they shed their flowers and create beautiful natural carpets all over the city. But look around, and you will see that this […]

This is my 500th column on this page. To commemorate the occasion, let me take you on a little journey. Let us go back to the Kenya of a decade ago, when I first started writing in the Sunday Nation. In 2002, this country was broken. It had been plundered dry. It was in the […]

There is a simple, widely observable incongruity in the higher planes of business life. Where are all the women? Specifically, where are all the women when it comes to decision-making and direction-setting? Look at the upper echelons of corporate life, and you will see only a few token feminine faces. This situation is found even […]

There is a persistent drone in the air of human endeavour, and it goes something like this. Don’t try too hard; it’s not worth it. Don’t try to achieve too much; you’ll fail and it will hurt. Don’t stand out from the crowd; the crowd will shun you and you will be lonely. Be average. […]

Travel is great for a variety of reasons. One of the most important is the possibility of serendipitously coming across something you might not otherwise have seen. This happened to me recently when I opened a magazine on an airplane to find the following: “There was this one instance when a woman in her early […]

There is nothing quite like Kenyans when it comes to our propensity to laugh at ourselves. I discover this every so often on Twitter, when making a few comical observations: often the hashtag created will go viral in a matter of minutes, as Kenyans on Twitter pile in with their own rib-tickling insights. #HowToSpotAKenyan was […]

Kenyan leaders, what are you looking at if not at the carnage on our roads? We have always had a high rate of road accidents, but it has now reached crisis proportions. There seem to be awful crashes occurring across Kenya every single day. These result in deaths and dismemberments, grief and disruption, tragedy and […]

I was fascinated to read this on the Harvard Business Review blog network recently: “Recently I asked a high-level Singapore official how Singapore’s companies would be able to compete in a world of countries whose companies have greater access to low-cost labor (as in China) and cutting-edge innovation (as in the U.S.). His response was […]

Picture yourself at the funeral of a very rich person. This person owned much land and had plenty stashed away in plenty of bank accounts. There are many people present at this funeral, as there always are when a wealthy person passes away. The now-expired man of means is being given a fitting send-off. But […]

To be widely respected in Kenya today, you need to have just one thing. Just one. All of the things that normally generate respect – virtue, compassion, wisdom, knowledge – have been thrown in the gutter. In the society we have crafted, only one thing matters, and you know what that one thing is. Money. […]

While watching a cookery programme on TV the other day, I came across a most interesting word. The word is “kodawari,” and it is in Japanese. The programme in question showed a master sushi maker at work. Sushi has always fascinated me: for its artistry; its painstaking attention to detail; its insistence on the finest, […]

The 2 hashtags, #TwitterBigStick and #TwitterThumbsUp were never intended to be finished products in any sense. As I have said from the outset, they were simply a demo of what focused tweeting can do. They play on very human needs: to express frustration when good service or value for money is not provided; and to […]

Another year, another set of Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education results. And another year in which parents, children and the media go into a seemingly uncontrollable frenzy about the significance of the results. I have written about this peculiar phenomenon before, and no doubt will again. For I fail to understand why we have to […]