Challenges for Kenya's next president - Opinion. Kenya has its fair share of challenges, but also an endowment of opportunities.
The most important advantage is the Kenyan people. Unlike many of its peers, Kenya has not relied on oil or mining to develop. It remains one of the most diversified economies in Africa [PDF], with a well-educated, enterprising population, a capitalist tradition, and a GDP that straddles agriculture, tourism, communications, infrastructure, services and increasingly natural resources. The country's development blueprint, Vision 2030, seeks to consolidate and exploit these advantages to make Kenya a solidly middle-income country as soon as possible.
The plan identifies several flagships, transformative projects ranging from a new constitution to the ambitious port/rail corridor from Lamu to Ethiopia/South Sudan. The first priority will be to consolidate far-reaching legal reforms already underway to turn Kenya around. Wabenzi: In the land of poverty and opulence - Opinion.
At the back of Nairobi's City Hall is an old black Vanden Plas Princess limousine - a symbol of status during the 1960s and 70s.
The Mayor of Nairobi purchased it shortly after Kenya's independence from Britain in 1963. In fact, most aldermen at the time thought it was a Rolls Royce, and perpetuated this misperception to those who observed it sibilantly cruising along the streets of Nairobi. As a village boy, I admired the car when I saw it in mid 80s. So controversial was this purchase in the 1960s that the matter ended up in Parliament on whether the country could afford such opulence.
Of course it couldn't. Kenyatta had his own white Lincoln Continental, a fleet of Mercedes Benzes and two Rolls Royce. One characteristic of the Wabenzis in Kenya was - and is - that they use taxpayers' money to live large. Overnight, shortly after independence in a swift and seamless transformation, the new public servants became flashy tycoons. 'Man-eat-man' Wabenziland.
Annals of Settler Colonialism: British Atrocities in Post-War Kenya. The anti-colonial movement in Kenya of the 1950s was mythologized by the British as a shadowy ‘Mau-Mau,’ an irrational outbreak of aimless hatred.
In fact, the movement was protesting the confinement of Kenyans to ‘reserves,’ their crowding into urban slums, the privileged position of white British settlers, and the latters’ plan to go on ruling over 6 million Africans with an iron fist. Kenya's Kibera Slum. The International Reporting Project took us to the Kibera slum today, everyone here says it's the largest slum in the world (though Wikipedia says it's third), and we heard presentations from youth groups, Doctors Without Borders, and others.
We also broke into small groups and interviewed families -- we were free to ask anything we wanted -- about half of which were HIV positive. Kibera It's hard to understand how many of them make it at all. Rent for a dirt-walled shack is 1500 shillings per month (the exchange rate is approximately 80 to 1 so this is around $18.75 per month). All of the people we talked to were casual laborers, and they found work when they could doing things such as knocking on doors and asking if people needed their clothes washed.
The Sewage System As for infrastructure, they get water from the government twice per week, maybe (Tuesdays and Sundays). He has aids, his wife is virus free Nevertheless, the economy was more vibrant than I expected. Food Stand School.
Kenya - curators.. Killing Kenyans: One Strike at a Time « Gukira. Kenyan health professionals—nurses, medical technicians, pharmacists—are on strike.
Predictably, the newspapers are featuring stories of the many patients who are dying because of the strike. Health professionals, we are told, lack compassion. Crass materialists, they dare to put their own material comforts above the urgent needs of the most vulnerable: sick women and children. The claims are familiar, uttered in similar tones during the doctors’ strike in 2011. I prefer not to simplify complex situations, but polemics have their uses. During the doctors’ strike, we learned about their labor conditions: they worked in under-funded, equipment-deprived conditions catering to massive populations.
Poor labor conditions create material and affective obstacles. Patients die. Doctors detailed what it felt like to watch patients die. Doctors said: patients die when we show up because we don’t have resources to treat them. Worse, the mainstream media led the demand for excellence without money. Eye On Kenya's Parliament — Eye On Kenya's Parliament. Kenya Goes Dark « Sahel Blog. For months, Kenyans have been watching the value of their shilling fall (hitting an all-time low on June 7 before recovering slightly) as costs of living rise (inflation passed 14% in June, and could hit 22% later this year).
It's not just Kenya. Squaring up to the seamier side of empire is long overdue. History teaches us that empire can bring out the worst in people.
In Britain we applaud the "civilising mission" of our imperial past, but are less happy to acknowledge the violence and brutality that so often girded our imperial endeavour. It is time we were more honest.