Nyakiya Nyakiyaism to represent Intellectus in East Africa Peace Summit,Rwanda

This is a special publication: On behalf of Intellectus Consultancy, I take this opportunity to congratulate Nyakiya Nyakiyaism on his appointment to represent Kenya and Intellectus Consultancy in particular in a peace and diplomatic mission in Rwanda. This comes after the political instability that has been witnessed in  South Sudan, the continued militarism in Uganda and Congo and the Alshabaab Threat that has affected Somalia and Kenya. Nyakiya is a reknowned Political Scientist from the University of Nairobi and an established writer and political critic. He is increasingly creatting critics in the political theory circles as he champions his school of thought named 'Nyakiyaism' after his Luo-Suba name.We wish him luck and may he continue championing the progressive debate in the East and Horn of Africa.

Kennedy Mwangi
CEO
Intellectus Consultancy

STUDENTS DIE LIKE CHICKEN: SO SAD! VERY SAD! EXTREMELY SAD!-Steve Biko (Organizing Secretary,SONU,UoN)

The university of Nairobi senate has decided to kill her own students, the same people who has made them sit in Gandhi Wing. They recently introduced article 18(f) of the senate rules and regulations that requires that in the medical school, students who fail or get a re-sit in any paper shall repeat a whole
academic year. This is done in total disregard to the ripple effect the students are going to have once it comes to action. The trend started in medical school and no one protested, it has slowly started moving to American wing for the engineers and the School of Engineering dean has even pressurized the campus rep to give him the names of the students who complained, and hopefully to Parklands, Chiromo and finally to Main campus. The saddest part is that, during the proposal of that particular article, students were not represented by the SONU executive officials, whom the senate tends to ignore forgetting that it is the only body which can give crucial directions to anxious students to calm any eruption of riots. I can't say what happened at the engineering wing recently, they can best tell you. Some of the result of this particular move of mental torture and depression targeted at students is the loss of one of our comrades, a fourth year medical students who before his death, is said to have been disturbed at his poor performance in some of the papers he didn't perform well at which then, since no one cared, isolated himself. Sadly there are no counseling services or the people entrusted with that particular service are not up-to-the-task for students who have a lot to cope up with like the medical school, engineering wing, school of law and vet med school and the college of biological and physical science (Chiromo Campus) . The officers entrusted with this particular job are so unwelcoming and mostly absent, this leaves most students disillusioned and resort to deadlier moves, like committing suicide or engaging in drug and substance abuse, as well as deferring their courses
The student leaders who are in authority led by Chairman-Zack Kinuthia, Secretary General Edith Mwirigi, Organizing Secretary Steve Biko (Signior) have always made legal efforts with the top administration to address the plights of students that, the calling is so high, the senate are not in touch with reality. "We are the voice of the comrades, and our key role is to give them information and ensure that the administration understand their plight, We also have a responsibility of ensuring peace and peace in the university, we cannot risk betraying students when they all know that something is astray, the world all over knows that leading intellects ain't easy because they are a lot which can neither be blackmailed or fooled on something they clearly know doesn't suit their interest, LET NOT STUDENTS CONTINUE TO DIE UNDER MISTERIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES,the resultant effect might not always go well with the university and its environs. The senate will not,shall never or has never been the voice of
students" Said Signior Steve Biko the organizing Secretary-SoNU. The recent alarming death of Students have see the most vibrant SoNU leaders like Signior Steve Biko, Zack Kinuthia and Edith Mwirigi take charge of the situation and even go an extra-mile to e sure things are put back to order. But the recent killing at the CENTRAL POLICE STATION, seemed to be unbearable and the students forces, commonly known as the strongest power on earth after Jesus Christ, had to retaliate but the outcome was one more death of a student of engineering who was shot by a live bullet while rioting at night. "The senate must do something either now, right now, this moment, suddenly and if they can't then they have to immediately do something" Signior Steve Biko.

KETER:YOU ARE FIGHTING A LOSING BATTLE-Steve Biko(Organizing Secretary, SONU)

After all the acrimony that preceded President Uhuru Kenyatta's visit to Rift Valley last week, Deputy President William Ruto now admit the claims by the great Jubilee alliance rebel and Nandi Hills MP, Alfred Keter, that the URP wing was only fed by the fragments of power in the coalition government are near-truths. He, the Deputy President, recently assured the incited Rift Valley MPs that issues raised by the youthful Nandi Hills MP are amicably settled. The big question is "Is Ruto still playing his ODM departure tune?" Just before the historical and massive exodus from ODM which was key to the downfall of of Raila's influence in the Rift valley, Isaac Ruto severally criticized the Nyanza wing, led by Raila Odinga, for giving their region a raw deal and frustrating their people. But William Ruto, then minister for agriculture, was severally quoted to be warning Isaac to stop creating a rift between him and RAO. It only came to appear as the war of the damns when Ruto finally admitted that there were irreconcilable differences in the ODM. This move by Keter could be a signal that the Jubilee Government might not work together come 2017 but these are just learned projections. We are all in terms of what an incumbent president is capable of if the Nyayo era is anything to go by. It would be wise for Mr. Ruto to maintain the status quo and let the son of Jomo rule for ten years while he is busy winning friends in the government. He should project himself as a friendly candidate and never be a hostile one, especially towards the Mt Kenya Mafia and the entire region of the Kikuyu. This is a tribal country where tribal arithmetic is core to access and maintain power. The notion that the Kikuyu cannot vote for anyone else apart from their own will be put to test then. At tis juncture its advisable to note no one tribe that does not vote for their tribesman is in existence in this republic. In 2002 it would be simplistic to say that the Luo voted for Kibaki; its only that they saw an opportunity for Raila to grab the premiership once Kibaki was in power. The Kisii have at one time voted for Nyachae and so did the Kamba. Proceeding, I can freely advise Ruto o keep the Kikuyu close to power and dangle the carrot come 2022, until then, he should hold his horses.

JUSTICE DELAYED IS JUSTICE DENIED-Dennis Kabutha(Linguistics Specialist and Political Scientist, University of Nairobi)

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, goes a line in a popular song; that withstanding we are all in consensus that after the ICC indictments against Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto failed to kill them, politically at least, made them stronger something that eventually culminated into the jubilee coalition despite the fact that the cases project the two as arch-rivals. If we say the camaraderie of the prince in Uhuru Kenyatta and the hustler in William Ruto was not founded on the rocky grounds of their respective ICC cases among other reasons, we shall be lying to ourselves. In fact, this is one things that shall not be obliterated from our history even when everything else vanquishes to antiquity. I need not mention that these cases have also been pivotal in international politics, to say but the least. They have given other African leaders a mouth-piece through which they can shout at the top of their voices. For some reason they are justified, no one is yet to give a clear explanation whether crimes against humanity are only committed in Africa, but we must acknowledge that Africa’s is a grave situation especially now that we have just witnessed the world’s youngest nation slip into a civil war overnight!

I have watched in awe at what was personal problem mature into a national problem ending in parliament and eventually to a continental one in the hands of the United Nations Security Council. It is either Kenya or the scion of Jomo is too influential otherwise this issue would have escalated to such unprecedented proportions the moment Sudan’s Al Bashir was handed an arrest warrant, or even when Gbagbo’s case commenced. If we are to view The Hague based court as imperial, Ivory Coast is the most ideal example to use! We all heard the office of the prosecutor relentlessly insist that there has to be a lesson made out of the Kenyan case. I am from the school of thought that out of that out of the three cases, the prosecutor has will have to nail one or two, if she fails; she will have nailed the three! Given the political nature of these cases, there might be collateral damage (not justice) at the end. All along we all have witnessed that the deputy president has literally taken the bull by its horns while the president has seemed to cower. Don’t be quick to judge him; we haven’t yet heard from the horse’s mouth that he won’t attend. Remember the presidential debate?It never came from his mouth that he wouldn’t attend but there were all indications only for him to resurface in the last minute. While the son of Jomo enjoys his early Christmas gift, methinks arap Ruto should be a worried man. He needs to remember how the ‘don’t be vague, go to Hague’ phrase boomeranged on him. I would prescribe to him a little caution when it comes to matters on ICC lest he gets beaten in his own Waterloo. I might have no prowess in legal matters, looking at the cases you’d be forgiven to think Uhuru Kenyatta is swimming deeper in the murky waters of The Hague but actually Ruto could be.

To begin with,how admissible are these cases? In his dissenting opinion, ICC judge and international law scholar, Hans-Peter Kaul was evidently squandering about the admissibility of the Kenyan situation in Ruto’s case, as stipulated in article 7(2)a of the Rome statute. Ruto’s case has been marred by setback after another each falling like a sledgehammer. Where he was lucky to have the time he was required in the court waived, the prosecutor pinned him through the appeals chamber, terming it as “a blanket excusal.” Earlier when the case was beginning, the prosecutor managed to get an extra week to organize witnesses, despite the fact that the commencement of the case was long overdue. Now the prosecutor needs time to gather more evidence, in a case whose commencement is also long overdue. I still find it difficult to understand how two witnesses could knock a case of as heavy magnitude as the president’s off balance. She has come back with the same story she had a few months ago when she needed the case of Muthaura dropped. Remember the day Uhuru’s case was pushed to 5^th February 2014? Did it have to coincide with the UNSC deliberations on the same while the two were totally independent? One must have been pre-empting the other in a well thought and orchestrated manner!Am yet to hear a radio recording of arap Sang presented in the court. This could be part of the collateral damage already! How, in three months, will the Gambian attorney fish more evidence from Kenya?  For such a short time, I think I need optimism lessons from her. It essentially sounds like a nolle prosequi declaration. It’s evident that there are more setbacks in the case against Ruto than there are reprieves in the one against Kenyatta. As a result, my constant fear has been and is still; the fate of these cases is pre-determined!

With all this noise of witness procurement by the OTP and witness bribery by the defence, we ought to be a worried lot if we are actually seeking justice. I can only admire the resilience of that man at the heart of Uasin Gishu County, who had the courage to put up another house besides the ruins of the one that was burnt 5 years ago. Shall we trust the OTP while Matsaanga is still walking scot-free, shouting witnesses’ names at the top of his voice? In fact, he has dared the ICC to issue an arrest warrant. Well he could be right after all; he is now having the last laugh. The Walter Barasa case, could it have been a deal gone sour if in deed witnesses were procured?

At the end of the day we seem to be having more questions than answer but we need to be even more worried, justice delayed is justice denied,it’s now more than ever we need these cases concluded logically for the sake of the victims at least, or dropped if it is pointless politics and seek justice elsewhere! How I wish we had gone the Rwanda or Yugoslavia way, perhaps an ad hoc tribunal would have served justice. We had better realise that expecting justice from The Hague is no different from expecting a voluntary retirement from Mugabe or a voluntary surrender to the same court by Al Bashir! I now choose to exonerate Kenyans from any blame for choosing The Hague court to seek justice; it is the ICC that has failed for not reciprocating our trust!

SICK AT 50; AN OPEN LETTER TO KENYA-Nyakiya Nyakiyaism (Political Scientist,UoN)

Hello Kenya, as I write, you must have resumed duty. I heard from my neighbour that he had a great time celebrating your 50 year old accomplishments and to be honest, I too, thought that a Birth Day wish for you, would be in order. But as an afterthought, I decided not to stoop that low. I didn’t and won’t celebrate with you as a matter of principle. Both you and I know that you are a hard core criminal and that celebrating your 50 years of successful breech of law, murder of innocent people, theft, ineptitude and injustice, is not the wisest thing I can do as law abiding citizen. Make no mistake, I am not protesting against your merrymaking, which does not also approve that you had reasons to celebrate anyway. Let me be magnanimous with truth, gauged on any logical developmental verisimilitude, you are a dismal performer who at 50, should be more worried and moody than restlessly jovial. Of course I know it wasn’t meant to be 50 years of perfection, but when you score a pathetic 8 out of 10 on the scale of imperfection, I don’t just see the sense in publicly celebrating that you are proudly a failure. At midnight on December 12th,1963, President Jomo Kenyatta, your founding father, full of empty promises, led your children, Kenyans into lowering the colonial flag and raising the independence flag as sign of emancipation from colonial subjugation. 50 years after, Uhuru Kenyatta, then a baby, is your forth President and just like his old man, presided over a similar event, to commemorate what Jomo did a half a century ago. Apart from that, did you have any other reason to justify your celebrations? Be honest and specific! Here! Bite this bit of straight talk and do it double-quick .Whether or not you like the taste should be your own business, because as you should have known by now, it’s not the intention of this letter to please you. Some fifty years ago, you made a sacrilegious mistake and a great symbolic blunder when you crafted and adopted a national anthem with a lullaby tune. And as is the nature of insensitive mothers, you regrettably entrusted the fate of your children in the hands of gluttonous baby sitters who with great zeal, have sang the lullaby and soothed your innocent children into slumber as they plunder your national coffers and steal your babies’ milk for 50 years. The handful of your sons and daughters who wouldn’t shut an eye no matter how sweet the lullaby seemed, are most probably somewhere in Heaven, hell or in between. Those who are still determined to journey on the same ragged terrain of trust and honesty are either gagged or ‘followed’ today so that they won’t disturb the sleeping compliant lads. But what have you done? No need for answers! We both know what you did- Nothing! And just as a reminder, it’s only you among nations, who has two different national anthems for your children. Each time any two of your children sing the national anthem, one in English and the other in Kiswahili, one of them must be lying! ‘’Ee Mungu nguvu yetu ilete Baraka kwetu…’’ and ‘’Oh God of all creation, bless this our land and Nation…’’ are completely two different songs. At 50 you should be old enough to settle on one of these two songs which in your wisdom, or possible lack of the same, could unite your children. When ‘mkoloni’ relinquished his rule and handed power over to you, you seemed just fine. Do you remember Malaysia and South Korea? Of course you can’t forget Singapore! They were your peers. You all grew up together. Confide in me Kenya, what happened? No doubt, you slept in your economic and politico-social policies, only to wake up to a country of a handful of millionaires and millions of paupers. While you settled for gurgitation of your national wealth, your peers revamped their economies and soon you shamelessly went begging for help from their door steps. Do you even have a single thread of decorum in the fabric of your mannerism? Are you ever shameful? Get annoyed if you must, lose your hope in humanity and break my head, but I must tell you this; in 1963, you suffered from disease, ignorance and poverty. Annoyingly, 50 years later, apart from ignorance that you have not yet fully eradicated, poverty which has become your national emblem, and your diseases which have greatly multiplied, you now suffer from corruption, impunity, graft, and the malady of ethnic polarization. Is this the Kenya that my grandfather an ex- soldier fought for? Is this the Kenya whose children were ranked the most hopeful in the world in 2002? Alright, I can see you hate reproach. Well, mother Kenya, forget my earlier ‘harsh’ words. By the way, I suspect that you had a reason to throw a party to celebrate your 50th anniversary and even though you might not believe me, I think you do deserve a nice celebration. You have of course come from ‘far’. Let us toss in the air and celebrate your achievements.Oh yes! Let us celebrate your 50 years of falsehood, 50 years of corruption and impunity, 50 years of poverty, 50 years of gross inflation, 50 years of greedy politicians, 50 years of squatters, 50 years of poor health, 50 years of hunger and famine, 50 years of insecurity and of course 50 years of collective ignorance. Congratulations mother Kenya on your 50th year in the business of achieving nothing and mustering the courage to celebrate it! Children of Kenya, my fellow human beings, I salute you all. Is it really true that we are celebrating, or is it our facial expressions that are misleading the observers? Is it 50 years of ‘man eat man Kenya’ that we are busy celebrating? Or are we simply sick and stupid? I tend to think and it might be true that only fools celebrate hunger, bloodshed, insecurity and apathy. Swallow me, if you must, but do we really have a nation which as a people, we can feel proud enough to celebrate? How about a little truth? Kenya was poisoned with tribalism shortly after it was born, buried secretly in the tomb of greed and only a mental picture of what it ought to have been, provided to us through fruitless national cohesion initiatives. Verily, we’re not celebrating Kenya but 50 years of Kikuyus, Kalenjins, Luos,Luyhias pokomos, Abasuba,and all the other cultural groups which make the 42 tribes of this country. There is no such thing as a united Kenya, we are lying to the world. We are cheating ourselves. We are not one. We might never be. Period. How can we be one when masses of this country live in abject poverty, die like flies in terror attacks and watch their young and old die of hunger while others within the same nation, are safe, live in extreme affluence and proudly display their pomp and splendor? How can we be united, when only less than a quarter of the total population, celebrates our ‘advancement’ in health care while not one, but many patients have just succumbed to preventable deaths as I write? Sadly, our national and county governments don’t seem to agree on who should hire and remunerate medical practitioners and as long as this stalemate is not addressed, the doctor’s strike is on. In simple terms, the sick must continue dying until we finish partying and get back to the table of negotiations. While we boast of our success in the fight against ignorance as evidenced by the numerous public and private colleges and Universities, there in a small village in Ukambani, a humble group of ‘religious’ Kenyans still think that vaccination against polio is an unnecessary and a demonic temptation from government. Fifty years into independence, insecurity as a ‘sector’ is booming in Kenya, the Northern part of this country has become a favourite playground for bandits, in Nairobi, life is unpredictable! Recently, our government fiercely fought and vanquished ‘about 10- 15’ imaginary terrorist at Westgate, and of course we don’t need a reminder on how much ‘water’ was drank from Nakumatt and other Business premises that were under ‘siege’ during the multi-agency operation by our very own (in)disciplined forces. The Kenya that was militarily ‘strong’ enough to succeeded in Somalia where the mighty USA had failed, cannot safeguard its own internal security? And with a President and his Deputy, suspected to be powerful criminals by the International community, I find more reasons to be gloomy than to expose my molars in unrealistic jubilation. I won’t lie to you Kenya! 50 years ago, you begun a race but sadly oscillated around the same point of stagnation in all aspects of your development. Precisely, you have only moved on, never forward. By openly celebrating our failures before a local and global audience, Kenya has appended the signature of failure on the form of her national character. We have become a bad influence to the world and especially to those other countries who wasted their tax payers’ money to send their heads of states and envoys to come and witness our national insensitivity. Had I the unfortunate duty of advising the Kenya @ 50 celebrations committee, because they wouldn’t listen anyway, this would have been my advice; “Instead of spending millions to mock ourselves in meaningless celebrations, let us, as a nation, purchase sack cloths, assemble in all our village headquarters and declared three days of national mourning. Let us reflect on the opportunities we have lost in addressing poverty and hunger, on joblessness, impunity and nepotism, Let us think of all the lives we have assassinated, on all the innocent lives we have lost in careless road accidents, terrorist attacks, extrajudicial killings and on the lives we are currently losing because of the Doctors’ strike. Let us take this time, to make a national declaration to begin a new, this time more seriously and with honest diligence.”