Rasna Warah

I don’t know why everyone is surprised that the first Al-Shabaab terrorist to be arrested and jailed in Kenya is not a Somali, but a young Luhya man from Western Kenya.

Kenyans are seen to have a “business-as-usual” approach to corruption, but a new report published by the International Peace Institute shows that our extreme tolerance of impunity is having devastating consequences and is, in fact, undermining the State’s legitimacy.

On July 18 this year, the United Nations Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea tabled a report to the UN Security Council.

‘Too educated, too strong, too successful, too stubborn and too hard to control.’ This is how Mwangi Mathai described his headstrong wife Wangari when he sought to divorce her in 1979.

In September 2008, a food aid convoy operated by a wealthy Somali businessman and his wife was allegedly looted by an armed group in northern Somalia.

The season of giving has started - and it is not even Christmas yet.

I knew the real story about the famine in northern Kenya and Somalia would probably never be told when I watched a young foreign aid worker “reporting” the famine for CNN in Dadaab camp.

Apparently, a reality show-cum-documentary called ‘Famous, Rich and in the Slums’, which has been shot in Kibera, has been airing on British TV in the last few days. The film is being promoted as a fund-raiser for the residents of Nairobi’s most notorious slum.

The fortunes of the Nairobi-based United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT) could change drastically in the wake of a damning report by the UK’s Department of International Development (DFID) that suggests that the organisation is riddled with irregularities.

Last month the Associated Press (AP) reported that four African countries - Djibouti, Mali, Mauritania, and Zambia - had misused grants from the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, a revelation that was first made public by none other than the Global Fund itself.