The most potent question in public debate right now is whether or not to send “moribund President and ineffective Prime Minister” et al packing through fresh elections. The coalition government stands accused of failed leadership - their accuser, the discontented 70% of Kenyans per recent opinion polls and now the clerics. The prayers before the public court are that an urgent decision be reached on whether or not fresh elections should be held right away.

Kenya's coalition government has held fresh crisis talks a day after the premier said he would boycott cabinet meetings in a letter to the president. Prime Minister Raila Odinga still feels his Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) is being sidelined by President Mwai Kibaki's Party of National Unity (PNU).

We understand that the Kenya government has applied for an emergency credit for US$100 million to cushion its currency from the International Monetary Fund. We also understand that this application is due for consideration at your next board meeting. The Partnership for Change is concerned that while Kenyans continue to demand accountability from the Government of Kenya on our public debt, the government continues to ignore the public and continues to borrow and indebt the poor people of Kenya.

cc The Kenyan government must issue orders for the military and police to ‘cease and desist from acts of intimidation and harassment of human rights defenders and to make public the text of such instructions’, Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, has said in a statement issued on 7 April. Alston said that dozens of prominent and respected human rights defenders who provided information to the UN have been targeted in ‘a blatant campaign designed to silence individual monitors and instil fear in civil society organisations at large’, with all indications seeming to point to the fact that the campaign ‘has been carefully coordinated within the government’.

cc Attending a conference on Kenya’s national dialogue and reconciliation in Geneva, Yash Tandon, notes that the issues of power sharing, ethnicity, and governance overshadow matters related to economics and welfare. He also ponders why, other than the 50-60 Kenyans present, he and Tanzania’s former president Benjamin Mkapa are the only attendees from East African countries. Given the ‘many daily cross-border interactions between the people of the region’, this lack of interest in Kenya, he says, demonstrates ‘a serious slip-up of the principle of solidarity among East African neighbours’. Help from European friends to Kenya has, Tandon suggests, allowed Uganda and Tanzania and the East African community ‘an exemption from their moral responsibility’.

The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has warned Kenyan leaders that he will act expeditiously and relentlessly against the suspects of the post election violence that rocked Kenya last year. In a terse statement, the ICC prosecutor Louis Moreno Ocampo said through his adviser Beatrice le Fraper du Hellen that he and his team are ready to step in once called to do so. He added that when the Kenyan parliament fails to set up a special tribunal to try those behind the violence the ICC would react.

cc The absence of both President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga from UN-convened talks in Geneva to assess Kenya's power-sharing deal is a sign that the country's mediation process has run into problems, writes coalition Kenyans for Peace, Truth and Justice (KPTJ). The mediation process, KPTJ says, is vunerable and in crisis 'because Kenya’s political leadership has continuously and consistently undermined it'.

For the past year, Karen Awuor*, 15, has had a new daily ritual– taking antiretroviral (ARV) drugs. She discovered she was HIV positive during an unintended pregnancy that forced her to drop out of school; her baby died after just four months. “When I was in class seven, I got into a relationship with one of my teachers; he promised to pay my school fees if I agreed to be his wife,” she told IRIN/PlusNews.

The Kenyan government should urgently renew efforts to revise and enact bills to create a special tribunal to try those responsible for last year's election violence, Human Rights Watch said today. The organization also issued a memo explaining the procedures of the International Criminal Court in relation to the special tribunal.

March 24, 2009 is Impunity Day in Kenya - the Human Rights Defenders Day. It was the 24th day of March in 1996, when Daniel arap Moi’s State assassinated our dear Karimi Nduthu. Karimi Nduthu had just finalized an investigative report into the state sponsored ethnic clashes of 1992 and 1993 which targeted targeting ethnic populations of the Gikuyu, Kisii, Luo and Luyha in Rift Valley, Nyanza, Western and Coast Provinces.

The music blaring through Nyahera village in Kenya's southwestern Nyanza Province comes from two large speakers strategically placed at Mzee Dishon Onyango's home. Youths, some as young as 12, gyrate to the beats of their favourite music and consume a local illicit brew; others smoke bhang [marijuana] with abandon.

The Grand Coalition Government in Kenya seems to be losing the war against corruption. In the wake of widespread starvation and rising costs of living, TI-Kenya’s National Corruption Perceptions Survey shows that many Kenyans believe the government has the power, the ability but not the will to tackle corruption. Parliament stands especially indicted in the failure to uphold the common good.

The Maasai of Kajiado, like many indigenous communities the world over, are continuously victims of historical and contemporary injustices arising from land and natural resources. This is occasioned by their unique and distinctively different livelihood system from the mainstream Kenyan society and their refusal to embrace the modern agricultural economic systems, despite much pressure to do so. Most recently, their lands in the Kajiado district are being threatened by the Nairobi Metropolitan Area Bill 2000 which will urbanise Kajiado as part of the Nairobi Metropolitan Area (NMA).

The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has appealed for $244 million to scale up its operation in Kenya, where high food prices and drought have left 3.5 million people in need of aid. The Kenyan Government declared a national disaster in January following the failure of rains in some parts of the country. Subsistence farmers in south-eastern and coastal areas were hardest hit and have experienced almost total crop loss.

Throughout her farming career, Jane Owino she has planted recycled seeds from the previous year’s harvest. However, for as long as she can remember, the 47 year old farmer in Western Kenya has never posted any profits from her labours. Year in and year out, she prepares her farm diligently and plants the seeds on time but she knows that she is at the mercy of increasingly unpredictable seasons and when the rains fail her harvest is in jeopardy.

On Wednesday, Feb 25, 2009 Somali bandits raided the Samburu tribe near Lerata, Kenya, a small community between Archer's Post and Wamba located in the Samburu District, northern Kenya, once known as the Northern Frontier District. Bandits took hundreds of cattle, shot two men, stole a local conservancy vehicle, and kidnapped two Samburu children. The response of the Kenyan government has shocked Samburu victims and their advocates.

When we were told that Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga (Principals to the Kenya National Accord) had settled on a Kenya Cabinet size of 43, Mars Group told Kenyans to prepare themselves to pay through their noses, unless Kenyans managed to convince these two men to see what was obvious: That Kenya could not afford such a large Cabinet and that Kenya did not need such a large Cabinet. This very bad start for the Grand Coalition has bust the bank less than 12 months after the Grand Coalition Cabinet was appointed. And for what?

The African Research and Resource Forum last year held a 3 part seminar series on Discourses for Strengthening the Civil Society in Kenya. As a result, a book ‘Discourses on Civil Society in Kenya’has been published. The book is currently on sale at the ARRF Offices, African Book Services alongKoinange Street and Simply Books at ABC Place.

We lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex individuals, in a word, queers, have had the distinct un-pleasure of being told we don't exist—in official government statements, historical documents, and contemporary statements. Well, we do. We want Kenyan stories by Kenya-based and Kenya-born queers. About everything. We want writing about the dailyness of our lives, the good, the bad, the weird, the indifferent.

I agree with the author, we know the and we know that women can make a difference. We have know this for a long time, but somehow our organising has not been succesful. We can not wait to say the same in 2013, we need to fill the gap that has made women not access these positions, we need a woman president come 2012, but more so we need women who are leaders of integrity as being a 'woman' is not enough platform. There are many many qualified women, what we need is a strategy that is different from the past.