The International Monetary Fund ( IMF) said on Thursday it would give Kenya 56.8 million U.S. dollars after waivering five requirements including declaration of assets by ministers and senior civil servants, according to a report by Xinhua. A statement from the IMF Country Office in Kenya said the east African nation's macroeconomic performance had improved markedly since 2004, resulting in increased financial reserves.

In Kenya, major banks – like most banks on the continent - prefer to deal with ‘big’ clients. ‘Small’ clients find obtaining access to banking services almost impossible. One bank in Kenya has set out to change this. Zipporah Musau and Kwamboka Oyaru report for PANOS.

Like the rest of Africa, Kenya is waging a war against poverty to halve its hungry by 2015 – a global United Nations’ Millennium Development Goal. But has that battle reached poverty’s heartland? The large but marginalised rural communities where tens of millions are so hungry they are barely living. Mildred Barasa of PANOS reports from eastern Kenya.

Across Africa, the AIDS pandemic is creating chaos for hundreds of thousands of women forced to leave their land and homes when their husbands die. Campaigners say the best way to protect the growing number of these ‘AIDS Widows’ is to introduce and enforce laws which give women equal rights to inherit and own property. In Kenya, these rights continue to be denied. This article by PANOS suggests that there are signs that things might change.

The Open Society Initiative for East Africa (OSIEA) is hiring a Programme Coordinator.To Apply: Send cover letter and resume by May 5, 2007 to: [email][email protected] or fax to +254-20-3877663. No telephone inquiries please.

Clashes caused by a dispute over land rights in the western Kenyan district of Mount Elgon have continued, exacerbating the plight of about 45,000 displaced people, the Kenya Red Cross Society (KRCS) said.

About 13 Kenyans die of tuberculosis every hour and there is little immediate prospect of improvement, the head of a leading national health organisation said on Saturday which is World Tuberculosis Day.

Information communication technologies cannot be wished away in the current globalised economy. With the advent of the computing technology which has been able to provide a digital platform for managing text, imaging and voice into one is a great achievement for the present generation. This is according to Brown Onguko, lecturer at the Aga Khan University-Institute for Educational development, Eastern Africa in Tanzania

I have been living in Kenya for almost a year. I did not know that there would be so many cultural and political differences from Uganda, which was once my home for more than a decade. I was only moving across the borders of a East Africa that was definitely uniting, albeit slowly. In any case, for all the years I had been in Uganda, even in the most difficult periods of tensions and suspicions between Museveni and Baba Moi (when Moi could close the border at will), we had no alternative but to pass through Nairobi which was, and still remains, the regional communications and transport hub.

In those days there were not many direct flights from Entebbe, so we had to transit through Nairobi whether we liked it or not. There was a time when many senior members of the Pan-African Movement (PAM) in Uganda (Col Otafiire, Late Lt. Col. Serwanga Lwanga, Late Major Ondoga ori Amaza, Lt. Noble Mayombo, Mzee Chango Machyo, others and myself) were regarded as agents of destabilisation by the Moi/KANU government. In those days you stopped over in Nairobi with anxiety. At one time The Kenya Times, the government/KANU mouth piece, published a series of articles claiming that PAM was created by Museveni to foment troubles among his neighbours and across Africa in general. In my particular case I was not only persona non grata in Nigeria but had been closely associated with the Kenyan exile opposition in the United Kingdom, initially through the Committee for the Release of Political Prisoners in Kenya, and later UMOJA. It was true too that many senior people in the NRM had sympathies and solidarity with different elements of the opposition to the Moi/KANU dictatorship.

A particular kind of understanding of Kenya flowed from these experiences. One had a sense of who were our friends and who were our enemies. Consequently, even as relations between Uganda and Kenya improved, forced by economic realism and the increasing isolation of Moi's regime by its erstwhile foreign backers, and the confidence and perseverance of the democratic opposition, the view from Kampala was that Moi and Museveni were in mutual embrace for reasons of realpolitik only. The bulk of the opposition remained 'our friends'. It was no secret that Uganda supported the NARC opposition in the run up to the 2002 historic electoral revolution that saw off four decades of political monopoly.

We were all jubilant that 'our friends are in power', but since that euphoria, the reality of power and alliances based on the negative unity of 'Moi must go' has shown their limits. You may remove individuals, but dealing with the structural relations of power skewed against the majority of the people requires more than merely getting rid of the incumbent. Within two years of NARC taking power, the unity of the opposition that won the election was cashed in for all kinds of opportunism, factionalism and sectarianism and accusations of betrayal.

So it was not a familiar country that I settled in last year. It is really not clear who our friends and our enemies are anymore. They are all at logger heads. For instance, veteran opposition politician Raila Odinga, son of the even more famous Mzee Oginga Odinga, along with others, including Kalonzo Musyoka and former Vice President George Saitoti, quit KANU because Moi imposed the son of the former president, Uhuru Kenyatta, as the KANU presidential candidate. They teamed up with Mwai Kibaki and others to form the NARC which booted out KANU. Today, Uhuru Kenyatta is part of the ODM-Kenya, an alliance of parties and personalities who were formerly in NARC but are now opposed to Kibaki. Musalia Mudavadi who became Moi's vice president after Saitoti is now in ODM-K too, while Saitoti is firmly with Kibaki.

Are you confused? There is more in store. No one is even sure which party the president belongs to because the DP, which was the basis of his partnership in NARC, is all but dead. But there is another coalition, NARC-KENYA, which is effectively the party of the president while he is still presiding over a NARC 'Government of Unity' that theoretically includes those NARC members who did not flee with Raila and co, such as Charity Ngilu and Ford People. But listening to Ngilu and other ministers who are not part of NARC-Kenya, you wonder what they are still doing in Kibaki's government. Let me stop there because I will not only be confusing you, but will lose the plot myself as the names and parties become incestuously intertwined.

Kenya is the worst example of a farcical multi-party democracy, because political parties have become so easily disposable depending on the personal ambitions of their leaders who own them, and can literally do what they please with them. Essentially they rely on assumed or assured ethnic constituencies, which makes national politics a club of ethnic notables.

The manipulation of ethnicity, religion, region and race by the political elite to secure support from the masses is not uniquely Kenyan or African. Electoral politics involves such manipulation even in the so-called matured democracie. Ask yourself why John F. Kennedy was, and still remains, the only Catholic to have been elected president of the USA? Why is there no labour or conservative party in Northern Ireland rather than Irish parties that are allied to the mainland parties?

My surprise in Kenya - even for a Nigerian where all kinds ethno-religious and regional manipulations are common currency in the battles between different sections of the ruling classes - is the shameless way in which ethnicity is flaunted and ethnic prejudices proclaimed even, especially, among the 'enlightened classes'.

Nowhere is this more prominently in evidence than in the current electioneering campaigns which everybody agrees will be a two-way battle between President Kibaki (standing under NARC-K) and whoever emerges the opposition candidate in ODM-K. In ODM-K the final duel is between the two leading aspirants, Raila Odinga and Musyoka.

If other Africans had a vote in Kenyan elections, Raila would have won hands down because he is the better known figure; not just because of his old man status, but as a veteran opposition figure who spent several years in prison for his political activities. However, come to Kenya and ask many people, aside from his fanatical supporters, and you get a different picture. Unfortunately most of Kenyans who are anti-Raila will give you no other reason why he cannot be president, than the fact he is Luo. The same Kenyans who are hysterical about Barrack Obama, a Luo man running president of America, will not vote for his Luo uncle in Kenya. Why is a Luo good for America but not for Kenya?

* Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is the deputy director for the UN Millennium Campaign in Africa, based in Nairobi, Kenya. He writes this article in his personal capacity as a concerned pan-Africanist.
* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Kenyan telecommunications operator Safaricom has reluctantly accepted the decision by the industry regulator, the Communication Commission of Kenya (CCK), to reduce mobile tariffs within the country. This is according Michael Joseph, CEO of Safaricom.

Gladwell Otieno is the executive director for the Africa Centre for Open governance, based in Kenya. An uncompromising anti-corruption campaigner, she aims to revive Kenyan civil society's work on anti-corruption and good governance.

Rights activists in Kenya have intensified their campaign against a proposed anti-terrorism law, this after a travel advisory issued by the United States warned of possible terrorist attacks in the East African country during the upcoming World Cross Country Championships (WCCC).

This joint report by the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative and the Kenya Human Rights Commission examines the Kenya police, looking particularly at illegitimate political control, the impact of that control on policing, and the reform answers that will provide a more democratic and accountable police service to the Kenyan people.

The Centre for African Family Studies (CAFS) is pleased to announce the "Management and Coordination of Decentralized HIV & AIDS Responses" course to take place from 25 June - 6 July 2007 in Nairobi, Kenya. This two-week course provides hands-on skills to leaders, managers and coordinators of HIV & AIDS decentralized structures for planning, implementing, coordinating and monitoring HIV & AIDS response at the grassroots level.

Kenya's justice assistant minister has accused the European Union (EU) members states of putting in place barriers to Kenya`s bid to recover over US$1 billion allegedly stashed in foreign banks by corrupt leaders.

A one-year prison sentence has been imposed on Mburu Muchoki, the editor of the tabloid weekly The Independent, for libelling the justice minister and called on the government to amend the laws so that judges in future can pass fairer sentences for press offences.

The Kenya Project, a student-run organization at the University of CA, Davis School of Medicine seeks to inspire greater awareness and attention to global healthcare disparities and the HIV/AIDs epidemic in Africa, engaging future physician-leaders in meaningful exchange with Kenyan physicians, medical students and community members. The group seeks funding to small group of medical students embark on a four week organized trip to Kenya.

As the world marks International Women's Day, Thursday, under the theme of 'Ending Impunity for Violence Against Women and Girls', activists in Kenya claim there is much to do in ensuring that abusers are punished.

Two former top executives of the state-owned Kenya Reinsurance Corporation (Kenya Re) who were sacked recently to allow investigations into allegations of financial irregularities in the company may be forced to refund Ksh8.5 million ($121,400) to the corporation.

There was outrage among European oil exploration companies interested in Kenya when it emerged last week that the state-owned National Oil Corporation of China — CNOOC — has quietly put out notices offering to farm out to third parties some of the oil exploration blocks granted to it by President Mwai Kibaki in April last year.