Edwin's Corner

Mr. David Kimaiyo resigned as the Police Inspector General of the Kenya Police Service on a Tuesday afternoon. The clamor to have him resign had risen to a crescendo in the wake of continued and unchecked excesses of Al-Shabaab in the northeastern region of Kenya. This week I wanted to investigate a number of questions arising from this event. Why have political leaders in Africa been steadfast in refusing to resign when all else pointed to their ineptness? Is this situation changing? What power has social media given the masses? What is at the core of leaders not wanting to resign their positions? What can alleviate this anxiety? We start this piece at Tahrir Square the epicenter of the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. It is from this location that Egyptians actively participated in unshackling themselves from Hosni Mubarak’s rule while using social media and its omnipresent ability to disperse information instantaneously, in real-time, across the world. ...

 A few weeks ago, a woman was publicly stripped in Donholm, Nairobi by a mob. The decadent act has been repeated a number of times since then. I have to be candid and state that the act is repulsive, debasing and inhumane.   As the storm rages, I wanted to pause and answer a few questions that may ideally go to the root of this problem. And I believe it is a deep-sited problem manifesting itself. The first question I wanted answered is about freedom? What is freedom and within that context what freedoms can a person be afforded. Freedom is never absolute; we can never escape the control and influence of forces other than ourselves. Absolute freedom where you can do anything you want to do at any given time, in the context of society is a fallacy, there are always contesting bonds in any given society that demand we act in a certain way. In the “ I have a dream ” speech delivered by Martin Luther King in 1963; the resounding fact was that despite th...

It was a cool Wednesday morning when President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya took a Matatu (never done before by a Kenyan President), from state house to the City Center; a route not covered by the public transport system that is widely used by the low and middle class in Kenya. In his speech a while later, he mentioned that he welcomed graffiti on Matatus, a total reversal of a previous government policy which had aimed to streamline the public transport system in Kenya. President Uhuru in the Matatu with Bob Colymore CEO Safaricom Matatu 'picks' President Uhuru Why had he made this statement? To understand this, I went back in time and looked at the checkered history of graffiti, and its effect on our collective psyche not just in Kenya, but also around the world.   The journey starts, many centuries ago in a prehistoric cave when a testosterone filled youth fresh from a hunt drew stick figures of men running after a buffalo, killing it and tha...

The classroom as we know it has not changed dramatically over the last century. It pivots around a single source of Knowledge standing or sitting at a specific position in the room ‘dispensing’ information. The Creative The Peripatetic school founded by Aristotle in 335 B.C went on to influence a wide range of subjects that are studied in today’s institutions of learning. The centerfold of the school was learning by inquisition and student collaboration. Due to the lack of a place to conduct training, Aristotle was known to give lectures while walking around. There was no set curriculum or any requirements for students. The students ran the school.  The School of Athens by Raphael “The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think—rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with the thoughts of other men.” ~ John Dewey The Rote For a peasant t...