“Abandoning diplomacy for confrontation.....is a dive over a cliff,” - Antonio Guterres, UN Chief

  The year 2007 was an electoral disaster, nobody knows who won! The Electoral Commission went as far as claiming that both sides rigged the election. However, what was not in doubt is that Raila Odinga had assembled a massive national voting bloc that ran through the Rift Valley, Western, Coast, Nyanza, Nairobi and Northeastern.   There was a ‘handshake’ with President Mwai Kibaki and Raila has continued with this tradition in what now appears to be part of presidential handover notes. Some years back we had been made to believe that Kibera slums in Nairobi had a population of more than one million people until the national census put that figure at around 170, 000. Following the 2007 fiasco, we have also unquestionably accepted that Raila is an enigma with numbers. Fast-forward to 2013, Kibaki probably realized that he could not guarantee his deputy Kalonzo Musyoka votes from his backyard and that could have informed his decision not to endorse him. Uhuru Kenyatta had his ...

President Nelson Mandela famously said “one of the mistakes which some political analysts make is to think their enemies should be our enemies”. This is how diplomacy worked for the most part of the Cold War era. You could fly between Washington and Moscow cutting deals under the pretense of ‘ non-alignment’ which went well for the emerging states as the two super powers battled for influence. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, America was still interested in building soft power but the economic rise of China has tested this to the point of near abandonment by the Trump administration which is now turning inwards. It is no longer about being cool. Some have called it ‘ transactional ’ diplomacy but international politics has always been about national interests. Unlike the Soviet Union, China’s economic growth carries a threat that the West never had to worry about post Second World War. Worse still, the Chinese have not shied from flexing their muscles. At the start of Trump’...

In the 2020 United States presidential elections, Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden. His supporters later stormed Washington in a desperate attempt to stop the certification of the results by Congress. Trump left power as a political outcast even within his own Republican party. The elite believed that he will never mount a comeback, overzealous prosecutors both at state and federal level went after him, he was kicked off social media and negative coverage piled up on mainstream media. The Democrats wanted Trump on the presidential ballot because they were convinced he could not win against anyone they presented. Some top Trump rivals within the Republican party amplified that message including Nikki Haley and even the non- committal former vice president in the first “MAGA” administration, Mike Pence. After the Gen-Z protests that brought down the 2024 Finance Bill, the elite in Nairobi have come to a similar conclusion that anyone can beat President William Ruto in the next election. ...