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Governance and Society · Kenya: Commentary12 articles

Governance and SocietyCommentary

Tribal Numbers: Count Us, Then Account to Us

Regional registration totals describe where registered voters live. They do not establish ethnic voting blocs or a leader’s authority to deliver those votes. Age, gender and livelihoods reveal circumstances representation should address.

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Governance and SocietyCommentary / Case Simulation

The Kenya Sugar Belt: Leasing, Capability and the Ledger Nobody Can See

Four state sugar mills were leased, not sold, in May 2025. Farmer payments and milling have improved at some sites; disclosure, worker arrears and creditor claims remain unresolved. This fact-checked case asks whether leasing has produced capability, or only a change of gatekeeper.

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Governance and SocietyCommentary / Case Simulation

Pan Paper Mills, Webuye: Industrial Revival or Industrial Capability?

Pan Paper Mills collapsed in 2009 and failed a state-backed revival in 2010. Since 2016, Rai Group has rebuilt it around recycled fibre. This fact-checked commentary and governance simulation asks what would actually prove capability rather than repeat an announcement.

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Governance and SocietyCommentary

Mzungu Research vs Mwafrika Research: Who Holds the Knowledge?

A doctoral defence and a jua kali engine on the same morning. Formal research makes knowledge contestable; apprenticeship makes it consequential. Africa’s opportunity is not to crown one laboratory and dismiss the other, but to build institutions where footnote and fingerprint can interrogate each other.

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Governance and SocietyCommentary

From Ethnic Geography to Convivial Democracy

We live convivially. Why do we vote territorially? Applying Paul Gilroy’s idea of convivial culture to Kenya’s constituencies, and asking whether representation should begin from the systems through which Kenyans already share a life.

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Governance and SocietyCommentary

The Candidate Is Also a Map: Sifuna and the Test of a Civic Movement

Citizen TV’s The Explainer presented Edwin Sifuna as Kenya’s “man of the moment.” But the more important question is whether his political moment can become a civic movement, one capable of organising citizens around shared values and problems rather than merely rearranging Kenya’s familiar ethnic blocs.

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