Will 2027 be Kenya’s dirtiest poll?

• “Dirtiest” is a rather high bar for a country in which a thousand people were slaughtered after a disputed election result.
• Goonism is a bipartisan sin, and the Interior CS accuses the opposition of assembling the very goons his officers arrested.

Every Kenyan election to date has had its own smell: 1992 had the crisp, inky smell of cash, 2007 smelt of burning tyres and, afterwards, the foul odour of grief and trauma we haven’t recovered from; 2017 smelt of courtrooms. 

With fewer than 10 months to August 10, 2027, the whiff wafting off this one – this is one for the ages – is a malodorous witch’s brew of danger, desperation, a cold detachment from the suffering mass, greed, fear, and an irrationally clingy determination.

• 

  Mutuma Mathiu: Why did preacher kill the children?

  Paul Mackenzie's cruel and pitiless brainwashing of parents to starve their children has come to haunt him now that he has been convicted of 191 murders.

• 

  Mutuma Mathiu: China trade deal too good to miss

  Think of this brilliant trade deal as act of freeing the slave to spite the master.