Baba Yenu

Six fully funded master's scholarships a Kenyan can still apply to. All six close within five weeks, and most people will hear about them too late. 1. DAAD, MSc International Health at Heidelberg. Closes 15 Oct. Tuition exempt, EUR 992/month, insurance, travel allowance. Needs two years' work experience and a degree under six years old. klinikum.uni-heidelberg.de/h… 2. Mastercard Foundation at Edinburgh. Declaration form 19 Oct, 5pm. Tuition, accommodation, travel, living stipend. You must be born 1992 or later and must not already hold a postgraduate degree. The form is capped and can close early, so go the day it opens. edinburgh-global.ed.ac.uk/ma… 3. Commonwealth Master's Scholarships. CSC closes 20 Oct, Ministry of Education around 22 Oct. Full tuition, GBP 1,712/month, return airfare. Kenya gets 19 places. You cannot apply direct. The Ministry of Education has to nominate you, and that means two physical hard-copy sets delivered to Telposta Towers, 27th floor, room 2701. Certified copies take days, so start now. cscuk.fcdo.gov.uk/scholarshi… 4. Mastercard Foundation at the University of Cape Town. Closes 31 Oct. Tuition, laptop, accommodation, living costs, medical aid, annual return travel. Coursework master's, any faculty. You need a UCT offer first, so start that today. uct.ac.za/mastercardfdn/appl… 5. African Graduate Fellowship, American University in Cairo. Closes 2 Nov. Tuition, monthly stipend, housing allowance, health insurance. Open to every discipline, and restricted to non-Egyptian Africans, so you are the target group rather than an afterthought. aucegypt.edu/admissions/fell… 6. DAAD In-Country and In-Region. Closes 12 Nov. Fully funded with a living stipend, and you can study at home: MSc Plant Breeding at Chuka, MEd Research at Moi. Or elsewhere in the region, from Rwanda to Ghana. daad-kenya.org/en/in-country… Two things that will save someone a year. Chevening, Rhodes Kenya, Fulbright and Knight-Hennessy have all closed for 2027 entry. Chevening shut about a week ago and reopens in August. Use the ten months to document the 2,800 hours of work experience it asks for. And some programmes people still share every year are dead. Ford Foundation IFP ended in 2013. Open Society wound down its scholarships in 2021. AERC has stopped funding new students on its Collaborative Master's in Economics, while its own website still lists Nairobi, Kenyatta, Moi and Egerton. No genuine scholarship ever charges you to receive it. If anyone asks for M-Pesa to process or release an award, it is a scam.

They carried Britain's war in East Africa on their heads. When it ended, Treasury rules held back money due to their dependants. 11 November 1918: the Armistice is signed in France. Clause 17, read out in the UK Commons that day, is about us: German forces in East Africa must get out. But the guns here did not stop on the 11th. The news took days to reach the German commander in the bush, and Kenya's foreign ministry dates the end of the war here to 25 November. Behind those guns walked the Carrier Corps. One review of Geoffrey Hodges' history puts Kenya's toll at 25,891 dead and 13,748 missing, out of some 163,000 recruited, and says about 67,000 pounds due to dependants was held back. Nairobi still says their name every day: Kariokor. So what? In 2021 the Commonwealth War Graves Commission apologised for leaving African dead unequally remembered, and its historians now count at least 88,000 East Africans. In 2025 Kenya's foreign ministry launched a national commemoration plan. Which day should Kenya mark, the 11th or the 25th? @ForeignOfficeKE @museumsofkenya @CWGC @NAM_London @kdfinfo @UKinKenya Photo: Dominic Imbuga, CC BY-SA 3.0 #CarrierCorps #Kariokor

42 police officers and reservists walked into a valley to bring back stolen cattle. They never came home. 10 November 2012: A police and reservist team on a livestock-recovery mission was ambushed in the Suguta Valley near Baragoi, Samburu. The count climbed for days as bodies were recovered. Early reports said 32. The toll settled at 42. In 2017 the High Court acquitted the seven people charged with their murder. Families were left asking who planned the mission, and who answers for it. The valley has not settled. In February 2023 the government declared parts of six counties, Samburu among them, "disturbed and dangerous" and put them under a dusk-to-dawn curfew. We remember the 42. Should anyone in command have answered for that day? @NPSOfficial_KE @IPOA_KE @InteriorKE @HakiKNCHR @NAssemblyKE Photo: Baragoi, 1979. Robin Hutton, CC BY 2.0 #WeRemember #Kenya

Nobody can tell you how many people died in Garissa in November 1980. Kenya's truth commission tried. It said the number could not be counted in any meaningful way. 9 November 1980: Around 8pm, gunmen opened fire in a Garissa bar and killed four civil servants. Within the hour, security committees had decided to round up the town. The TJRC report, drawing on survivors, tells what followed. Homes set alight. Witnesses describing doors locked from the outside. Women raped. Bodies thrown in the river. People were marched to Garissa Primary School. Men of Somali origin were held on the field for days without food or water. One survivor called it a place of death. The commission called it collective punishment. The late PC Benson Kaaria denied any army role and said he could not recall a shoot to kill threat. So what? Uhuru Kenyatta received the report in 2013 and apologised in 2015. HRW said in 2019 that Parliament had not considered it and no reparations had been paid. Even now, the KNCHR chair names unimplemented TJRC recommendations as a failure. Can a country apologise for something it never counted? @HakiKNCHR @NAssemblyKE @AfUncensored @theelephantinfo #BullaKaratasi #Kenya

The world's navies were bringing captured Somali pirates to Mombasa for trial. Then one Kenyan judge said Kenya had no power to try them. 9 November 2010: In the High Court at Mombasa, Justice Mohamed Ibrahim freed nine Somali men. A German warship, with US air support, had seized them in the Gulf of Aden in March 2009. He ruled that Kenyan courts could only try crimes committed inside Kenya's territory. By then navies had sent 136 suspects to Kenya, and 50 had been convicted (Christian Science Monitor). A UN anti-piracy official called the ruling "a significant setback." The Court of Appeal reversed it on 18 October 2012, holding that Kenya can try piracy on the high seas. Why it matters now: attacks off Somalia have returned, and in 2024 the EU asked Kenya to sign a new deal to try suspects seized at sea (The Standard). Should Kenya be the region's piracy court? @Kenyajudiciary @AGOfficeKenya @ODPP_KE @UNODC @EUNAVFOR #Kenya #Piracy #RuleOfLaw

Murkomen anasema next year Ruto ataleta Man United na Arsenal Nairobi. wueh. sawa bana, lakini tuanze na Bayern vs Ajax January tuone kama stadium iko tayari kweli. na hao Arsenal na United wenyewe wameambiwa? 😂

ANC kwa local elections: 64% twenty years ago, just over 30% leo. wueh. liberation story haiwezi kulipa stima na maji forever bana. wakenya tunaangalia, kuna somo hapa kwa vyama vyetu? xitter.cf/SABCNews/status/211950…

hospitali mpya ya Marigat tayari imeanza kupasuka, kuta na sakafu. aki. contractor ni nani, na nani alisign hii kazi kama complete? hospitali haifai kuwa hatari kwa wagonjwa bana

"That is an award, not a settlement." James Callaghan's line to the Colonial Secretary, after Kenya's African members asked for 15 more seats and got six. 8 November 1957: before leaving Nairobi, Alan Lennox-Boyd told the Legislative Council groups that the 1954 Lyttelton constitution was finished, and what would replace it. Why it fell: Africans had elected their first eight members that March, among them Tom Mboya, Oginga Odinga and Daniel arap Moi. They refused to work the system. Then the European and Asian ministers resigned. The new deal: six more elected African seats, twelve more picked by the Council itself, four per community, and a Council of State. African numbers would more than double, he told MPs. African members rejected it within days. Fenner Brockway told the Commons they spoke for 6 million people against 200,000 of other races. After Lancaster House in 1960 it was amended anyway. So what? The fight over seats never ended. The boundary review was due by March 2024, and this January the IEBC pushed it past the 2027 election. Six seats: real progress, or a way to buy time? @UKinKenya @UKParliament @NAssemblyKE @Senate_KE @IEBCKenya @museumsofkenya #KenyaHistory #Katiba

454kg za suspected meth zimenaswa Kwale, Ksh3.6B. watatu wameshikwa baada ya Tanzania kumkabidhi suspect pale Lunga Lunga. ushirikiano wa mpaka ukifanya kazi, unaona matokeo. swali ni moja: mzigo huu ulikuwa wa kupitisha tu, ama soko iko hapa kwetu? xitter.cf/citizentvkenya/status/…

ruto akiwa Nyamira: Rironi–Mau Summit dual carriageway itafika Kericho, Kisii na Kisumu. sawa, barabara tunataka. lakini ya kwanza bado haijaisha, na toll ya Sh8 kwa kilomita imeshapendekezwa. 2027 inakuja bana. tuulize timeline na bei kabla ya makofi. xitter.cf/Kenyans/status/2119386…

The State hanged the man convicted of killing Tom Mboya, then refused to say when. 8 November 1969: Nahashon Isaac Njenga Njoroge is reported to have gone to the gallows at Kamiti at about 3 a.m. Four months earlier, on 5 July, Mboya, the 38-year-old planning minister, had been shot outside a Nairobi chemist. Journalist Kamau Ngotho later wrote that the trial, the appeal and the execution all moved at unusual speed. Then silence. Weeks later prison officials said only that the hanging had been done "in accordance with the law". No date. No details. The 8 November date comes from reports in Nairobi at the time, carried by TIME, and from the warder who walked him to the gallows and spoke to Ngotho years later. The secrecy fed rumours that he was never hanged at all. That warder and Njenga's own lawyer both told Ngotho he was. So what? Death is still a sentence in Kenya's Penal Code. Nobody has been executed in over 30 years, and a bill read in the National Assembly this April would let judges choose between death and at least 30 years in jail. Should any government be able to execute someone without telling the public the date? @PrisonsKe @Kenyajudiciary @NAssemblyKE @LawSocietyofKe @ICJKenya @AmnestyKenya @HakiKNCHR #TomMboya #DeathPenalty

SA local elections: ANC losing metros, hung councils kibao, sasa ni coalition talks. wueh, chama ya Mandela. wakazi walikuwa wazi tu: maji, services, basics. sisi na 2027 inakuja, tutapiga kura ya maji na barabara ama ya majina?

Kenya held a general election and nobody voted for president. Only one name was allowed through. 8 November 1979: the first general election under Daniel arap Moi. One party, KANU. More than 700 candidates for 158 seats. Moi was the only presidential candidate, so he was declared elected without a vote. The real election happened at the gate. To stand you needed KANU clearance, and Moi said five former KPU leaders, Oginga Odinga among them, would not be cleared. But voters still had one weapon. The Nation counted 72 of 158 MPs out, seven senior ministers among them. Less than three years later, in June 1982, Parliament made the one-party state law. So what? Article 138 of today's Constitution still says that if only one person is nominated for president, that person is declared elected. And the date itself is live: in August the High Court at Malindi held that the election was due in 2026, while the IEBC is working to August 2027. If one party decides who may stand, was that vote a choice or a ceremony? @IEBCKenya @NAssemblyKE @Senate_KE @Kenyajudiciary @LawSocietyofKe @MyKenyaLaw @HakiKNCHR #KenyaElections #Katiba

Lissu amepewa 4 years kwa incitement, treason imeangushwa. na court inasema slogan "No Reforms, No Election" ilitosha ku convict. wueh. kama slogan ni crime, sisi huku Kenya tunaongea kila siku tujipange aje? pole sana majirani. xitter.cf/AJEnglish/status/21187…

ANC ilikuwa na 70% in 2004. sasa SG mwenyewe anasema leadership ni accountable kwa haya matokeo. watu wa Alex na Soweto walikuwa wanasema tu: maji, stima, takataka. county governments zetu mnasikia ama mnangoja 2027? xitter.cf/SABCNews/status/211907…

treason imeanguka, lakini bado four years for incitement. mtu ako ndani tangu April last year. EU inapiga kelele, serikali ya Samia inasikiza? na sisi majirani, tutasema kitu ama kimya kama kawaida? xitter.cf/NationAfrica/status/21…

Kenya's first Parliament ended eight days after the only opposition party was banned. 7 November 1969: President Jomo Kenyatta dissolved the National Assembly. The Kenya People's Union had been outlawed on 30 October, and Jaramogi Oginga Odinga and other KPU leaders were already in detention. When Kenyans voted on 6 December, all 600 candidates were KANU. Each signed a loyalty oath and paid a £50 deposit. Kenyatta waived the bar on recent members of other parties for two people, Bildad Kaggia and Grace Onyango, who became the only woman elected. Voters still had a say: 77 members of the old Assembly lost, including 5 ministers. In 1969 one man's decision ended Parliament. Today Article 102 ends its term on the next general election, and Article 101 sets that date. Even that is argued over: IEBC is preparing for 10 August 2027, while a High Court judge in Malindi held in August that the presidential vote fell due in 2026, then suspended her order. Who should control Kenya's election calendar? @NAssemblyKE @Senate_KE @IEBCKenya @Kenyajudiciary @IPUparliament @museumsofkenya @LawSocietyofKe #Kenya #History #Parliament

18 days into the Emergency, Britain's Colonial Secretary told Parliament that Mau Mau was not born of economic pressure. 7 November 1952: Oliver Lyttelton, just back from Kenya, tells the House of Commons that Mau Mau "feeds, not upon economic discontent, but upon perverted nationalism and on a sort of nostalgia for barbarism". The same speech carries an admission. Those arrested were being held "upon suspicion, even including Jomo Kenyatta himself". He warned that the Kenya African Union could be banned if evidence tied it deeply to Mau Mau. Then he turned to land, which he listed first among Kenya's economic problems. A Royal Commission would study it, and that would take perhaps a full year. MPs challenged him in the chamber, and one asked why, if he had the evidence, the leaders were not being tried. So what? In Nairobi in 2023, King Charles called the violence against Kenyans "abhorrent and unjustifiable", without an apology. The Kenya Human Rights Commission had asked for one, with reparations. Can you tell the Mau Mau story without land? @thekhrc @UKinKenya @UKParliament @museumsofkenya @HakiKNCHR #Kenya #MauMau

teargas ndani ya mkutano wa mpira, then Mariga na wengine sita wanatolewa in absentia, 65 kati ya 66 delegates. wueh. hii FKF ni siasa tupu. mpira wenyewe utachezwa lini bana? xitter.cf/NationAfrica/status/21…

judiciary inasema orders zao ni binding, compliance ni kazi ya police. sawa kabisa. lakini order ikipuuzwa, contempt power iko na nani? familia bado zinatafuta watu wao. bana, kila mtu anajificha nyuma ya mwingine. xitter.cf/Kenyans/status/2118921…