Kenya Live TV

A series of super tusker elephant killings has sparked a bitter international battle over trophy hunting and its controversial, often-counterintuitive role in conservation. Biodiversity reporter Phoebe Weston speaks to Amy Dickman, professor of wildlife conservation at the University of Oxford, about why this debate has become so divisive, and the complexities of allowing killing in conservationTrophy hunter killings spark fierce battle over the future of super tusker elephants Continue reading...

Police in Kampala stop and detain anti-corruption demonstrators after earlier round-up of opposition MPsScores of demonstrators have been arrested in the Uganda capital, Kampala, for taking part in a banned rally that has drawn inspiration from the youth-led anti-government protests that have roiled neighbouring Kenya for a month now.Police stopped and detained people from among small groups of protesters who were marching and shouting anti-corruption slogans in different parts of the city. Continue reading...

In western Kenya, wild giraffes are being relocated to the Ruko Conservancy to maintain peace between the Pokot and Ilchamus communities. Since the first giraffe’s arrival to the reserve in 2011, poaching has ceased, and community relations have improved, creating jobs and regional stability. Before a giraffe’s arrival, an intercommunal welcoming ceremony with dancing and singing is held for them, an inconceivable scene in the mid-2000s Continue reading...

With little grass for grazing on the island of Lamu, donkeys are rummaging through rubbish – and scientists now fear it is a global problem affecting many speciesThe smell of sea water and fresh dung fill the oceanfront air on the Kenyan island of Lamu, as donkeys plod along the town’s dock, ferrying residents and cargo. Lamu Old Town is a Unesco world heritage site, known for preserving its Swahili culture. With no cars but nearly 3,000 donkeys on the island, residents rely heavily on the animals for a living and as transport in the narrow, winding streets of the 700-year-old town, one of east Africa’s oldest.Now, however, increasing numbers of donkeys are dying from eating plastic on the island, and scientists fear many other land animals are also being affected by human plastic pollution. Continue reading...

Amid stagnant or falling yields producers across India and east Africa are being forced to adapt Tea is a British institution and 100m cups will be drunk today, but experts are warning that our beloved brew could get pricier as extreme weather causes misery for growers in India and Kenya.Last week’s official cost of living update put food inflation at 1.5%, but a breakdown of price moves showed a box of 80 teabags now costs £2.65, a rise of 18p, or 7%, on a year ago. Continue reading...

Swiss company On will make history in Paris and is challenging the sneaker superbrandsHellen Obiri, the Kenyan long-distance runner, is a hot prospect for the Olympics this month. That is not only down to a talent that has seen her take two silver medals previously and a win at the Boston Marathon in April – but also her shoes.In Paris, Obiri will wear the Cloudboom Strike LS. This innovative design made by Swiss sneaker brand On using what they call LightSpray technology will be released to the public this autumn. Continue reading...

In today’s newsletter: President William Ruto’s unpopular finance bill has sparked a wave of protests – that have been met with brutality and yet more discord in the country• Sign up here for our daily newsletter, First EditionGood morning.Anti-government protests are expected to escalate in Kenya after a month of demonstrations that erupted again across the country on Tuesday calling for the president, William Ruto, to resign. In response to police hostility, protesters set fires, threw stones and chanted “Ruto must go” and “Stop killing us”. The demonstrations were met with police firing teargas and water cannon at those involved and the press. One man was shot dead and his body carried through the streets to a nearby police station.King’s speech | Keir Starmer has set out a government agenda that he claims can counter the “snake oil charm of populism” in a king’s speech pledging change to people’s lives including rights at work, cheaper energy and secure housing.Israel-Gaza war | The US military-built pier for carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza will be dismantled and brought home, ending a mission that has been fraught with repeated weather and security problems that limited how much food and other supplies could get to starving Palestinians.Europe | Labour’s proposed foreign policy and security pact with the EU sounds “quite promising”, the head of the European parliament’s foreign affairs committee has said, adding that the British government should use the next weeks and months to come up with proposals that are “as concrete as possible”.US election 2024 | JD Vance formally accepted the Republican vice-presidential nomination on Wednesday with a deliberate, and at times divisive, pitch to re-elect Donald Trump in November.Environment | The Labour government must oversee a massive ramping up of renewable energy generation in this parliament or the UK will breach its international obligations under the Paris agreement, the government’s climate watchdog has said. Continue reading...

Art and counselling are helping women and girls in Kenya to process anger and forgive family members, who are often the ones who subjected them to genital mutilationThe first of Sara Sori’s portraits depicting women at various stages of life shows a young, happy girl. “If you harm [a girl] at this stage she is ruined for ever. And this is the stage where I was violated,” says Sori, from Isiolo, in northern Kenya, who was forced to undergo female genital mutilation as a child.Another portrait shows a girl with her mouth sewn shut, “giving in to what life has dictated for her and to prevent her from expressing any anger”. Another shows “the age of regret, of missed opportunities” of an older woman. “This is where my grandmother is now. I loved her so much. She wanted me to get married to a good man and the only way to do that was by getting the cut. She, too, went through similar initiation rites and cannot undo the past.” Continue reading...

Suspect was ‘in the process of luring another victim’ when he was arrested in Nairobi, police sayKenyan police say they have arrested a suspected serial killer who has confessed to murdering 42 women including his wife and dumping their dismembered bodies in a Nairobi rubbish tip.Since Friday, nine butchered bodies trussed up in plastic bags have been pulled from the dump site in the Mukuru slum area in the south of the capital. Continue reading...

Police have been scouring site in Mukuru since mutilated corpses of at least six women were found on FridayKenyan police said that they had found more bags filled with dismembered female body parts on Saturday, the latest macabre discovery at a rubbish dump that has horrified and angered the country.Detectives have been scouring the site in the Nairobi slum of Mukuru since the mutilated corpses of at least six women were found on Friday in sacks floating in a sea of garbage. Continue reading...

While ultrasound services are normal practice in many countries, software being tested in Uganda will allow a scan without the need for specialists, providing an incentive for pregnant women to visit health services early onMothers-to-be have become used to the first glimpse of their baby via the fuzzy black and white ultrasound scan, an image that can be shown to friends and family. But it remains a luxury in many parts of the world. Now AI is being used to develop technology to bring the much-anticipated pregnancy milestone to women who are most in need of the scan’s medical checkup on a baby’s health.A pilot project in Uganda is using AI software to power ultrasound imaging to not only scan unborn babies but also to encourage women to attend health services at an earlier stage in their pregnancies, helping to reduce stillbirths and complications. Continue reading...

Only foreign minister spared as William Ruto tries to quell violence triggered by planned tax risesKenya’s president, William Ruto, has fired his entire cabinet apart from his foreign minister, bowing to pressure after nationwide protests that have created the biggest crisis of his two-year presidency.The youth-led protests against planned tax rises began peacefully but turned violent. A least 39 people were killed in clashes with police last month. Some demonstrators briefly stormed parliament before Ruto abandoned the new taxes. Continue reading...

Kenya’s eruption of protests, riots and government repression is the result of decades of failed western financial prescriptionsIt took several days of peaceful popular uprisings, violent confrontations with the police and the army, the illegal arrests and detention of protesters, the tragic death of several protesters at the hands of state security forces, and the burning of its parliament building for the Kenyan government to finally withdraw a finance bill that would have imposed the most extreme form of austerity in Kenya’s history.Protesters held signs directly blaming the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for last year’s increases in VAT taxes, fuel and food prices, and for the new tax hikes proposed in the now defunct 2024 finance bill. This was in fact what the IMF has imposed on Kenya under the 2021 loan agreement for a 38-month program unlocking $3.9bn subject to periodic reviews designed to verify that Nairobi is actually doing what the IMF wants: to increase taxes, reduce subsidies and cut government waste (a code word for privatisation of state-owned enterprises).Fadhel Kaboub is a senior advisor with Power Shift Africa and a member of the Independent Expert Group on Just Transition and Development. He is the author of Global South Perspectives on Substack Continue reading...

The cruelties inflicted years ago at Nyayo are barely taught in schools. Now survivors want to help the nation rememberThe 56 days that Patrick Onyango spent in Kenya’s dark, damp Nyayo House torture chambers remain clear in his mind. It was three deacdes ago that Onyango, now 66, knew that his opposition to the autocratic rule of Kenya’s second president, Daniel arap Moi, was to be punished when uniformed policemen seized him in the middle of a class he was teaching in Kisumu, the port city in western Kenya, bundling him on to a helicopter and whisking him to the capital, Nairobi.There he was shuttled from one prison cell to another for nearly a week, he says, before being blindfolded and taken through a narrow tunnel to the cells of the infamous Nyayo torture chambers. Continue reading...

Self-proclaimed pastor Paul Nthenge Mackenzie alleged to have incited acolytes to starve to death to ‘meet Jesus’The leader of a Kenyan doomsday cult has gone on trial on charges of terrorism over the deaths of more than 400 of his followers in a macabre case that shocked the world.The self-proclaimed pastor Paul Nthenge Mackenzie appeared in court in the Indian Ocean port city of Mombasa along with 94 co-defendants. Continue reading...

The lifting of a long-held ban has angered conservationists, but others argue trophy hunting can support local economies and even help protect threatened speciesIn the borderlands of Tanzania and Kenya, the “super tuskers” roam. A combination of old age, genetic pooling and prolonged protection from poaching has created a population of bull elephants with enormous tusks, weighing up to 45kg apiece, large enough to scrape along the ground as the animals walk. To many, the bulls are “living icons” of the African savannah. They are also highly prized by trophy hunters.Now, a series of super-tusker killings has sparked a bitter international battle over trophy hunting and its controversial, sometimes counterintuitive role in conservation. Some conservationists believe the killing of these extraordinary animals should not be allowed. Others say controlled, regulated hunting can actually contribute to elephants’ long-term survival by providing jobs for local people and incentives for habitats to be preserved. Continue reading...

In advance of the Paris Olympics and Paralympics, we speak to women who have faced conflict, discrimination and a lack of funding to stand as their countries’ only female qualifiers in their chosen fieldsOne of Alexandra Ndolo’s greatest career achievements so far is winning a silver medal for Germany at the world fencing championships in Cairo in 2022. But when the daughter of a Polish mother and Kenyan father looked up and saw the Kenyan flag hanging from the roof of the arena for the one athlete who hadn’t won anything, she had a moment of reckoning. Continue reading...

Toll of dead and injured at anti-government rallies where police opened fire is almost double earlier figure disclosedAt least 39 people have been killed and hundreds more injured in anti-government demonstrations in Kenya, the national rights watchdog has said, as activists geared up for a new round of protests this week.The toll announced by the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR) is almost double the figure previously disclosed by the authorities for those killed while contesting a set of unpopular tax increases that have now been withdrawn. Continue reading...

A finance bill was the trigger, but the backdrop is government debt and blinkered interventions from western institutions There is as yet no resolution after an unprecedented week in Kenyan politics. What began as protests against a rushed-through finance bill has revealed a crisis of legitimacy within the executive, the legislature and the police that were sent to do the government’s bidding. And while the protesters have been very clear about their demands – reject the finance bill – outsiders who are accustomed to simplistic narratives about African politics have been scrambling and failing to understand what these events really mean.Kenya is experiencing a polycrisis of sorts. The finance bill is the immediate trigger: an annually produced document that lays out the government’s fiscal strategy, and which normally passes without much comment. But this year it attracted an unprecedented level of attention because it contained several proposals for the taxation of everyday goods, including bread, sanitary towels and more. Kenyans were already struggling with the effects of a collapsing currency and the aftermath of the Covid-19 crisis. However, the government was not merely looking to meet its financial obligations but to increase year-on-year spending from the last finance bill, which had already introduced a number of new taxes.Nanjala Nyabola is a writer, political analyst and author of Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics: How the Internet Era is Transforming Politics in KenyaDo you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. Continue reading...

The PM’s unbending belief in Britain as a meritocracy blinded him to the realities of race, class – and his own flawed projectIn Nairobi’s industrial South B district stands the Highway secondary school, alma mater of Rishi Sunak’s father. It was established for Asian boys in 1962, one year before Kenya’s independence, during a time when there were separate schools for whites, Asians and black Kenyans.Days after Sunak became prime minister, the principal told the Kenyan press that his premiership was “an indication that with determination and focus, one can be anything in this world. We are not limited if the example of the UK premier is anything to go by.” The celebration reflected an aspirational approach to life, emerging from deep within the postcolonial experience, that conceives of the world in terms of centre and periphery, and in which success is defined by proximity to that centre. “Endeavour to excel”, the Highway school motto, is hand-painted neatly on a blue sash on its walls. Continue reading...