Wycliffe Muga

Nairobi

Columnist at The Star (Kenya)

COLUMNIST, THE STAR

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Articles

MUGA: Water management and food security

1 week ago | the-star.co.ke | Wycliffe Muga

If we discuss industrialisation policy, we could mention such things as “the ease of doing business”, and various other issues, but in the end, it boils down to our inordinately high electricity costs, which should ideally be about one-third of what they are now. Recently, there has been much concern over the question of “food security,” with a focus on Kenya apparently not being adequately food secure. There are actually two separate issues here.
MUGA: Successful policies can bring problems later on

2 weeks ago | the-star.co.ke | Wycliffe Muga

Last week I wrote about how a leader’s key policy decisions which seem perfectly valid at the time they are made, will sometimes turn out to have laid a foundation for disasters to come. My examples were from Germany: first was former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s policy of expanding trade ties with Russia which was supposed to bring Russia into ever closer engagement with the European Union and rule out any potential aggression against Russia’s much smaller neighbouring states.
WYCLIFFE MUGA: Failed policies will come back to haunt you

3 weeks ago | the-star.co.ke | Wycliffe Muga

The election of a new German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, just last week, set me thinking of the sad fate of a lady who once seemed guaranteed to be one of the iconic leaders of modern Europe: the former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, now living quietly in retirement.
MUGA: Why political promises take long to fulfill

1 month ago | the-star.co.ke | Wycliffe Muga

At some point in the late1980s, I accompanied a friend of mine to the “launch” of a water project in a rural part of Kenya. My friend had the ambition of being elected the next MP of that constituency. But he had not begun to campaign yet and indeed posed as a great supporter of the serving MP to disguise this ambition. Hence he had been invited to the official launch of that project.
MUGA: Limits of infrastructure in promoting economic growth

1 month ago | the-star.co.ke | Wycliffe Muga

There has been much talk of “infrastructure projects” following President William Ruto’s recent state visit to China. A good part of this, I believe, is that we tend to see infrastructure as the golden key to “development” (by which we mean, economic growth). And China may not have a great reputation in the respect for human rights: but it has a stellar reputation when it comes to building world-class infrastructure.
Debate over colonial benefit to rural Kenya

1 month ago | the-star.co.ke | Wycliffe Muga

In SummaryPros and cons of colonial rule are weighed with critical but balanced eyeIn continuing to review Nicholas Rankin’s ‘Trapped in History: Kenya, Mau Mau and Me’, there is the question of the good and the bad of British rule, with education already highlighted among the positives and education and agriculture pending.
Book scrutinising colonial history irks and disillusions

1 month ago | the-star.co.ke | Wycliffe Muga

It’s not often that you find that what you have in a 560-page book is actually two books within the same covers. One of them a remarkably well-researched work of history, and the other a rather uninspiring personal memoir of the author’s early days spent in Kenya as a child of a middle-class British expatriate family. But such is the case withTrapped in History; Kenya, Mau Mau And Me by Nicholas Rankin.
WYCLIFFE MUGA: The difficult journey to economic opportunity

1 month ago | the-star.co.ke | Wycliffe Muga

What is the difference between a container of coffee being shipped out to Germany from the Kilindini Port in Mombasa, and a planeload of German tourists arriving at Mombasa’s Moi International Airport? From an insular Kenyan point of view, there is no real difference. In one case, we have Germans paying for Kenyan agricultural goods. On the other, we have Germans paying for Kenyan tourism services.
MUGA: Plenty of work ahead for Kenyan think tanks

2 months ago | the-star.co.ke | Wycliffe Muga

ROUGHLY 20 years ago, and at a time when America was far friendlier to foreigners than it appears to be at present, I had the good fortune of attending a number of meetings with American think tanks both in New York and in Washington DC. Well, what impressed me most was the capacity the resident scholars at the American think tanks had for projecting, not just a few years ahead, but decades ahead, to assess the threats and opportunities that potentially lay ahead for their country.
MUGA: USAID and failure of communications in Kenya

2 months ago | the-star.co.ke | Wycliffe Muga

WITHIN the opinions and commentary sections of the local mainstream media, you will often find contributors to those pages self-identify as “communications experts” or “media strategists” or any of the many other titles used to identify those who work in what I shall broadly term as “media relations.”So much so that you might be justified in wondering if Kenya has a huge surplus of people, with a degree of expertise in media relations. In my opinion, this is not quite the case.