Kenyan State Research Articles

From conflict to coexistence: Reaffirming belonging and property rights through the ‘sons of village’ discourse in post-conflict Kenya

This article explores the puzzle of victims of political violence in Kenya committing to return to contested spaces of their prior victimhood and displacement. It considers how political violence has been brought to bear on understandings of property rights and belonging among Kikuyu victims of political violence in the Burnt Forest area of Uasin Gishu County in Kenya. It is reported that the iteration between the collapse of the multiparty Kenyan state commitment to protect Kikuyu land rights in their state settled areas and the partisan character of neo-customary tenure that restricts the admission of co-ethnic outsiders, induced Kikuyu spontaneous resistance to their spatial political confinement motivating their formulation of an organic discourse of belonging. The article introduces the ‘sons of village’ concept as a bottom-up framework for understanding the informal mechanisms for claiming property rights and belonging in contested spaces in Africa. By challenging notions of belonging rooted in contested histories and emphasizing credible links to land and space, this concept embodies inclusive citizenship with the potential to foster conciliatory relations between previously hostile groups in post-conflict scenarios. The 'sons of village' identification, therefore, offers a promising avenue for fostering positive peace in regions afflicted by chronic violence in Africa and beyond.

An Evaluation of Human Resource Practices on Employee Retention in State Corporations in Kenya

Organisations can achieve a competitive advantage by enhancing and expanding human resource knowledge, skills, motivation, and morale. The study aimed to determine the effect of performance management techniques on staff retention at the National Transport and Safety Authority-Kenya. The study focused on 2100 employees working in 15 of Kenya's National Transport and Safety Authority branches. A descriptive research design was used in the study, with a sample size of 336 respondents selected using a stratified random sampling technique. Findings showed that Staff retention is positively correlated with performance management. There was a strong positive correlation (association) (r = 0.725) between performance management and employee retention. The ANOVA findings determined the regression model's significance, from which an f-significant value of P<0.001 was derived, indicating that the model's likelihood (probability) of producing an incorrect prediction is less than 0.001. Management of NTSA-Kenya should appropriately handle aspects of employee relations management, such as HR initiatives, leadership styles, and shared values. They should also provide their employees with rewards in the form of cash bonuses, payments based on performance and pension schemes. Previous research on human resource practices and employee retention has mostly focused on the private sector, leaving a study gap on the effect of these policies on staff retention in Kenyan state corporations such as NTSA. The study, therefore, fills the gap in Knowledge of the performance management practice affecting staff retention.

Contestation, negotiation, and experimentation: The liminality of land administration platforms in Kenya.

This paper examines diverse infrastructural interventions in the making of Ardhisasa, the Kenyan state's digital land information management platform, as a space of contestation, negotiation, and experimentation. We analyse the platformisation of governance through theories on liminality to explain the agency of various actors in shaping the digital state. We particularly zoom into the influence of two actors: the private actors in the land sector and the civil society organisations representing informalised residents, and how they exercise agency in the development of Ardhisasa. Drawing on interviews with state and non-state actors, secondary literature, and extensive experience within Kenya's land administration system, we trace the overt and covert exercise of power in the platformisation of land administration of Nairobi. Our central thesis is that, despite its progressive development, Ardhisasa follows the tradition of a long line of large-scale infrastructural or developmental projects that rarely deliver on their promise for improvement but rather further entrench marginalised groups due to its exclusion of the already existing, albeit informalised, land administration and transaction practices that meet the needs of the urban poor. We argue that Ardhisasa's perpetual state of becoming leads to the spatialisation of liminality itself.

Sorting paper: The archival labour of digitising land records in Kenya

AbstractNairobi's land digitisation programme presents continuous challenges to the Kenyan state's aspirations of reforming land administration. By drawing upon insights from archival sciences and digital geographies, this paper argues that digitisation of Kenya's land administration records presents us with an opportunity to pay attention to how information flows from paper to digital systems, and the nature of human condition that makes it possible. Based on research of land digitisation initiatives in Nairobi and its peripheral counties, this paper explores first, how digitisation initiates a large‐scale state exercise of sorting paper in the land records departments that constitutes the archival apparatus of the state; and second, how the archival labour of state officials in this process is at the same time significant, invisible and devalued. Through interviews of state officials in county and state departments, we argue that the digitisation process is far more complex and messier than the rhetoric of seamless transition to automated land administration in Kenya. Digitisation involves a slow embodied labour in sorting paper by state officials who have little power in shaping the design of the platform that they are expected to use. The devaluation of the archival labour of state officials who are not professionally trained in ‘archival practice’ and are seemingly voiceless in the production of national land information platforms leads to subversion and non‐cooperation with the platform itself. The paper concludes that an expansive lens of seeing digital platforms through the tools and technologies of archiving practices enables us to understand why platforms fail, why and how paper increases value within digital systems and how archival labour is central to the politics of digitisation and platformisation in the future.

Understanding Technological Orientation as a Predictor of Organization Performance: Evidence from State Corporations in the Energy Sector in Kenya

Kenya's energy sector plays an important facilitative role to other sectors of the economy and thus drives economic productivity and industrial growth. Statistical evidence shows that the key objectives of the energy sector, such as increasing electricity generation capacity, fostering access to services and information, promoting stakeholder satisfaction, and upgrading requisite technology, have not been accomplished in the recent couple of years. For this reason, this study examined the effect of technology orientation on the organization performance of government entities in Kenya's energy sector. The research was based on a resource-based view and a balanced scorecard. The research design was cross-sectional, including inferential and descriptive analysis. The study's target group included 11 Kenyan state corporations with 887 managers. A sample size of 285 respondents was chosen using a stratified random selection procedure. The respondents were managers in the fields of human resources, accounting, marketing, operations, corporate affairs, procurement, and supply chain management, as well as information and communication technology, administration, finance, and business strategy development. A structured questionnaire was used to acquire primary data. Quantitative data were analyzed and presented using figures and tables, as well as descriptive and inferential statistics. Tables and pie charts were used to convey quantitative data. The findings of the research revealed that technological orientation has a positive effect on the performance of state corporations in Kenya's energy sector. The findings of the study contribute to the body of knowledge, thereby validating the propositions of the resource-based view and dynamic capabilities theory. Further, the conclusion of this study forms an important basis for anchoring policy guidelines on strategic orientation practices that foster technological orientation and corresponding resource commitment for promoting communication, automation, technological change, and research and development with the object of optimizing organizational outcomes. Future researchers should execute replicative research in other sectors and industries to validate the findings of this study.

Masculinity, Morality, and the State in Northern Kenya: The Case of Baringo County's Il Chamus

Since the early 2000s, armed attacks and inter-ethnic violence have increased in parts of northern Kenya's Baringo County. This article examines how the Maa-speaking Il Chamus men respond to the growing insecurity as they draw on long-standing notions of morality and on the Kenyan state. In contrast to tropes of (agro)pastoralist northern Kenya being plagued by inter-ethnic animosity, lawlessness, and absence of governance, Il Chamus men situate inter-ethnic violence and gun ownership in notions of peace, prosperity, and security and engage the Kenyan state in an effort to achieve these values. Analyses of men in precarious conditions as experiencing “waithood” and turning to violence “in search of respect” need to be complemented by attention to emic notions of morality, masculinity, and intergenerational hierarchy, albeit not as simple remnants of “culture” but as points of debate in contemporary contexts of political and ecological insecurity.

Addressing statelessness in Kenya through a confluence of litigation, transitional justice, and community activism: reflecting on the cases of the Nubian, Makonde and Shona communities

This article outlines the challenge of statelessness in Kenya and proceeds to focus on two seminal cases filed by the Nubian community against the Kenyan state: one before the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the other at the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child. Attention then turns to Kenya’s transitionaljustice agenda and its interaction with the plight of stateless persons in Kenya. Through the experiences of the Nubian, Makonde and Shona communities, the article also explores the role of community-led activism infurthering the cause of ending statelessness in Kenya. It concludes with key lessons to be learned from utilising litigation, transitional justice and community-led activism as part of the struggle for the rights of stateless persons in Kenya. It relies on desk-review and research of the Nubian cases, Kenya’s truth commission report and other official inquires, civil society reports, the 2010 Constitution and related laws.

‘We are our land’—Ogiek of Mount Elgon, Kenya: securing community tenure as the key enabling condition for sustaining community lands

AbstractWe outline how securing the community tenure rights of forest peoples can create a rapid, rights-based route to the effective and sustainable conservation of their forests. We draw on the different skillsets and experiences of the authors (long-term fieldwork, mapping and monitoring, and a lifetime of experience) to identify the conditions that enable the Ogiek of Chepkitale, Mount Elgon, Kenya, to sustain and be sustained by their lands. We also identify the conditions that drive the disruption of this sustainable relationship through an appropriation of Ogiek resources by external interests that threaten to degrade, alienate and destroy their ecosystem. It is increasingly recognized that securing sustainable conservation outcomes can be best achieved through the deep knowledge, connection and commitment that ancestral communities have regarding their lands. Evidence from Mount Elgon and more broadly shows that Indigenous Peoples are better guardians of their forests than international or state protection agencies. This challenges the idea that evicting forest peoples is the best way to protect forests. Other studies, including those conducted by the Kenyan governmental Taskforce on Illegal Logging, highlight the way Kenyan state agencies such as the Kenya Forest Service have been responsible for the severe depletion of Indigenous forests. We examine how collective community control can enable decisions to be made in line with taking care of community lands over the long term, but also highlight how this ability is under constant threat until and unless national law and practice recognizes the collective tenure rights of such communities.

Provoking an Overreaction: Transborder Guerrilla Warfare in the Kenya-Somalia Borderlands

ABSTRACT Scholars have shed much light on the positive correlation between foreign military interventions and blowback in the form of transnational violence, such as terrorist and guerrilla attacks. While the strategies of transnational terrorism have been widely addressed in the literature, the strategies of transborder guerrilla warfare have received little attention. Since Kenya deployed troops to Somalia in 2011, Al-Shabaab has carried out reprisal attacks in Kenya in an attempt to wear down their opponents. Using new primary evidence from Somalia and Kenya, I demonstrate that Al-Shabaab frequently stages transborder guerrilla operations at the margins of Kenya with the intention of provoking a violent overreaction from the Kenyan state against ethnic Somalis who dominate the Kenya-Somalia borderlands. The resulting repressive governmental response has strengthened perceived divisions and mistrust among Kenyan Somalis, sparked virulent public anger in Somalia, and reinforced the public image of Kenya as an unfriendly foreign occupying force. Despite the costly militant casualties, the findings reveal that militant groups prioritize transborder guerrilla attacks over transnational terrorist violence primarily due to the resultant state repression against their presumed constituency. These findings contribute to the broader analytical literature on militant organizations’ strategic goals.

Explicating the Impact of Leadership Styles on Strategy Implementation: An Empirical Study of the State Law Office, Kenya

This research paper sought to find out how leadership styles affect strategy implementation in State Law Offices. The study’s specific objectives are to determine the effect of autocratic, participative, transactional and transformational styles of leadership on strategy implementation at Kenyan State Law Offices. The theoretical anchors of the study were; the behavioural theory of leadership, the resource-based view theory along with the strategic leadership theory. To meet the study’s objectives, there was the use of descriptive research design. The target population of the study was 415 senior staff drawn from 4 State Law Offices in Nairobi, Mombasa, Kisumu and Nakuru. Stratified random sampling was used according to the cadre of staff. The study used primary data, which was collected by open and closed-ended questions as captured in the questionnaire, the main primary data collection tool. Data collection was set in after authorization by Kenyatta University Graduate School and the Management of the State Law Office. A pilot study was done in the Nairobi office in order to determine the validity along with the reliability of the research instrument. Content validity and construct validity was used to examine the relevance of the tool in retrieving the required information. The tools reliability were assessed by applying the Cronbach alpha where a score of above >0.7 underlined the questionnaires reliability. Further, after the cleaning and coding process, the collected data was then analysed using SPSS and the output presented in tables, figures and charts. In the research on autocratic leadership’s impact on strategy implementation, it was found that many respondents preferred top-down decision making to enhance accountability, while fewer supported the importance of rules and regulations and the use of coercive techniques in challenging situations. In the research on participative leadership, it was found that most leaders support group decision making and see it as an opportunity for mentoring. The key recommendation was that organizations should stick to top-down approach of leadership in enhancing accountability. Another key recommendation was that leaders should promote a culture of group decision making.

From constitutional avoidance to the primacy of rights approach to adjudication in Kenya: A case study of the interplay between constitutional rights and the law of contract

The Constitution of Kenya of 2010 is a value-oriented normative document. It enshrines values, principles, and rights that are supposed to transform the Kenyan state and society into a democratic and egalitarian direction. Through Article 20(3), the Constitution envisages that all legal rules sourced from statutes, common law, or customary law will be developed to ensure conformity and consistency with its value order. This paper advances the argument that the obligation to develop the law to promote the vision of the Bill of Rights mandates a shift of adjudication and litigation strategy from an approach that places premium on the doctrine of constitutional avoidance to an embrace of a primacy of rights approach to adjudication.

Instrumentalizing pastoralism? Understanding hybrid tenure and governance in Ilkisongo Maasai land of southern Kenya

Throughout Kenya, new governance regimes that are designed to sustain habitat connectivity for wildlife populations outside of national parks have gained increasing prominence. Though these new regimes often center a discursive emphasis on the synergies between wildlife conservation and pastoralist land use, it often remains unclear how they have interacted with colonial and post-colonial legacies that influenced pastoralists' relationships with land. As an effort to gain an improved understanding of the practices that conservation governance regimes deploy, and their underlying rationales, I present an empirically-driven account drawn from ethnographic field work in Kenyan Ilkisongo Maasai land surrounding Amboseli National Park. I argue that to understand recent configurations of land, it is essential to consider the multiple types of interlocking practices deployed by international wildlife conservation NGOs and the Kenyan state. Under a range of pressures to subdivide collectively titled land, a new territorial and governance configuration is emerging where land tenure will retain characteristics of being both private and collective. I argue that a discursive emphasis that frames conservation interventions as producing welfare for populations of wildlife and pastoralists alike has created new potentials to center the concerns of politically marginalized pastoralists, but has also raised risks of an ‘anti-politics’ that can reproduce and reinforce multiple dimensions of power asymmetries.

Work-Life Balance Benefits and Employee Performance in the State Corporations in Kenya

The lack of a comprehensive reward management system in a majority of Kenyan state corporations has created dissatisfaction among employees leading to decreased staff morale and consequently decreased employee performance. This study sought to establish the influence of work-life benefits on employee performance in state corporations in Kenya. The study used descriptive and explanatory research designs with a sample size of 642. The study used regression analysis to test the significance of the variables at a 5% significance level on the dependent variable. The findings showed that work-life balance rewards moderately influence employee performance. The study concluded that most state corporations in Kenya recognized work-life balance programs, however, these organizations hardly budgeted for the work-life programs. The study, therefore, recommends that work-life programs should be considered and budgeted for. Offering gym facilities to employees provides a healthy lifestyle and also counters stress. Organizations can also offer childcare facilities so that the parents can work comfortably without worrying about their children and hence maximum concentration at the workplace that would lead to better productivity.

From the Sky to the Streets, and Back

Abstract Against the Eurocentric, heteronormative paradigms that continue to structure analysis of post-9/11 global warfare, this article asks what it means to decenter the view from the imperial war room, illustrated most poignantly in the 2016 thriller Eye in the Sky. Highlighting the role played by the Kenyan state in the ongoing war against the Somali militant group al-Shabaab, it takes seriously the African subjects who co-constitute geographies of war making in East Africa today, from the political and business elite who normalize militarized masculinities and femininities, to the African troops whose affective and violent labor sustains war making in Somalia. Far from a celebration of subaltern agency, the article engages the notion of a “subaltern geopolitics” that is mindful of asymmetries of power and that foregrounds ambiguous positions of marginality that are neither dominant nor resistant. Attention to entanglement disrupts binary analytical paradigms of global/local and masculine/feminine, and calls for a deeper consideration of collaboration and complicity.

Camps and counterterrorism: Security and the remaking of refuge in Kenya

This article examines the enduring entanglements of counterterror governance and refugee encampment in Kenya. The spectre of “terrorism” and its supposed remedy—“counterterrorism”—have loomed large in Kenyan politics since the 1990s and gained further traction since the country’s military invasion and occupation of southern Somalia in 2011. Few other spaces have been associated as persistently with threats to Kenya’s national security and sovereignty as the Dadaab and Kakuma refugee camps in the country’s Northern belt, which are popularly depicted as “wombs” of terror. In this article, we analyze the transformation of refugee governance in Kenya under the auspices of the War on Terror and consider how counterterrorism has become a way of governing both refugees and precarious ethnoracialized citizens. We provide a multi-scalar analysis that moves between the scales of global militarization, Kenyan state governance, as well as securitized spaces of camps, checkpoints, and policing. The article concludes that refugee camps are not only gateways for imported global counterterror initiatives, but key sites of locally defined state-making processes in which Kenya’s counterterror state is (re)assembled as part of a planetary architecture of humanitarian containment and militarized apartheid.

Evaluating and Engaging: Using Participatory Video With Kenyan Secondary School Students to Explore Engagement With Health Research.

BackgroundThe growing ethical requirement to engage communities with health research has yielded diversification in approaches and targeted audiences. Conventional approaches like community “town-hall meetings,” laboratory open-days and focus group discussions, have evolved into new methods and audiences such as community drama and school engagement with health research (SEHR) involving learning interactions between researchers and school students. While engagement practices are diversifying, evaluations of these initiatives are rare in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMIC). This article focuses on the use of Participatory Video (PV) to explore the influence of the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme's (KWTRP) School Engagement Programme (SEP) on the views and understandings of science and research among Kenyan state secondary school students.MethodsTwelve male and twelve female students from four coeducational schools were provided with film-making kits (1 per school), and a one-day PV training workshop. They prepared 22 short films over 8 weeks depicting their experiences and views of research and engagement and conveying their career aspirations. Schools were selected based on prior SEP participation; two schools having experienced different engagement approaches, and the others with no prior school engagement. Study data comprised footage and participant observation notes.ResultsPV provided an opportunity to simultaneously engage and evaluate to inform practice. Through student-led filmmaking, PV stimulated conversations with students about research and engagement, enabling them to share their views in a way they felt was appropriate. These interactions offered an understanding of student gains from engagement, the depth of interaction required to address perceptions held about research and the potential unintended consequences of engagement. PV also provided insights into the context and complexity of life in which engagement is situated. Understanding this context is important because of its potential influence on participation in engagement activities. We draw on these insights to make two recommendations for school engagement practice. First is that PV can provide an enjoyable and insightful means of combining engagement with evaluation. Second, given that time for SEHR is competed for against other important curricular and extracurricular activities, SEHR practitioners must ensure that activities are as beneficial and enjoyable as possible to students.

Knowledge/Seizure: Debt and Data in Kenya’s Zero Balance Economy

AbstractThis article examines the growth in mobile phone‐based lending in Kenya, where millions now borrow from services that translate digital data into credit scores. Reeling from ongoing retrenchment and marketisation, many find themselves turning to expensive, short‐term credit to “buy time”. We depart from actuarial approaches to the digital economy that foreground the technical analysis of data in order to emphasise the importance of racialised expropriation and rentier capitalism. We focus on Safaricom, the corporation at the centre of the digital data and debt industry, showing how its infrastructural power and absent regulation permit it to seize value from users. Safaricom serves not only its own accumulation, but the fiscal imperatives of a Kenyan state that is, like its citizens, groaning under untenable debt. Citizens and state alike operate within the twinned constraints of illiquidity and volatility, a situation we call the “zero balance economy”. By linking the popular and sovereign debt crises we explore parastatal formations of predatory inclusion—neither market nor state, but an unwieldy amalgamation of the two.

The Independence, Accountability, and Effectiveness of Constitutional Commissions and Independent Offices in Kenya

One of the concerns that animated the search for a new constitution in Kenya was how to build more effective mechanisms for accountability. Towards this end, the 2010 Constitution of Kenya establishes constitutional commissions and independent offices in an attempt to dismantle and democratize the Kenyan state. This paper proceeds on the basis that what determines whether an independent institution ends up as an effective force for accountability in governance is its institutional design. The paper thus interrogates the constitutional and statutory design of the regime meant to effectuate the independence, accountability, and effectiveness of these independent institutions to determine whether they can deliver on their mandate.

PhD Candidate

Across the world, refugee hosting has been associated with costs and benefits to the hosting nations. However, in Kenya, hosting Somali refugees is majorly considered costly rather than beneficial to the nation. The county’s high insecurity is one of the major effects that Somali refugees are associated with. No objective research has indicated the specific benefits of Somali refugees in Kenya. Using mixed research method, this study focused on establishing the costs and benefits of Somali refugees. The findings show that Somali refugees pose positive and negative effects on the Kenyan state. These effects are economic, social, and environmental. The study recommends policy implementation and technological adoption strategies as ways of enhancing Somali refugee contribution to Kenya’s socio-economic development.

Effects of Human Resource Development Practices on Employee Job Performance in State Corporations in Nairobi, Kenya

Human resource development practices are seen as key to improving employee performance at work, which in turn leads to the achievement of individual and organizational goals. This study aimed how human resource development practices affect employee job performance in parastatals in Nairobi. The social exchange theory, human capital theory and the social learning theory were the key theories used for the study. To realize the study objectives a cross sectional descriptive design was adopted. The study was undertaken in various government parastatals in Kenya where a sample of 56 state corporations was selected. Primary data was exclusively used for the study and was obtained via a structured questionnaires which were circulated to the HR Managers of the government parastatals or their equivalents. The collected data was summarized using descriptive statistical tools and the regression model to assess the linkage among the variables. The outcomes revealed a positive and significant linkage between training and development and employee job performance. The study concluded that training and development, organizational development, rewards management and performance appraisal significantly had a positive effect on employee job performance among state corporations in Nairobi. The paper recommended that the management of Kenyan state corporations should invest additional resources on training and development, develop effective organizational development strategies and set attractive monetary and non- monetary compensations to improve employee performance.