Ian's Blog

  A bar opens next to a church. The church, disturbed by the noise, the traffic, and perhaps the symbolism of alcohol flourishing beside a place of worship, begins praying daily against the business. Quiet, persistent prayer, offered with the confidence that heaven listens. Then one day lightning strikes. The bar catches fire and burns to ashes. Immediately, the bar owner reaches a startling conclusion: this was no ordinary accident. He believes the prayers worked. In fact, he believes so strongly in the power of those prayers that he drags the church to court, insisting the priests are responsible for the destruction of his business. The church, faced with the lawsuit, quickly distances itself from any spiritual credit. Suddenly, prayer becomes symbolic rather than effective. The priests deny responsibility entirely. Lightning, they argue, is weather. Fire is accident. Prayer, apparently, had nothing to do with it. The judge proceeds to say: This is a difficult case because here w...

  Part I: What the Gen Z Protests Were Really Saying When young Kenyans took to the streets during the Gen Z demonstrations, one of the most common misunderstandings—sometimes deliberate, sometimes careless—was the belief that they were simply being disruptive. To some sections of society, especially among the comfortable middle class, the protests were first experienced through traffic jams, delayed meetings, closed businesses, missed appointments, and interrupted routines. The complaint came quickly: Why are they disturbing normal life? Why destroy business? Why not protest quietly? But that question missed the point entirely. The demonstrations were not born out of boredom, rebellion for its own sake, or a desire to inconvenience others. They were born out of accumulated frustration from a generation that has grown up watching public theft become normal, police violence become familiar, and leadership increasingly detached from the weight citizens carry every day. Young people w...

  There are moments in public life when leadership reveals itself not through policy, not through vision, not through courage, but through conduct. And sometimes that conduct says more about the state of a nation than any speech ever could. What unfolded recently between William Ruto and Rigathi Gachagua was one of those moments—deeply revealing, deeply unsettling, and for many Kenyans, deeply embarrassing. Part I: When National Leaders Descend into Public Spectacle A president and his former deputy are not ordinary political actors. Whether they agree or disagree, whether they are allies or rivals, they carry offices that symbolize the seriousness of statehood. Their words shape political culture. Their tone influences public discourse. Their conduct teaches citizens what leadership looks like. That is why watching the two spend public time exchanging insults, body-shaming one another, and reducing national conversation to personal attacks felt so jarring. Instead of debating po...

  Sometimes I catch myself wishing I had been born earlier. Not because the past was perfect, every era had its wars, its injustices, its struggles—but because earlier generations seemed to possess something we are quietly losing: time. Not just time in the sense of hours in a day, but time in the way the world moved, in the way life unfolded at a human pace. Bad news used to travel slowly, and mainly in a newspaper. A crisis might unfold somewhere far away, but it would take days or weeks before the details reached ordinary people. By the time the fear arrived, half the story had already resolved itself. That distance created a kind of psychological buffer. The world was still heavy, still complicated, but it did not press against your mind every waking moment. Today, there is no buffer. Wars update in real time. Missiles launch and within seconds the videos are on your phone. A flood happens across the city and you watch it swallow streets while you sit at your desk. A crisis unf...

One of the most powerful tools for understanding society is surprisingly simple: ask who benefits. When systems change, when institutions weaken, when social norms shift dramatically, the question of benefit often reveals motivations that are otherwise hidden beneath layers of rhetoric and ideology. In recent decades, one of the most significant social transformations across much of the world has been the weakening of the traditional family structure. Divorce rates rose sharply in many countries through the late twentieth century. Marriage rates declined. More people live alone. Dual-income households have become the norm rather than the exception. Cultural narratives around work, success, and independence have also changed dramatically. These shifts have sparked an ongoing debate: were they simply the result of evolving social values and economic realities, or did powerful institutions have incentives to encourage them? For many critics of modern economic systems, the answer seems ...

  In theory, paying taxes is one of the clearest expressions of citizenship. It is the agreement between the people and the state: citizens contribute a portion of their earnings, and in return the government provides services, infrastructure, security, education, healthcare, and a functioning society. Taxes are supposed to be the fuel that powers a nation forward. But in Kenya today, many citizens feel something very different when they look at their payslips or send money to the tax authority. Instead of feeling like they are contributing to the common good, it increasingly feels like they are funding criminals. And for many people, it doesn’t just feel like that. It looks like that. The frustration comes from the growing perception that the political class has transformed public office into one of the most lucrative criminal enterprises in the country. Instead of serving the public, many politicians appear to treat government as a private business, one where the product being s...