Startup Kenya

It's Friday again. Young ladies leaving work early to pass by the salon for a touch up. Young men going through their bank balance, MPESA balance and wallet to confirm their capacity for damage. Married men leaving their calculators tucked deeply under their work files in the office; and everybody in between getting ready to party. As you plan to paint tonight red, here's an A to Z guide of how to stay on the right side of the law - especially in light of the Alcoholic Drinks Control Act, 2010 a.k.a. Mututho Law. A - Alcohol So that we know what we're dealing with, take a look at how the Act defines alcohol. It includes a ny alcoholic drink with at least 0.5% alcoholic content except for methylated spirit or denatured alcohol (which kinda provides a loophole because Kenyan's have been known to take alcohol unfit for human consumption). The Act regulates production, sale and consumption of alcohol. UPDATE:Read recently that the law regarding proximity to scho...

This year I celebrate my 10th anniversary since finishing high-school. Yes, for those who want to count, it was 1999, when I finally lifted the yoke that is high school off my shoulders. It's also been ten years where I've been able to forget most of the millions of pieces of data I stored in my brain for examination on topics as varied as photostatic conductors, wheat farming in Siberian tundra, morphological features of fish, and calculus. That last one though (calculus) I continued to study even in the real world (apparently anything you experience while in school, under 18, and on your parent's allowance is not the real world, but a fictional world created to get you employable skills). Well, maybe not the actual formulae, but calculus dealt with curves. One curve I became familiar while studying law was the curve of diminishing ambition. You see when you join law school, you feel like you are on top of the world. Heck, you must be one of the brightest minds in the land...

Some will call me a hater, but I am not, and I can no longer keep quiet about this. As a compulsory requirement to completing a law degree at the University of Nairobi one must attend an 8-week clinicals programme during the second year of study. At these clinicals you intern under a civil law and criminal law magistrate for a month a piece. If you get a good magistrate you will get to write judgments for the cases you sit through (not that they will be implemented) and have plenty of Q&A time with your magistrate. I was fortunate enough to be assigned to one of the two Senior Principal Magistrates at Nairobi Law Courts where I sat through several high profile cases. I also got to write judgments on two accused persons (which were totally opposite to what the magistrate delivered), and saw the justice system in action first-hand. I learned many things during these clinicals but I remember two clearly. First of all: DO NOT commit a crime, or even be caught in circumstances where the...