BY DAVID ONJILI It is not in me to hog another’s parade. In the month of July, Kenya ‘successfully’ hosted the World U18 Athletics Championships, immediately President Uhuru Kenyatta scrapped entry charges, resulting in a surge in spectator numbers and record crowds. Kenyans and their government are happy, and rightly so. A crowd of 55, 000 for a sporting event is no mean fete, especially in a developing country. But there in lies the real problem that faces local sports. From football to athletics to boxing to rugby to motor sports, our competitive edge as a nation is on a…
Author: NBM CORRESPONDENT
By C. M. Rubin “We need courageous cathedral builders! We also need to address traditional experts’ biases clinging to their narrow domains, parents’ old personal experiences biasing their views, and teachers’ and administrators’ lack of training and leadership, respectively.” — Charles Fadel All around us we are witnessing disruptive automation that is changing lives and taking away the jobs many have relied on to make a living. According to a recent report by PwC, within 15 years, artificial intelligence (AI) will take over 38% of U.S. jobs. But will this trend continue even further, and to what extent does AI…
The electricity industry in Africa is undergoing massive transformation and the old linear model of conducting electricity affairs is being challenged and tested, as new models are emerging with far reaching impact. Available technology today can be employed to create reliable, sustainable, localized and more efficient energy networks. That was the message that George Njenga, GM, Steam Power Systems for Sub Saharan Africa delivered to delegates while making his keynote address at the opening session of this year’s Power-Gen Africa and DistribuTech event in Johannesburg. “Distributed generation, smarter & cleaner steam power, renewables, smart grids, storage, prosumers, innovative financing, evolving…
BY PETER WANYONYI You can take this to the bank: at some point on the 7th of August or in the early hours of the 8th of August, the Government of Kenya will shut down internet access to most parts of Kenya. Every indication is there that the government, through the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA), has put in place all the technical devices and processes required to pull the digital plug and leave Kenyans in internet darkness as the General Election takes place. As this happens, the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC), the organ charged with overseeing and…
BY MOHAMMED BASHEER The Petya ransomware attack that hit computers around the world recently, the second in two months, is yet another reminder that computers play key roles in most enterprises, and that it does not take much to disable those computers. Irrespective of how robust your information security systems are, users are still the weakest link in your company’s cybersecurity. It’s a business cliché that staff are a company’s greatest asset and potentially its greatest risk. And while that has always been true in the area of customer relations, it’s now equally applicable to data security. Users are the…
By Rick Holland Late on June 27, the New York Times reported that a number of Ukrainian banks and Ukrenergo, the Ukrainian state power distributor, had been affected by unidentified malware, which caused significant operational disruption. Multiple security vendors and independent researchers subsequently identified the malware as a wormable ransomware variant with functional and technical similarities to Petya. Based on these similarities and continuing confusion, the malware has been dubbed Nyetya, Petna, ExPetr, and NotPetya, among others. It has been linked with a large number of infections, a significant proportion of which (around 60% according to statistics published by Kaspersky)…
BY KEVIN MOTAROKI If Mohamed Raffi Rajput could be a car, it would be a Range Rover. Or a Mercedes Benz. Why? Because he loves power. And the big engines in those cars translate to lots of power. “I love the urgency and the surge… Those cars, well specced, just nudge you to go. I love torque – raw, unpretentious torque. In my world, Benzes and Rovers are beautiful machines that stand for brute refinement; that is what I stand for… refined power,” Umar, as Raffi is popularly known, says with a wistful chuckle. In a popular weekly newspaper column,…
BY VICTOR ADAR Leafy suburbs like Karen, Runda, Muthaiga where individuals selling land were scarce to find to as recent as 10 ago are now opening up for developers thanks to owners who are intent on getting value as economic times get tough. In fact, Muthaiga and Gigiri, according to HassConsult’s land price index quarter two report 2071 released last month, are other old and well-established suburbs that are currently thriving big time on land development. Nairobi suburbs such as Eastleigh and Nyari have posted an increase in asking prices, a reversal from the previous trend of price drops making…
Once a wealthy person’s toy with utilities, the mobile phone has become the most ubiquitous gadget in history. It has evolved to become a tool of economic empowerment among developing countries in the world. Mobile phones have allowed information to become readily available, which in turn has made markets more efficient thus helping nurture entrepreneurship in the emerging generation. The evolution of mobile phones led to the growth of the mobile money industry, which has enjoyed a decade of great achievements. Ever since the launch of M-Pesa 10 years ago, the mobile money sector has enabled people to transact and…
BY DAVID ONJILI One man’s meat is another one’s poison; this is so evident with the recent move by the Kenyan Government to pass the interest capping rates on bank loans in September 2016. What this has led to is a number of unregulated microfinance institutions to prey on cash starved Kenyans especially those that are employed. With banks now raising the minimal requirements for ordinary working class Kenyans before they can acquire loans so as to hedge themselves against the risk of default in repayments, a number of employees are now falling prey to the microfinance institutions that seem…