Cognoscenti 🇰🇪

Funny political operatives should never be able to walk into a national fuel crisis meeting and appear to chair, direct or control it, because once that becomes normal, the country is no longer being governed through constitutional offices but through informal power, proximity to the President and political errands that no Kenyan can audit. This is not a small matter of optics or personalities. It goes to the heart of how public power is exercised in Kenya. When a crisis touches fuel prices, transport, schools, police deployment, protests and the daily survival of millions of citizens, the chain of command must be visible, lawful and accountable. Kenyans must know who called the meeting, who attended, in what official capacity they attended, what decisions were made, who gave instructions and who will carry responsibility if those decisions harm the public. Parliament foresaw the danger of power being exercised without a record, and that is why parliamentary business leaves behind Hansard, committee minutes, order papers, reports, votes and formal proceedings. You may dislike MPs, you may disagree with their conduct, and you may even believe Parliament has failed the country many times, but at least there is a public trail that allows citizens to go back and see who said what, who supported what, who opposed what and who must be held responsible. Government crisis meetings should also leave a formal record, especially when they concern matters as serious as fuel, transport, police action and public unrest. This does not mean every sensitive security detail must be thrown into the public domain, but there must be official attendance records, minutes, decision notes and lawful authority attached to the people in the room, so that strangers, political handlers, advisers or presidential errand boys do not exercise state power in darkness and then vanish when consequences arrive. Fuel is not a PR problem. It is an economic crisis that affects food prices, school movement, business costs, transport fares and the general mood of the country. If Cabinet Secretaries, Principal Secretaries, police commanders, energy officials, Treasury officials and transport sector players meet over it, Kenyans deserve to know the official structure of that meeting and the lawful basis of every instruction issued from it. A country cannot be run through whispers, side rooms, unofficial actors and vague orders from above. That is how shadow government grows around the formal government, until elected and appointed officials become decorations while unelected men with access become the real machinery of power. Power without record is dangerous because it cannot be questioned properly, and power without office is even more dangerous because it allows people who carry no constitutional burden to influence decisions that affect millions of lives. If someone is chairing a public crisis meeting, let their title be known. If they are making decisions, let the law show where that authority comes from. If they are merely advising, let them sit where advisers sit, not where accountable officials sit. The fuel crisis has exposed something bigger than prices. It has exposed the informal architecture of power around this government, and unless Kenyans insist on records, titles, minutes and accountability, tomorrow anyone with access to State House can walk into a public crisis, speak with borrowed authority, intimidate officials, direct outcomes and disappear when the country starts burning.

@amenya_nelson Dangote is known not to give bribes, your guess is as good as mine as to how it will go.

Kenya should take up Dangote’s offer ASAP. That will mean we can supply refined oil to all EAC and SADC bloc

@KenyaPower_Care No power 01450274822 what’s up?

@JalangoMwenyewe Of all the problems we have in this country this is the one you have decided to put your energy in? The day Kenya will get progressive leaders is the day we will start our journey towards Singapore.

Ng’anya culture is here to stay. We’re heading back to court, and I will personally cover all legal fees as we appeal the ruling. This is an industry that drives Nairobi. People travel from all over just to experience matatu culture—the art, the music, the energy.

@TheStarKenya if you dey talk anyhow without thinking, you go end up dey beg sorry wey go shame you.

President William Ruto has clarified his recent remarks on English usage, saying they were taken out of context after a private conversation was leaked and widely circulated online. The clarification follows a response from Nigeria’s Solid Minerals Minister Henry Dele Alake. #starkenyanews

The Board of Directors of Nairobi City Water and Sewerage Company (NCWSC) has appointed Martin Nang’ole as the substantive Managing Director, following his service in an acting capacity. ow.ly/1ScE50YP71E

Board of @NairobiWater Chairman Arnold Karanja has announced three new appointments: 🔵 Martin Nangole — Managing Director (pictured) 🔵 Josiah Gitu — Commercial Director 🔵 Albert Musyoka — Internal Audit, Risk & Compliance Director “All three were competitively recruited. The Board expects them to improve operational efficiency, revenue performance, customer satisfaction, and institutional effectiveness”, he says

@timothyturunga Some animals like the perpetrator of this crime just deserves to be put down painfully.

Velvine Nungari Kinyanjui was born on March 13, 1997. She was an only child, which, in many families, is a full-time responsibility. All the hopes, expectations, and dreams of her lineage were compressed into her; she was expected to succeed on behalf of them all. By 2016, she had secured admission to Kenyatta University to pursue a degree as insurance against the cruelty of chance. University life did not fund itself. To bridge the gap, she worked as a waitress at Destiny Gardens and Resort in Ruiru. She earned her money the honest way shift by shift, plate by plate. She was building something, slowly and carefully. Then, on Sunday, February 21, 2021, her "construction site" was visited by a man who did not come to admire progress. Joseph Kinyua Murimi was a married man, a spare parts dealer, and a regular customer respectable by daylight, but questionable after dark. He noticed her. Men like Joseph rarely miss what they perceive as an opportunity. He asked her out, and two days later, on Tuesday, February 23, he picked her up from Kihunguro near Ruiru. The evening began the way many dangerous evenings do. Drinks at a restaurant in Kahawa West, followed by a second location along Kamiti Road. Movement created comfort, and familiarity built quickly because alcohol handled the introductions. At 7:58 p.m., Velvine called a friend. “Come join us,” she said. The friend declined, noting that it was late. Then Velvine said something that would later echo with unbearable clarity. “I’ll call you when I get home. Please check up on me in case something happens.” They checked into Sinnots Hotel in Kahawa West at around 9:00 p.m. CCTV captured what institutions call "affection" the kind of footage that often confuses investigations because violence rarely announces itself at the reception desk. They looked like a couple. An hour and a half later, at 10:30 p.m., Joseph walked out calmly. He told the barman Velvine was tired and resting. He added, as an afterthought, that he was married and needed to return home, a nod to "responsibility." He mentioned the door was unlocked, a small detail carrying large implications. Then he left, taking her phone with him. Predators understand something fundamental that silence is easier to maintain when the victim cannot call for help. On Wednesday, February 24, around 1:00 p.m., Velvine managed to make a call to a friend. “Come. Bring someone. Help me get to the hospital.” When her friends arrived, they found a body that had been broken. She was naked, drowsy, and in agony, unable to move. They rushed her to Kenyatta University Teaching, Referral and Research Hospital. Doctors discovered she had three cervical spine fractures and a shattered pelvis. The spine, the structure designed to hold a human being upright had been destroyed. That does not happen gently. Her friends reported the matter to Kiamumbi Police Station. Joseph was arrested and charged with a violent sexual offense, only to be released on a 100,000-shilling cash bail. It seems gravity applies differently depending on who is falling. Velvine remained in the hospital for two weeks, fighting injuries that had already decided the outcome. The end arrived on March 9, 2021. She died slowly, giving pain enough time to fully introduce itself. On March 17, 2021, Velvine Nungari was buried in Sabasaba, Murang’a County. Family and friends gathered to mourn a woman they described as vibrant, loving, and joyful, the words people use for a life ended before it had the chance to complicate itself.1/2 For best Kenya & Investigative stories follow @timothyturunga .I love telling Kenyan Stories (continuation in comments)

@ChomaSauce @WarriorRapid @justnick0095 I also don't understand how kenyans allow foreigners to mistreat them in their own country. Totally unacceptable. That inferiority complex coz of skin colour is nonsense.

@WarriorRapid @justnick0095 I would never allow a Caucasian to make me uncomfortable in this country. I become xenophobic and violent very fast.

Huku river cafe wazungu hushtuka ukiwa na audacity ya kuenda kukula huko as a Kenyan. Unapatanga looks crazy. Some even leave ukiingia.

@KenyaPower_Care No power since Morning, and it hasnt rained. 01450274822

@lynn_ngugi1 It’s a system that has trained people to adapt rather than confront. People are navigating a complex system with limited options, trying to survive, belong, and hope—all at the same time.

What makes a population of over 50 Million people normalize dysfunction from a few politicians? Is it fear, conditioning, survival, or something else entirely? Who actually understands this, psychologists, sociologists, historians, anyone?? Feel free to weigh in✌🏾

@ledamalekina @WilliamsRuto Spare us this empty hypocritical sentiments.

Mr President, @WilliamsRuto how can the Ministry of Energy buy fuel outside the G2G framework at ~USD 253–255/MT while G2G fuel is fixed at USD 84/MT and still expect prices to stay affordable? This is a cabal enterprise. A few greedy faces are making everything in Kenya very expensive. Kenyans need to see real charges filed in court against all those energy officials and others involved. Not fake resignations while in police custody. No theatrics just dockets, trials, and convictions.

@Am_Blujay He probably doesn't know that a lion could lying in the grass behind him and he would only realise when his throat is in its mouth. Lions are masters at stealth hunting

So lions attack only if your back is turned?? This is risky though 😲

Throwback: Gen-Zs can’t relate.

@KenyaPower_Care Being in darkness for 2 days is not funny. Why is restoring power taking so long? Ref 14874532

@heynavtoor If you understand how LLMs work then this should not come as a surprise. Nevertheless at the speed AI is advancing such issues will be a thing of the past

🚨SHOCKING: Apple just proved that AI models cannot do math. Not advanced math. Grade school math. The kind a 10-year-old solves. And the way they proved it is devastating. Apple researchers took the most popular math benchmark in AI — GSM8K, a set of grade-school math problems — and made one change. They swapped the numbers. Same problem. Same logic. Same steps. Different numbers. Every model's performance dropped. Every single one. 25 state-of-the-art models tested. But that wasn't the real experiment. The real experiment broke everything. They added one sentence to a math problem. One sentence that is completely irrelevant to the answer. It has nothing to do with the math. A human would read it and ignore it instantly. Here's the actual example from the paper: "Oliver picks 44 kiwis on Friday. Then he picks 58 kiwis on Saturday. On Sunday, he picks double the number of kiwis he did on Friday, but five of them were a bit smaller than average. How many kiwis does Oliver have?" The correct answer is 190. The size of the kiwis has nothing to do with the count. A 10-year-old would ignore "five of them were a bit smaller" because it's obviously irrelevant. It doesn't change how many kiwis there are. But o1-mini, OpenAI's reasoning model, subtracted 5. It got 185. Llama did the same thing. Subtracted 5. Got 185. They didn't reason through the problem. They saw the number 5, saw a sentence that sounded like it mattered, and blindly turned it into a subtraction. The models do not understand what subtraction means. They see a pattern that looks like subtraction and apply it. That is all. Apple tested this across all models. They call the dataset "GSM-NoOp" — as in, the added clause is a no-operation. It does nothing. It changes nothing. The results are catastrophic. Phi-3-mini dropped over 65%. More than half of its "math ability" vanished from one irrelevant sentence. GPT-4o dropped from 94.9% to 63.1%. o1-mini dropped from 94.5% to 66.0%. o1-preview, OpenAI's most advanced reasoning model at the time, dropped from 92.7% to 77.4%. Even giving the models 8 examples of the exact same question beforehand, with the correct solution shown each time, barely helped. The models still fell for the irrelevant clause. This means it's not a prompting problem. It's not a context problem. It's structural. The Apple researchers also found that models convert words into math operations without understanding what those words mean. They see the word "discount" and multiply. They see a number near the word "smaller" and subtract. Regardless of whether it makes any sense. The paper's exact words: "current LLMs are not capable of genuine logical reasoning; instead, they attempt to replicate the reasoning steps observed in their training data." And: "LLMs likely perform a form of probabilistic pattern-matching and searching to find closest seen data during training without proper understanding of concepts." They also tested what happens when you increase the number of steps in a problem. Performance didn't just decrease. The rate of decrease accelerated. Adding two extra clauses to a problem dropped Gemma2-9b from 84.4% to 41.8%. Phi-3.5-mini from 87.6% to 44.8%. The more thinking required, the more the models collapse. A real reasoner would slow down and work through it. These models don't slow down. They pattern-match. And when the pattern becomes complex enough, they crash. This paper was published at ICLR 2025, one of the most prestigious AI conferences in the world. You are using AI to help you make financial decisions. To check legal documents. To solve problems at work. To help your children with homework. And Apple just proved that the AI is not thinking about any of it. It is pattern matching. And the moment something unexpected shows up in your question, it breaks. It does not tell you it broke. It just quietly gives you the wrong answer with full confidence.

@Wavinya_Ndeti You have failed terribly, roads in syokimau and katani are in dire state and you are here chest thumping?

I want to assure the people of Machakos County that I will remain firm and focused in fulfilling the responsibility you entrusted to me. I will not allow pressure or intimidation to distract me from the duty you gave me through your vote. The mandate I hold comes directly from the people, and I will continue to serve with determination and dedication, always putting the interests and development of Machakos first.

😂😂😂

@KenyanSays This reflects a very narrow, retrogressive view. Reducing such a transformative technology to deepfake videos misses the bigger picture entirely. AI is driving real, meaningful impact from improving operational efficiency and decision-making, to enhancing customer xperiences etc

“AI could disrupt the education sector in Kenya,” says Karen Nyamu on the controversial AI bill she has sponsored. The bill includes fines of up to KSh 5 million or prison terms of up to two years for violations related to AI use.

@droid254 It takes a lot of trust and guts for someone to let AI do such things for them.

Claude has shipped 74 times in 52 days..you can actually let Claude take control of your computer by just texting remotely from your phone