Dispatch from Mombasa

Source: Standard Media Eight members of parliament   had their day in court  where they were charged with incitement to violence. The eight had been languishing in police cells since Tuesday when the magistrate ordered that they be incarcerated pending completion of investigations into their case by the Director of Public Prosecutions. As I reflect about the plight of the six, a question that keeps coming to my mind is aren’t we all haters? Shouldn’t all of us have our day in court? Shouldn’t all of us be locked in the filthiest of police cells so as to reflect on the amount of hate that we spew whether online or socially? While the eight may have been open in their alleged divisive rhetoric, a good number of us are closet tribalists (I borrow the term from Miguna Miguna’s Peeling off the Mask). We hate, divide people send signals of hate, we polarise, we just do anything that would justify our hate of other people but hiding under the freedom of expression and othe...

I cannot fully recall how the debate started but all I can remember is that we were having a debate about the communicative power of silence. I found the debate intellectually stimulating and decided to on my own learn a few facts about silence and communication. Of course I had to try and see how it links to my two pet areas of preoccupation –politics and internal organisational communication. Meaningful silence as advanced by Johannsen (1974) and Jaworski (1993) is where thought processes are involved and the hearer of the message intentionally withholds a response to the speaker. The speaker is left to use his/her own means to find out the response which more often is gotten from the nonverbal cues. Now, the 2017 general elections are just around the corner. Aspirants and incumbents in equal measure are running like headless chicken in early campaigns earnestly  trying to convince voters that they are the best choices. For incumbents, anything that seems to oppose or spea...