Kenyan lawmakers, already among the best paid in the world, voted on Tuesday to increase their current salaries by nearly 40 percent, overturning a pay cut ordered by the national salaries commission earlier this year, reported Reuters, and ignoring a presidential request to free up cash to create jobs.
Kenya has become the hottest oil and gas venue in East Africa since big discoveries were made in the country’s virgin oilfields last April. All eyes are on Kenya in 2013 to see how quickly – and economically they can develop those discoveries into production.
READER SUBMISSION –By 2030, Kenya, East Africa’s largest economy, hopes to become a “middle-income country providing a high quality life to all its citizens”. Yet while the government’s Vision 2030 plan is strong in ideology and rhetoric, it neglects to compensate for the true problem in the country: human failures such as endemic corruption, poor governance, and low productivity.
Kenya could become the first-ever African nation to host the Summer Olympic Games, reported the Financial Times on Thursday, after Prime Minister Raila Odinga announced his intention to bid for the 2024 Olympics in the capital of Nairobi.
According to Odinga, Africa’s time to host the games had come, especially after South Africa’s and Egypt’s attempt to host the games, in 2004 and 2008 respectively, had failed.
The East African nation of Kenya could soon join the ranks of oil-producing countries in the world after Anglo-Irish oil giant Tullow Oil made the nation’s first ever oil discovery in the northwest region of Turkana.
Kenya’s president Mwai Kibaki announced the discovery on Monday after receiving confirmation from Tullow about the economic viability of the oil find.
“Our country has made a major breakthrough in oil exploration,” said Kibaki to a press conference in the capital of Nairobi.
Kenya is a lower income economies coming under the Sub Saharan African region as to the classification made by the World Bank on the basis of income and region for the year 2006.
Kenya’s economy has suffered from larger problems in the recent years due to increasing corruption. The economic history reminds us that it was the financial hub of East Africa one day. The country’s economy is largely dependent upon agriculture sector.
Within East Africa, Kenya is the heart for import/export trade. Unfortunately, serious issues have developed because of growing corruption, as well as this country depending heavily on a number of major favorable that still has depressed prices. In fact, the International Monetary Fund or IMF suspended Kenya’s Enhanced Structural Adjustment Program designed to improve the economy because reform was not sustained and corruption was not slowed. Kenya’s economy has also been hit hard because of a serious drought from 1999 to 2000.
