Esther Mutua

The best way to teach people is by telling a story.

[evansoo @elangat016]

TUJIFUNZE KISWAHILI:
1. Charger - kimemeshi
2. Remote - kitenzambali
3. Password - nywila
4. Akala (bladder shoes) - kirikiri
5. Passion fruit - karakara
6. Kangaroo - bukunyika
7. Fridge - jokofu
8. Juice - sharubati
9. Chips - vibanzi
10. PHD - uzamifu
11. Masters degree - uzamili
12. Degree - shahada
13. Diploma - stashahada
14. Certificate - astashahada
15. Keyboard - kicharazio
16. Scanner - mdaki
17. Flash disk - diski mweko
18. Mouse (for a computer) - kiteuzi
19. Floppy disk - diski tepetevu
20. Computer virus - mtaliga
21. Distillation - ukenekaji
22. Evaporation - mvukizo
23. Synthesis - uoanishaji
24. Oesophagus - umio
25. Greenhouse - kivungulio
26. Femur - fupaja
27. Germ cell - selizazi
28. Humus - mboji
29. Nector - mbochi/ntwe
30. Nutrients - virutubisho
31. Crystal - fuwele
32. Appetizers - vihamuzi
33. ATM - kiotomotela
34. Business card - kadikazi
35. Scratch card - kadi hela
36. Simcard - kadiwia/mkamimo
37. Memory card - kadi sakima
38. Microwave - tanuri ya miale
39. Mobile phone - rununu/rukono
40. Stapler - kibanizi
41. Laptop - kipakatalishi
42. Power saw - msumeno oto
43. Duplicating machine - kirudufu
44. Photocopier - kinukuzi
45. Cocktail party - tafrija mchapulo
46. Air conditioner - kiyoyozi
47. Calculator - kikokotozi
48. Lift - kambarau
49. Reaction - radiamali
50. Toothpick - kimbaka

[Kaatib Yusuf @kaatibyusuf]

Muslim men of today do not seem to know what they want. We are stuck between “our women should stay at home and build our kids” and, in the same breath, we want them to be placed in positions of authority. These are, unfortunately, two parallel lines.

We cannot keep demanding two different versions of Muslim women depending on what we need from them. At home, we want the endlessly available wife and mother whose highest priority is the family. Outside the home, we suddenly want the highly educated woman, the executive, the entrepreneur, the professional, the woman capable of navigating institutions and carrying serious responsibility. Then we act surprised when she cannot simultaneously give each of these roles the entirety of herself.

There is nothing wrong with a woman being a mother, wife, scholar, entrepreneur or professional but we pretend all these responsibilities require nothing from her. Every serious role costs something. Leadership requires time. Motherhood requires time. Marriage requires time. Building a business requires time. Scholarship requires time. We should stop speaking as though a woman can be expected to give her absolute best to every sphere simultaneously without trade-offs.

If you believe your wife should devote herself primarily to raising your children and building the home, do not turn around and complain that Muslim women are absent from positions of influence. You cannot demand the product while dismissing the process that produces it.

Likewise, if you want Muslim women to become doctors, academics, entrepreneurs, executives, policymakers and leaders, then you must accept that some of them will have ambitions, responsibilities and commitments beyond the four walls of your home. You cannot applaud a Muslim woman when her competence benefits the Ummah and condemn that same competence when it makes demands on your own expectations of her.

Caution should also be given to Muslim women against accepting the premise that their worth is proven only when they occupy corporate offices or positions of authority. That is merely another form of reduction. A woman does not become more valuable because she becomes an executive, nor does she become less valuable because she chooses motherhood as the centre of her life.

What we need is not a Muslim woman who fits whatever role modern society or Muslim men happen to demand from her. We need a Muslim woman who is educated, grounded, competent and conscious of Allah, with the freedom and wisdom to know where her abilities are most needed at different stages of her life.

Before we start asking why Muslim women are not in more positions of authority, we should ask ourselves if we have we actually built families, marriages and communities that make it possible for women to exercise that authority without making them pay for it twice.

Because you cannot ask a woman to build the home, raise the children, support the husband, preserve the family, pursue education, build a career, lead institutions and serve the Ummah, then call her deficient when she inevitably has to choose where to spend her finite time and energy.

We need clarity. May Allãh grant us one.

[IRCC @CitImmCanada]

Canada is looking for skilled health care and social service professionals—nurse practitioners, dentists, pharmacists, psychologists and social workers—to fill shortages in our health care system and provide essential services to Canadians!

If you have the training, credentials and experience in health care and social services we’re looking for, explore our immigration pathways and build your future in Canada: https://t.co/G3RYawcthL

[Zarish @Zarish5062]

My little neighbor starts kindergarten tomorrow. He told me, very seriously, “I’ve been waiting five whole years to learn how to read.”

“Five whole years?”

“Yes. My whole life. And I know my letters and everything. I can already read words with one vowel inside.”

I told him it sounded like he was ready.

“I am. I’ve been ready. I even have my backpack packed with my stuff.”

Tomorrow, after five long years of waiting, he finally gets to go. There’s a whole world of words waiting for him.

[#LandIsNotProperty Mwalimu Wandia @wmnjoya]

Every Kenyan parent considering their children's higher education needs to know this:

If your child pursues higher education in a different country, Kenya will never stop punishing your child for it. Kenya will never allow your child to work in the area of their training. I've seen someone with a MA in Kiswahili from University of Dar, no less, being told she can never get a TSC number. That's Kenya.

So yes, you'll hear civil servants praising foreign education as "world class," and harassing Kenyan universities to uphold the standards of Oxford, but they will punish you for daring to go there yourselves and get that education. You're a nobody, you're just a native. You're not supposed to have ambitions beyond what DO John Ainsworth imagined for you. The way the settlers couldn't stand the idea of Africans going to school, is the same way civil servants see education in Kenya. They decide what is good for you. If bad imitations of Norwegian education are what they think you need, that's exactly what you'll get.

So yes, they are going to defund Kenyan public universities and tell you to go to Str-thmore instead, but dare you take that seriously and seek education in TZ, Rwanda or Uganda, let alone Europe or America. You will return to grief and lamentation. Doors will be shut, one after another. You will come back with a PhD in engineering and the best you can do is motivational speaking.

This is not different from colonial days. In "Not yet Uhuru," Jaramogi says that British colonial officers used to arrest Kenyans at the port and jail them if they dared to pursue scholarships in Eastern Europe. Meanwhile the settlers were fighting tooth and nail for Royal Technical College to remain a TVET and never become a university, let alone one for Africans to attend.

But I'm saying higher education abroad: even if you try here, you will get grief. Matiang'i was particularly vicious about it. He said that if you don't get a C+ in KCSE, you should never, ever, see a university classroom, even if you do 10 diplomas and have work experience. He threatened to withdraw the degrees of those who took the long route.

Our education problem isn't curriculum. It's not the job market. It's British snobbery and class consciousness. It's hostility to knowledge. Our politicians and civil servants are steeped in the British "gentleman" model of public education, which was brought here. And that model hates both skills and knowledge. Period.

That mindset prefers fantasies like "the advantages and disadvantages of British colonialism in Africa." And this anti-intellectualism makes going to school even more desirable because the more we are denied education, the more we sacrifice in our savings and resources to get it. Human beings cannot live without understanding their environment. But for seeking that knowledge, you will be punished. Severely. @scherargei will write a bill reducing medical workers to hospital butlers and elevating police officers to medical practitioners.

@NoCountryHere ametupatia suluhisho.

[Nelson Amenya @amenya_nelson]

The kind of overspending we are seeing at State House alone could help pay for education, and we haven’t even begun talking about corruption. This is simply the money we can actually see being spent on vanity and excess. When Ruto came into power, he promised austerity and fiscal discipline, yet his government has done the complete opposite. He promised to stop piling on more debt, yet borrowing has continued. Meanwhile, the ordinary citizen is being squeezed harder and harder to give more to a government that refuses to tighten its own belt. So when you ask me what the alternative is, it’s actually pretty simple: stop wasting the little resources we have. Cut the excess, prioritise essential services, and live within our means.

[The Mayor @themayor_ke]

Uhuru is to blame for the problems we are facing today.

But who were the main characters during Uhuru’s government?

William Ruto - Deputy President

Kipchumba Murkomen - Senate Majority Leader

Abraham Kindiki - Deputy Speaker, Senate

Aden Duale - Leader of Majority, Parliament

Kimani Ichung’wah - Budget Committee

John Mbadi - Leader of Minority
…and many others.

Are you seeing what I am seeing? 👀

[Sann @san_x_m]

A mammogram missed her cousin's breast cancer. By the time it was found it was too late, and she died.

About 6 months later a second woman in the same family was diagnosed. She died as well.

The woman watching this happen was an artificial intelligence researcher.

Her name is Geetha Manjunath.

She grew up in Bengaluru. She took her bachelor's degree in computer science at UVCE, then a master's and a doctorate at the Indian Institute of Science, where she was a gold medallist.

Her first job was at the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, where she was part of the team that built India's first commercial supercomputer in the 1990s.

She spent 17 years at Hewlett Packard Labs as a principal research scientist. She then became a lab director at Xerox Research in India, heading their data analytics research.

Then the 2 deaths in her family happened, and she went and read about the disease.

What she found is worth knowing.

In India, roughly half the women diagnosed with breast cancer die of it. Her own words are blunt. Every alternate lady detected with breast cancer is dying.

The reason is almost never the treatment. It is that the disease is found too late.

Mammograms are the standard test. They use x-rays, they are expensive, they are uncomfortable, they need a large fixed machine, and there is a specific medical problem with them. In younger women the breast tissue is denser, and dense tissue and tumours both show up white on the scan. So the tumour can hide.

That is what happened to her cousin.

She started working on it in her spare time, on weekends, with a small team, while still employed.

The idea was to use thermal imaging instead. A cancer uses more energy than normal tissue and the blood flow around it increases, so the area is slightly warmer. A thermal camera can see that heat pattern from a distance, without touching the body and without any radiation.

The hard part is reading it. Heat patterns are messy. That is where her actual expertise came in. She trained machine learning software to interpret them.

Their first test was with a medical college in Manipal, using thermal images of 72 cancer patients.

It worked.

In 2016 she left her job and started a company with a former colleague, Nidhi Mathur. They called it Niramai, which stands for Non Invasive Risk Assessment with Machine Intelligence, and which in Sanskrit also means free from illness.

The test needs no radiation, no touch, no pain, and no one else in the room. It works on women of any age and any breast density. The equipment is portable, so it can be taken to villages.

More than 400,000 women have now been screened across over 250 locations in India. More than 2,000 cancers have been found.

The technology has regulatory clearance in the United States and in Europe. She holds 14 American patents.

She has one line she repeats.

Nobody needs to die of breast cancer, if you can catch it early enough.

[#LandIsNotProperty Mwalimu Wandia @wmnjoya]

"Dust" by @AdhiamboKE is about PEV.

It takes a philosophical sophistication to engage with tragedy. But the Kenyan intellect has been thoroughly twisted by the British elitism to be cultishly simplistic, like the mob that is hounding Prof Arday. Us we do problems and solutions, and being positive. Tragedy requires a different maturity that is viciously fought against in Kenya.

How do I know?

I once asked a class to listen to a performance of Lwanda Magere and write a response. Some said the story teaches us how women in traditional Africa are relegated to housework, others said it teaches the youth to listen to the elders if they want to succeed. Nobody saw the hero and his story.

The British school system and the Kenya government have programmed our minds so well. We look at everything in terms of solutions, alignment to policy, motivational speaking, and ethnic identity. For Kenyans, the problem of colonialism was that it was foreign, not that it was oppressive. Anything outside that, we really, really struggle. We call it too theoretical for practical use.

[Okong' Okuna @XivTroy]

This is where @JudithOketch 's Ambulex Solutions (@AmbulexLtd) comes in. For about KSh. 200 a year, you get covered for ambulance emergencies. Even better services for business packages. In this country, you will bleed to death waiting on the government. Private hospitals are also in business.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

These camps do exist 👇, in several versions (not only farming but also military, for instance): I personally know several families who sent their kids to one.

They actually answer a uniquely Chinese phenomenon: the parents and grandparents' generation that built modern China grew up in incredible poverty and hardship. As they see it - which is probably correct - they worked their way to prosperity precisely because of this, because hardship gave them grit and made them tough.

However, they now face the paradox of their own success: the comfortable lives they worked so hard to give their children might be the very thing that destroys that very success - the kids being too soft and weak to sustain it.

There was a very popular movie in China around this 2 years ago called Successor (抓娃娃, Zhua Wawa). The story is about a billionaire couple - who themselves grew up poor - who go to absurd lengths to raise their son in manufactured poverty, convinced that only hardship can forge a worthy successor.

It became a massive hit precisely because many Chinese parents recognized the anxiety behind the joke.

Same story for China's political class. If the cultural revolution had one silver lining, it's that it produced leaders hardened by genuine suffering. Xi Jinping himself spent years literally living in a cave as a sent-down youth, working as a farmer.

He can relate to China's poorest and did so much against poverty precisely because he understands intimately what poverty is.

I'm pretty certain that a question that haunts the Party is the same one that haunts those parents: can leaders who never knew hardship hold this thing together? How can we make sure that people who rise to the top - in the Chinese vernacular expression - ate sufficient bitterness (吃苦, chī kǔ)?

In a way, it's also what happened to the West. The so-called "greatest generation" - the De Gaulles, Churchills, Adenauers - were forged by the hardship of 2 world wars and the Great Depression.

We're now, in Europe, two generations of leaders after them and let's just say you can tell. Macron, Starmer (or Burnham) and Merz are mere managers of decline, and that's being generous.

De Gaulle had this wonderful expression about weak men: he would say "c'est du thé" ("it's tea" - as in weak, flavorless, watered down). No doubt that's how he'd call every single one of them.

This counterexample might actually be the biggest present we unknowingly give China: a cautionary tale that their anxiety is justified.

I wouldn't be surprised if every time Xi meets a Macron or a Starmer it gives him cold sweats about what China's future leaders might turn into and he secretly calls a politburo meeting to order a review of whether rising cadres are eating enough bitterness.

[Clear Leadership @LeadClearly1]

One of the best ways to get your team or the people who work under you to execute is to make sure they understand the why before they are handed the what.

People are less likely to take real ownership of instructions when they don't understand the purpose behind them.

But give someone a clear reason why their contribution matters, how it connects to something bigger than the task itself and what the outcome means for the team or the people it serves and you will see a completely different level of ownership, initiative and quality in how they show up to do the work.

Direction without context produces compliance. Direction with meaning produces commitment and commitment is what execution actually runs on.

[I am Chege @_James041]

After finding out that Namibia cleared IMF debts and washed their hands clean, I decided to do more research. Apart from another cleared $750M Eurobond, Namibia negotiated with South Africa and the cancelled N$800 million colonial debt.

What was their argument?

"The citizens of Namibia cannot pay debts they never incurred nor consented to."

Why are Kenyans being overtaxed to pay debts Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto regimes illegally borrowed to service their lavish lifestyles?

[James @MrJamesKe]

If you went to Murang’a today and told residents that Kang’ata isn’t working, they would probably think you’ve lost your mind. Tell them Kang’ataCare isn’t functional and they would argue with you and defend it because they have personally experienced it working. That’s the difference.

If SHA were genuinely working better than NHIF, the millions of Kenyans who have registered and tried using it would be the ones testifying to its success. You wouldn’t need to organize town halls and spend hours explaining to Kenyans how great the system is.

Holding town hall meetings to lecture people about healthcare while nurses are on strike only demonstrates how completely out of touch you are with the realities of governance.

[DulceBiatch @BiatchDulce]

Puerto Rico has no water, Gary Indiana has no power, Hawaii is flooded and had a hurricane snowstorm over a volcano, lettuce and popsicles are battling to kill you.
The USS Lincoln and the rest of the Navy are nearing mutiny, the totalitarian state of North Korea is now your friend, dog food is being recalled and your president has to hide in a catering truck. The Trump regime is an epic disaster.

[Chinkemkasimma C. Chukwuma @Chinkemkasimma]

I have spent the greater part of the night lost in thought.

Truly, there are moments in a person’s life when one must sit quietly with oneself and ask whether the road ahead is still worth walking. Since the announcement of the release of my book: Husband Is Useless, I have received messages from different calibres of people; some who were angry, disappointed, and also deeply invested and concerned in the kind of marriage I may or may not have in the future.

And perhaps they are right.

‘cause you see, in our part of the world, a woman is often taught from childhood to think about her prospective husband before she meets him. We are taught about the kind of in-laws and family we would eventually marry into and the children we’d have before we know whether we even want them. We are taught that a woman must be careful with her words because one day, somebody may hear them and decide she is not the kind of woman he wants to marry.

phew!

Now that I think about it, I see the wisdom of the elders. Perhaps a writer must sometimes know when to put down her pen ‘cause some battles are not worth fighting and there are things more important than a book. I for one would definitely love to get married someday, and settle down with my husband and seven children in an apartment somewhere in Ogbomosho.

So, after a long, excruciating night of reminiscence and remorse, I have made my decision. I am taking Husband Is Useless down. From the bottom of my heart, I am truly sorry. The book will no longer be available for pre-order for the cheap price of ₦9,500 from the 25th of August, 2026. It’d now be sold for ₦13,000.

This was truly a hard decision to make. Below is the pre-order link for any interested parties before I take this hard step: https://t.co/Ppw65DNjY4

[alpha man @alphaman_111]

My girlfriend once told me something during an argument that stayed with me,

"When I tell you something hurt me, I'm not attacking you. I'm trusting you with a vulnerable part of me. The moment you start defending yourself instead of understanding me, the conversation stops being about the problem and starts being about your ego."

That hit me hard.

[David Nahinga Π 🇰🇪✊🏿 @dnahinga]

Most Kenyan homes aren't destroyed by floods.
They are slowly ruined by microscopic design errors made before groundbreaking.

We see it every year:
A homeowner spends KSh 6M+ building a dream house.
The rains arrive.
Within two seasons, damp patches creep up the walls, paint peels, and the foundation settles unevenly.

The culprit? Shortcuts on moisture detail.

If you are building this year, enforce these four principles on site:

1. Foundation Gradient: A minimum 1:50 slope away from your structure. Water must never sit near your footings.
2. Unbroken DPM: Damp-proof membranes must be lapped continuously. A 2-inch gap renders the entire sheet useless.
3. Additive Exterior Plaster: Never use plain cement plaster on exposed walls. Integrate waterproofing compounds like Sika into the mix.
4. Protected Air Flow: High-level ventilation must allow wall cavities to dry without letting rain blow inward.

Water always finds the weakest detail. Make your details invincible.

At PoDCity, we connect you with architectural plans engineered specifically for local Kenyan terrain and weather conditions. View complete designs, estimate your material costs, and talk with expert designers—all in one place.

Don't leave your life savings to chance. Plan smart. Build once.

https://t.co/v2Fk9kDzc8
Own the Journey. Then Own the Home.

[The Catholic Engineer @TheCatholicEngr]

Laughing at the fact that this trait is exactly what gets people promotions in the corporate world, especially engineering.

The ability to foresee risks and mitigate them, thus preventing a slip in schedule or wastage of money

The same skills that women get rewarded for in the workplace world, get demonized in motherhood

[Adedoyin Ann Adedeji @AnnDeePen]

HUSBAND IS USELESS has been causing problems left, right and centre on this side of the internet, and it made me compile a list of books that will further rile you up. 😅

I personally find these book titles audacious and worth reading.

A thread…