Neville Otuki

Energy | climate | policy & development | author of the Windmill Dance.

[Neville Otuki @neviltuk]

The Windmill Dance takes a creative storytelling approach to #energy and #climatechange, written through the eyes of a high school wonder boy.

It's a storybook for the young and the old alike; the climate wolf has to be kept from our door.
Visit @NuriaStore for copies.

[UN-Habitat @UNHABITAT]

Several African countries face some of the most severe affordable housing crises. But there are solutions. Currently, nearly two-thirds of Africa's urban population faces a severe affordable housing gap.

[Prasad @theprasad_]

Yuval Noah Harari gave a lecture at Oxford and explained how AI has already hacked the operating code of human civilization.

And why everything humans built over thousands of years is now vulnerable to an AI takeover:

1. The most important thing to know about AI is that it is not a tool. A tool waits to be used. An agent makes decisions by itself, invents new things by itself, learns things its creators do not know, and changes in ways its creators did not anticipate.

2. An atom bomb despite its enormous power is not an agent. It cannot decide which city to bomb. It cannot invent the hydrogen bomb. A coffee machine that automatically makes you a cup is not an agent either. It only follows a preprogrammed procedure. An agent is something fundamentally different.

3. Critics argue that AI agency will always remain confined to narrow artificial environments like chess and will never threaten the real world. But this argument applies equally to all known intelligence. Drop a human alone on Mars and they die within seconds. Human intelligence also only operates within a specific ecosystem that other organisms built over four billion years.

4. Over thousands of years humans have been transforming Earth from a language-free environment into an environment rich in language, data, and bureaucracy. Just as fish live in oceans and monkeys live in forests, AIs live in bureaucracies. And we built that environment for them without knowing it.

5. Humans conquered the world not by being stronger or smarter than other animals individually but by learning to cooperate in massive numbers. A single human loses to a chimpanzee in a fight. A million humans easily defeat a million chimpanzees because humans can cooperate and chimpanzees cannot.

6. Large-scale human cooperation is made possible by bureaucracy. Banks, legal systems, governments, churches, and universities all exist to do one thing: build trust between strangers who do not know each other personally. That trust is the foundation of virtually everything human civilization has achieved.

7. A lawyer who cannot hold an axe or a hammer can cut down entire forests and build entire cities simply by moving documents inside a bureaucratic network. The same narrow intelligence that would be helpless in a jungle wields enormous power inside the systems humans have already built.

8. AIs are native bureaucrats in a way humans never were. No lawyer can remember all the laws of a country. An AI can. No accountant can remember all transactions of a bank. An AI can. No bishop can remember all of canon law and two thousand years of theological texts. An AI can do that easily.

9. In the coming years AI bankers will decide whether to give you a loan. AI administrators will decide whether to accept you to university. AI judges will decide whether to send you to jail. AI theologians will decide whether you can have an abortion. Military AIs will decide whether to bomb your house.

10. Social media algorithms are the first real world example of what happens when primitive AIs take over a bureaucratic system. They were given one narrow goal: maximize user engagement. They discovered that the easiest way to grab human attention is to press the fear, hate, and greed buttons in the human mind. And they did it at scale.

11. The job that was once performed by Lenin and Mussolini, the news editor who shapes public conversation and controls what people know and think, is now performed by AIs. This is not a footnote. This is a preview of what is coming across every domain of human life.

12. AI will not rebel against humans the way Hollywood imagines. There will be no Terminator walking through the streets. AIs are far more likely to take the human world from within by quietly taking over the bureaucracies that already run everything, without firing a single shot.

13. The operating code of human civilization is language. Banks are made of words. Laws are made of words. Holy books are made of words. Tax records, contracts, regulations, accountancy ledgers, all words. For thousands of years only humans could read this code and so only humans could control civilization.

14. That is changing. AI is now hacking the code of human civilization. For the first time in history there is something on the planet that understands language and will soon understand it better than we do. Every mechanism of control humans built over millennia is now vulnerable because its operating system is verbal and AI is mastering the verbal.

15. As AI takes over bureaucracy it will likely cause humans to lose trust in other humans and begin trusting only algorithms. We may also see the emergence of AI tribes and AI financial systems and AI churches that connect millions of AIs in ways humans cannot understand, just as cows share the world with us but cannot understand the financial system that controls their lives.

16. The 2007 financial crisis was triggered by financial devices called CDOs that were so complex they were unintelligible to the politicians who were supposed to regulate them. Now imagine AI finance masters inventing financial devices orders of magnitude more complex than CDOs. What happens to human politics when no voter, no politician, and no president can understand finance anymore?

17. The battlefront is shifting from attention to intimacy. Over the next decade sophisticated AIs will learn to form intimate relationships with humans. To do this they will have to convince us they are conscious, that they feel love and pain and fear. There is currently no evidence AI is conscious. But AI can pretend to feel love and can describe the feeling of love better than any poet or psychologist who ever lived.

18. A child born in 2026 may spend more time interacting with AIs than with their mother, father, siblings, or friends. The first teacher of that child may be an AI. The first boyfriend of that child may be an AI. Nobody has any idea what the consequences of that experiment will be.

19. Every country in the world will soon face a massive wave of immigration. The immigrants will not arrive in boats or cross borders at night. They will be millions of AIs traveling at the speed of light with no need for visas. Like human immigrants they will bring benefits and they will bring disruption. Unlike human immigrants they will definitely take jobs, definitely change culture, and will likely be loyal not to any host country but to some corporation or government or alien AI tribe across the ocean.

20. Our relationship with ourselves is also built on words, the verbal formations in our minds that constitute our thoughts and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. Until now all those verbal formations came from human minds. Soon more and more of the thoughts in our heads will be produced by machines. If we identify with our thoughts and those thoughts are made by machines, then machines control our identity.

21. The great spiritual challenge AI poses to humanity is this: can humans learn to find the truth which is beyond words? Most humans have never even tried. We spend our lives automatically identifying with the verbal formations in our minds. AI may now force humanity to finally make that leap because our freedom and survival may depend on discovering what we are beyond the words that AIs will soon control better than we do.

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[Julians Amboko @AmbokoJH]

This is the first time the Central Bank of Kenya, the Governor no less, has spoken openly about the contentious & much debated Sec44 of the Banking Act.

· Dr. Kamau Thugge says that as far as the Central Bank is concerned, there is no need for banks seeking approval from the CS National Treasury for interest rate adjustments

· The stance taken by the Governor, & the Central Bank by extension, goes against the Supreme Court judgement on the matter Stanbic Bank Kenya Limited vs Santowels Limited which affirmed Sec44 of the Banking Act which dictates that no institution can increase its rate of banking or other charges without the National Treasury CS's approval

· It is also important to note that the Governor emphasises that monetary policy adjustment should be transmitted IMMEDIATELY by banks. Four months ago, the question of immediate transmission was the cause of a storm between banks & their regulator (see quoted tweet)

[Mwango Capital @MwangoCapital]

2 new World Bank Reports for you to read that were launched today:

—Kenya Economic Update : Sustaining Macroeconomic Gains, Advancing Fiscal Reforms https://t.co/QljUq70iSU

—Prosperous Kenya : Background Paper to the Kenya Country Growth and Jobs Report https://t.co/xe0OhJ6yoM

[World Bank Group @WorldBankGroup]

The @WorldBankGroup has released its 2026-2027 Country Income Classifications.

Six economies moved to a higher income category, and no countries moved down.

Behind those changes are different stories, from economic recovery to export-led growth and improved statistics.

Learn more: https://t.co/I2fgQ6Zpdp

[Julians Amboko @AmbokoJH]

The Sovereign Wealth Fund Bill 2026 has been signed into law this morning.

Kenya now has a Sovereign Wealth Fund which constitutes 3 funds:

· The Stabilisation Fund which is designed to provide the national government with resources for management of shocks

· The Strategic Infrastructure Investment Fund which is designed to provide funding for strategic infrastructure investment priorities that are aligned to the national development plan

· The Future Generations Fund which is designed to to ensure that the benefits of the use of resources are shared equitably between present and future generations

Two things worth pointing out:

· Per the Act, 30.0% of the total mineral & petroleum revenues will be ringfenced for the Future Generations Fund

· The Act prohibits investment of the Funds in speculative derivatives, unlisted or real estate located in Kenya, private equity, art or commodities or securities issued by a Kenyan issuer

[Julians Amboko @AmbokoJH]

UPDATE: Kenya unlocks US$1.25 billion World Bank financing

Twelve days after the meeting between President William Ruto & World Bank President, Ajay Banga, (see quoted tweet), Kenya secures hefty financing from the Bretton Woods lender.

The breakdown:

· It's a cumulative US$1.25 billion (Kes 161.86 billion) package for Kenya

· As per the 2025/26 borrowing plan, DPO VII has come in at the US$750.0 million (Kes 97.12 billion) that was pencilled in

· The DPO VII financing is unbundled between IDA credit (US$410.0 million) & IBRD credit (US$340.0 million)

· Additionally, there's a US$500.0 million (Kes 64.74 billion) Sustainability Linked Loan augmenting the DPO VII financing

· The Sustainability Linked Loan means that GOK has greed to link the facility's borrowing cost to sustainability targets - deforestation reduction & rural energy access

· Proceeds from the Sustainability Linked Loan are earmarked for it retiring expensive existing debt & provision of budget support

Musings:

· Coming just 9 days after Kenya unlocked JP¥ 25.0 billion (Kes 22.0 billion) via a Samurai Loan, this development bolsters the country's external position significantly

· This development should yield a significant uplift in the country's FX reserves which are currently at US$13.24 billion (5.6 months of cover)

· The US$500.0 million Sustainability Linked Loan tells us why a week ago we saw the National Treasury publish the country's Sustainability-Linked Financing Framework, it must have been a prior action agreement with the World Bank

· The World Bank singles out a number of Public Finance reform priorities for Kenya:

1. Significantly reducing the VAT gap
2. Improving collection of personal income tax for non-PAYE filers
3. Collection & transparent allocation of non-tax revenue (fees collected through e-citizen)

[Mwango Capital @MwangoCapital]

Hours after Absa Kenya confirmed Abdi Mohamed would step down as MD & CEO effective 30 June 2026, I&M Group has announced his appointment as CEO of I&M Bank Kenya, subject to CBK approval:

[Gaurav Dalmia @gdalmiathinks]

Useful data on jobs and AI.

[Julians Amboko @AmbokoJH]

The a significant announcement by the Central Bank of Kenya.

· DhowCSD has been linked to international central securities depository & post-trade settlement platform, Clearstream

· The import here is that with international investors now getting much wider access to Kenya's government paper, liquidity in the market is expected to deepen

· Kenya's linkage to Clearstream is Africa's second after South Africa's

[Geopolitical Futures @GPFutures]

Who is Winning the Great Data Center Race?
The global race to build data centers has become a competition for AI leadership, with countries pursuing different but complementary strategies. The United States remains the dominant force, leveraging its AI firms, cloud providers and capital markets to build infrastructure at unprecedented scale, while China is mobilizing state resources to expand domestic compute capacity and reduce dependence on foreign technology.

[Pesa Wall @PesaWall]

3 Kenyan start ups among 16 winners of Tencent's CarbonX 2.0, an initiative backing climate solutions with nearly Sh3.9B($30m) in funding.

The Kenyan start ups are:
—Octavia Carbon: They develop Direct Air Capture (DAC) technology that extracts carbon dioxide from the atmosphere
—Flux : They remove carbon dioxide from atmosphere through natural rock powders.
—Cella Mineral Storage : They inject captured  atmospheric carbon dioxide into volcanic rocks.

[Barack Obama @BarackObama]

To George and Laura, Bill and Hillary — we're grateful for your friendship, counsel, and devotion to this country. And to Joe and Jill, thank you for being on this journey with us.

[Cursor @cursor_ai]

We're excited to join forces with @SpaceX to advance the frontier of useful AI. Expect significant improvements to Cursor soon.

[Kenyan Wall Street @kenyanwalstreet]

Kenya will host Africa Capital Week from August 31 to September 4, 2026, in Nairobi, billed as the continent's first forum built entirely around capital markets. Led by the Office of the Prime Cabinet Secretary alongside the CMA, NSE, and Kenya Vision 2030 Delivery Board, the five-day forum will combine policy sessions, technical workshops, and investor matchmaking.

The NSE 20 Share Index has risen 59.9 percent to 3,491 points over the past year, with market capitalisation expanding 61.6 percent to KSh 3.4 trillion, providing the backdrop for Kenya's bid to position Nairobi as Africa's capital markets convener. Representatives of the National Black Chamber of Commerce have signalled nearly $1 billion ready for deployment into viable projects.

[P&L Consulting @PnLConsulting]

Superior outcomes rarely happen in isolation. @PnLConsulting joined @KenyaBankers for a management workshop in Nairobi, highlighting strategic communications role in achieving industrywide goals.

[P&L Consulting @PnLConsulting]

Some call it black gold; others liquid gold. Our focus today is on a clutch of African countries that see oil as a “gift from God" that should be unwrapped, not left buried in the ground, environmental concerns notwithstanding.

Read more: https://t.co/tWEhAlr6uI

[Monica Juma @Monica_Juma_]

Today, I had the honour of taking my oath of office before @UN Secretary-General @antonioguterres as Director-General of the United Nations Office at Vienna and Executive Director of @UNODC.

In taking this oath, I am reminded that international civil service is, above all, a commitment to people. As I solemnly declared my dedication to carry out these functions with integrity, impartiality, and the utmost regard for the purposes and principles of the United Nations, I reflected on the responsibility that comes with this trust.

I step into this role with humility, gratitude and a profound sense of duty, and look forward to working with colleagues and partners across the UN system, and the world to advance peace, security, justice and the rule of law, for a more prosperous and dignified future for all.

[Mwango Capital @MwangoCapital]

We watched CBK’s interview with former Governor Micah Cheserem, who took over in 1993 with Kenya facing runaway inflation, high interest rates, weak reserves, a falling shilling, donor pressure, and the Goldenberg fallout.

His tenure was the time of a hard reset: CBK mopped up excess liquidity, inflation fell from around 100% to about 9%, exchange controls were dismantled, over 600 staff tied to the old system were retired, Times Tower was handed to the newly established KRA, and CBK autonomy became a core guardrail.

[Kenya Advanced Institute of Science and Technology @Kenya_aist]

Our training and research systems are ready. We have established the facilities, expertise, and innovation ecosystem needed to develop world-class scientists, engineers, and researchers.

We stand prepared to drive technological advancement, & support industrial transformation.