Law student leads protests in Kenya

Socioeconomic unrest and youth protests are roiling Kenya, and President William Ruto seems unable to get a grip on the discontent. Freelance journalist Kimu Elolia told This American Life last week the story of Nairobi protest leader "Ospina," a 27-year-old law student.

I wrote in summer 2022 about the most recent Kenyan presidential election, shortly after I visited there. The election broke new ground in Kenya, as neither leading candidate was of Kikuyu ethnicity. Term limits had run on two-term, 10-year President Uhuru Kenyatta.

In 2022, I made a new friend at the Nairobi Giraffe Centre.
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

A friend in Kenya whose political commentary I trust rather favored the candidate who did not prevail in the 2022 election, Raila Odinga. Though a product of a dynastic political family with see-sawing past fortunes, my friend saw Odinga, who is of Luo ethnicity, as the best prospect to combat corruption, which my friend saw as Kenya's top political problem.

Odinga lost to William Ruto, whose wary-smile-inducing "Every Hustle Counts"-themed billboards were ubiquitous in my travels in Kenya. Like incumbent Kenyatta, Ruto, of Kalenjin ethnicity, had a history of corruption charges in the International Criminal Court—dismissed—though Kenyatta endorsed Odinga. Ruto nevertheless rode to victory on strong promises of economic prosperity, which spoke to a powerful current of economic discontent in Kenya, especially among youth.

In May, Ruto had a high-profile visit with President Biden at the White House. Bilateral discussion covered climate, human rights, and most importantly, to Kenyans, economics. In the latter vein, the White House pledged to help Kenya work out a "financial architecture" that will ease an economy that Kenyans see as shackled by onerous debts and expectations in the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

Protest in Kenya in June.
Capital FM Kenya CC BY 3.0

The White House summit did not pacify the masses. In June, Ruto pushed a tax hike through Parliament, and violence erupted. Youth protestors laid siege to Parliament and burned part of the building. They demanded Ruto's resignation, which was not forthcoming. (Read more from The AP. I found the worrying events in Kenya profoundly under-reported in U.S. media, while ample time was spent dissecting our surreal horse race.)

The protests are dragging on, and the rule of law remains under severe threat in East Africa's largest economy. The government is disregarding human rights norms, outlawing dissent, even the waving of the national flag (N.Y. Times). Dozens of protesters have been arrested; human rights groups further allege state-sponsored abductions and torture.

Last week, freelance journalist and producer Kimu Elolia, formerly with The Intercept, told This American Life the story of Nairobi protest leader "Ospina," a 27-year-old law student. Elolia told TAL's Ira Glass that Kenyans tire of seeing political leaders such as Ruto riding in private jets and sporting Rolexes, while ordinary people are asked to shoulder more and more economic burdens. Ospina has been more involved than his mother cares for.

As law faculty and students, including me, return to classes this week and next in the United States, we might be thankful that onerous reading assignments and research expectations (or in my case, strategic planning) will be our most daunting challenges. We ought not take for granted that we enjoy the rule of law—if we can keep it.

The moving segment is "Mom Thinks He Doth Protest Too Much," in Swim Towards the Shark, This American Life (Aug. 9, 2024).

Does law school make students 'comedy-ready'?

Zarna Garg (from Press Kit)

Zarna Garg is a comedian known for her identity as an Indian-American mom. She's also a lawyer.

A lot of comedians went to law school. I can think of many reasons for the overlap. Some of it probably just has to do with a level of affluence to support both the luxury of graduate school and the opportunity to pursue, in the alternative, a usually unprofitable career.

I bet more has to do with the requisite wordsmithery of both careers. And lawyers' penchant to view the world through a pessimistic, or at least risk-anticipatory, lens surely makes for a better comedic edge than one would expect from the beaming optimism of the other classical professions, healers and clergy.

For Enhance Entertainment, Gav George opined that law school and comedy are not so different:

Getting through law school is no walk in the park—it takes hard work, a thick skin and dogged perseverance. The 3 a.m. study sessions, nerve-wracking exams and risk being cut down to size by peers in mock trials (or the front lobby), they all take their toll.

When you think about it, comedy is just as cut-throat. They have to always re-write material, survive the inevitable flop performances and harsh critics, hecklers and yes, occasional boos, all while quashing those niggles of self-doubt into a small black ball in the pit of their stomach.

A comedian’s neck is always on the line in the world of comedy until they get their big break.

Then stuff gets real.

John Cleese has a law degree.  He cut his teeth writing comedy for the Footlights Club while reading law at the University of Cambridge.  He never practiced.  Rebel Wilson might be my favorite lawyer-comedian. She's still not a half-bad lawyer if she had anything to do with her advocates' prosecution of her Australian defamation case.

I also like Demetri Martin. He left NYU Law School after two years to pursue comedy. I first saw Martin on The Daily Show in 2005, but already he had created a TV show for the BBC and written late night for Conan O'Brien—whose mother was a partner at Ropes & Gray.

A good friend of mine from law school came from a comedy background. He never practiced after school, but complemented K12 teaching—for which you really do need a sense of humor—with occasional stand-up. Yours truly wrote a weekly humor column for a newspaper once upon a time.

There's even a former-tenured-law-professor comedian, Liz Glazer. She taught at Hofstra.

I first heard Zarna Garg on a characteristically thought-provoking story on This American Life about her relationship with her daughter, Zoya. Garg's path to law school was unlike any I had heard before: she was avoiding an arranged marriage. Law school was like a draft deferment.

Later in her life, Garg found something still missing, a space that neither law practice nor beloved children had fully occupied. Ira Glass recounted for TAL, "Four years ago, when she was 16, Zoya saw how unhappy her mom was. She had trained to be a lawyer but didn't like it and stopped when she had her kids."

Garg said, "'Oh, I'll just be a secretary or somewhere. Or I got a law degree. I could go exercise my law degree. I could go practice law.' [And Zoya] was like, 'Mom, you hated practicing law. You love telling stories.'"

Now Garg tells stories that make people laugh. But like the best of comedians, she also makes people think. I hope I'll get the chance to hear her live one day. Or at least to see her on her very own Netflix special.

Oops. We accidentally linked healthcare to your job.

mohamed_hassan (pixabay.com)

I stand with the rest of the world in awestruck horror of America's stubborn insistence that access to healthcare should be a function of both one's wealth and the largesse of one's employer.

Critics of the free market are quick to conclude that it has failed the American worker.  Economic libertarians are just as quick to tout the essentiality of free contract.  Before we make any decisions about the free labor market, maybe we should try it out.  A market in which a worker can't change jobs for fear of a recurring cancer or a bankrupting accident is not a free labor market.

For the NPR podcast Throughline, Lawrence Wu set out recently to explain how we arrived at the problem of employer-dependent healthcare.  The description of the episode, "The Everlasting Problem" (Oct. 1, 2020), reads:

Health insurance for millions of Americans is dependent on their jobs. But it's not like that everywhere. So, how did the U.S. end up with such a fragile system that leaves so many vulnerable or with no health insurance at all? On this episode, how a temporary solution created an everlasting problem.

For This American Life and Planet Money, Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson also addressed this subject back in 2009.  Their bit ran only 11 minutes, but I have never forgotten the shocking fact that "four accidental steps led to enacting the very questionable system of employers paying for health care."