Who is yash pal ghai

He has also taught courses at the University of Wisconsin Law School, as part of an exchange program. He was the Chairman of the Constitution of Kenya Review Commission which attempted to write a modern constitution for Kenya from to Ghai has also advised and assisted NGOs on human rights law-related work. Biography Lists News Also Viewed. This is at all levels. Today, Ghai can often be found seated at the desk in the home office he shares with his wife, a large room whose walls, shelves and surfaces seem to spawn books.

At certain moments, when he pulls out his old, dog-eared copy of the Kenyan Constitution — peppered with his hand-written notes in the margins — to point to key sections and emphasize his arguments, he remains the quintessential professor. Most days, Cottrell Ghai is seated across from him.

Ghai agrees, crediting his wife as his partner in thinking, writing and editing. He is lucky, he says, to have such a valued professional partner in his wife. When asked about her career, Cottrell Ghai is dismissive. Ghai also sees his children and grandchildren at least once a year, and he considers himself lucky to have made lasting peace with his ex-wife, who is now a friend.

Vacations are sometimes extended family affairs. It is lucky, Ghai thinks, that it is possible to be one family in this way. Cottrell Ghai agrees, saying that seeing the children remains an important priority for her husband.

She worries that he does not get more time with them. Ghai also maintains old relationships, taking the time to visit and vacation with his close friends, whenever possible. I feel very lucky that he would regard me as a close friend. I certainly regard him as a close friend. We came from totally different upbringings, but we just hit it off. If he thinks well of me, I feel immensely grateful for that and flattered.

One of his most recent projects has been support of social justice centres in Kenya. He uses his networks to link the centres to other like-minded organizations, helping promote their impact. He is retired and is hanging out with Mathare Social Justice guys. Increasingly these days, Ghai expresses a desire to withdraw from public life.

He is working on a biography of his personal hero, Chanan Singh. Things I write take three or four times longer than they used to. Wanyoike remembers being star-struck long ago, before he had officially met Ghai. I saw him there, shopping with Jill, and I had this huge urge to introduce myself and say hi. It may seem strange that, after all the betrayals Ghai endured in his home country, he carries on with the same work, fighting for the same cause.

Kenyans realize that the same people that have cheated them have cheated him. He is in the very fortunate position that people will appreciate him more and more as time passes. Kenyans realize. He protests in the streets! Mutunga is not surprised. In fact, the former Chief Justice points out that Ghai was honored by the Queen of England for his work while his home country failed him.

The moment the crisis comes, the phone will ring off the hook. All the hoodlums will call him then. The Elephant is helping to build a truly public platform, while producing consistent, quality investigations, opinions and analysis. The Elephant cannot survive and grow without your participation.

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She holds a doctorate in Political Science, and her research focuses on electoral politics, with an emphasis on electoral integrity and electoral violence. Our contradictions point to a country that is deeply conflicted about itself. We are inauthentic and sadistic, bent on exerting and affirming the power of the colonial state, no matter what it does to us.

I vividly remember an incident that occurred when I was a graduate student in the US. I was also teaching undergraduate American students. They said this all the time and I was simply borrowing a phrase from them. This American knew I was a graduate student and I must have had a fairly decent command of English, but that did not count. He needed to remind me that when it comes to the English language, he ranks higher than I do.

The incident is an illustration of how purist notions of language and grammar are not innocent of certain social assumptions, and most of all, innocent of power.

The contradictions of the whole incident are mind-boggling. All the social dynamics of language were forgotten when the media, true to its hatred of educated Kenyans, celebrated that Kenyan nurses had failed the entry English test requirements. Unlike what Kenyans are celebrating, Kagwe did not suggest that the nurses could not speak English. His beef was that they did not prepare for the tests well enough.

In fact, he added that the role of the health workers is to prepare for the exams, and at no point did he express concern about the ability of the nurses to communicate in English.

And the conference attendees accepting this logic and clapping. As Mkawasi Hall recently said in a conversation with me on this matter, the idea of governments looking for foreign employers for their own citizens comes from a very dark and troubling place, where the government abandons its contract with the citizens and chooses instead to sell them to foreigners as labour.

The idea of governments looking for foreign employers for their own citizens comes from a very dark and troubling place.

This idea is even worse than what Fanon predicted when he said that the African comprador elite would sell their beaches and landscapes to European tourists and make their countries the brothel of Europe. In this case, we are returning to the Middle Passage four centuries ago where African chiefs kidnapped and sold people into slavery.

It defies imagination that the African bourgeoisie can think that the export of African labour will develop Africa because the bourgeoisie are English-speaking, suit-wearing Africans getting dollars from remittances rather than the chiefs receiving guns and cloth of four centuries ago. This is what Kagwe said:. The quality of service that we provide must be at the highest standard possible. Equal to anywhere on earth. If you do that, it will be possible for us to make Kenya a health tourism destination.

And if that happens, you pointing at the audience will benefit. As far as I am concerned, we will continue to negotiate for you, and ensure that you work in both Europe and the Middle East. They need you people audience applause and therefore you must make sure that you go there. But in order for that to happen, we have got to make sure that the standard of our training is one that is universal. Let me tell you what has happened. And this is the truth.

When we test, because there are certain tests that one has to do, depending on the region in the world that you are going to. Our failure rate, particularly in English, is extremely high audience laughter. We sent people to do the English exams. Ten passed Audience laughter and whistling. So I am challenging you that this is going to happen. We are going to negotiate, yes, but you are going to have to pass the exams. Not me. You audience laughter. And therefore when we talk about technologies, when we talk about the future, we need to prepare ourselves to be in that space.

It is clear that Kagwe does not care for the English communication skills of Kenyans. He cares that they pass the tests. That the media and their Kenyan adherents do not see this distinction between communicating in English and passing tests in English is baffling, given that the same people vilified 8. Mark you, this saga comes in the week where KICD has announced the assessments of Grades 4 and 5, and Kenyans are responding with wishes of good luck to the children, despite the repeated claims that the assessments are not examinations.

So the Kenyans saying that nurses need to pass English tests to prove they can work in English are contradicting themselves. They want to equate passing tests to ability to work, yet, 1 they lament about the obsession with exams, and 2 they do not want to listen to the fact that most educationists agree that passing tests makes you a good test taker and says little about your skill in the work place. First, this SLC Online is not an official examinations body.

The media has not done the homework of verifying that this so-called test was the one administered to the nurses. Ghai remembers seeing Kenyatta after he was released from prison. So he arranged for us to see him specially. There is a picture of us all together about a week after he was released. Yash Pal Ghai with brother Dharam, two of his three sisters and another relative. He spent the week in Nairobi, where he went to school and was cared for by his grandmother, and returned to Ruiru on the weekends.

His father emphasised the importance of education, and Ghai worked hard, excelling in school. In fact, when Princess Margaret visited Kenya in , Ghai, as the top student in his school, was chosen to present her with a bouquet of flowers. Unbeknownst to him, it would be his first claim to fame. There were huge, outdoor screens, and they would show these clips. That was the first time I saw him. A lot of us became monarchists as young kids after seeing those beautiful women and queens.

The reality of segregated living meant that young Ghai had virtually no substantive interaction with the white, British population in Kenya. What little interaction he did have, though, showed the young Ghai how very different life was for some Kenyans. They would bark at any non-white person. I never wanted to be here. Most of the inter-racial interactions he did have in his youth occurred at school, especially during athletic competitions.

Once a year, he remembers, the leading schools in Nairobi, each segregated by race, would have athletics competitions. We would always lose, because the Prince of Wales School for white students had coaches and equipment. You were on the field together, but then at intervals you went back to your own side. Segregation was just one manifestation, however, of the harsh reality of inequality all around him.

Ghai remembers witnessing insults and beatings on the streets. The injustice of it left a very deep impression on me, the unfairness of it. As he was preparing to apply for university admission, Ghai was advised to seek assistance from the Ministry of Education.

So I got into the lift. I was about to go, and suddenly three white men came in and asked me what I was doing. They physically picked me up and threw me out, and I ended up on the floor. I was so shattered. Brotherton, who, Ghai had been told, could help with the university admissions process. You want to go to Oxford? I said that I wanted to try. I got a distinction. It was a defining moment for Ghai, who had received the highest O-level results in Kenya. Instead of embittering him, however, the experience motivated him to forge ahead.

In fact, when he spoke to his teachers at the newly opened Gandhi Academy, which would eventually become the University of Nairobi, they wrote to Queens College to recommend him. After passing the entrance exam, Ghai was accepted at Oxford.

Given his intent to pursue literature, however, the university urged him to study Latin so that he would be prepared. They got this chap to come from the Prince of Wales School twice a week and tutor me. My school arranged it. I was quite pleased that this chap drove up and took the time.

The British Council had set up a course on how to eat, and I attended that to learn how to use utensils. I would look at other people, and I got a complex about knowing which spoon to use. He also enjoyed time with his brother, who was still at Oxford, and with Singh, who was studying in Bristol. The two kept in touch, hitchhiking around Europe during their holidays. Soon, however, Ghai realised that studying English literature was not what he had expected.

So I went to my tutor. He was understanding, and he asked me what I wanted to do instead of English. Even though my second love was history, I chose law. Ghai excelled at Oxford, so much so that, when he achieved the highest exam scores in the university, the College Provost told him that the College would henceforth take care of his fees. It was while at Nuffield, where he was studying comparative Commonwealth constitutions for his doctorate, that Ghai was approached by his former tutor.

I wondered if the College would really allow something like that. He was such a nice person, and he wrote to his friends there. Harvard gave me a grant and a generous allowance. And it was at Harvard that Ghai met William Twining, the son of the former Governor of Tanganyika, who would become a lifelong friend.

The University of East Africa, as it was then known, was recruiting professors. It turned out that he was looking for staff. It turned out, however, that Twining had already spoken to Oxford and the university was very supportive, encouraging Ghai to take the position in Dar. Twining had already recruited four or five teachers. I ended up going at short notice.

Ghai is among only 96 recipients of this degree since In , Ghai, at only 25 years of age, accepted his first professional position as a lecturer of law at the University of East Africa at Dar es Salaam. It was a heady, idealistic time for the young graduate, as well as for the wider society. The law school admitted only students per year, and they were superb.

Everything was up for debate. It was a very hopeful time. We were aware that the students who left us could soon be judges or senior government officials, and we were conscious of inculcating in them the sense that law could be used for the promotion of good values. In the new era of independence, however, Ghai and others like him believed it was critical for lawyers to understand how the existing law had come to be and how it might need to change to suit the rapidly evolving needs of newly independent nations.

Indeed, Mutunga credits Ghai for this approach. Above all, we anchored law in politics and shunned legal centralism. Our approaches were multi-disciplinary. Not everyone was a fan of this approach. Mutunga describes how some students were not interested in studying context.

While teaching in Dar, he co-authored with his colleague and friend, Patrick McAuslan what would become one of his most well-known books, Public Law and Political Change in Kenya. Although his primary motive in writing the book was to provide a textbook for his students, who did not have authoritative texts on the laws of newly independent East Africa, Public Law became one of the most widely cited works related to Kenyan law.

When it was published in , Ghai was just 32 years old. We have never understood the function of the law teacher or writer to be the mere reciter of rules whose merit is to be gauged by the quantity of information he can relay. All African countries have great need for lawyers who can take their eyes off the books of rules, who can see more to law than a set of statutes and law reports. The law student must constantly be brought up against questions such as. Their analysis was incisive and sometimes harsh, blatantly questioning, for instance, increasing executive power and the trampling of the Bill of Rights, which they said was so ineffective that they wondered why it remained a part of the Constitution at all.

How do you analyse society? What are the constituent components? He provides that within the book. There was no clarity about where the tails were, where the heads were.

And what he did was to show us where the tails and heads were. It has held sway up to now. It is still very much a valued way of analysing Kenyan society, which is why the book gets cited over and over and over again. It is one of the reasons why he is a legend.

Ever, ever! In fact, despite his growing success, Ghai remained down-to-earth. He strove, in many ways, to be a peer of his students. We reserved that tag for the faculty who clearly did not like to teach, did not like students, and suffered from egos and serious intellectual arrogance.

Invariably, they treated us as intellectually inferior, adopted a pulpit lecture system where they ordered not to be interrupted while lecturing. Questions were to be asked during tutorials. Yash and others were different. They were approachable, treated us as equals in the word and spirit of the intellectual culture in Tanzania. Despite his work, which was significant, Ghai invested time in creating and maintaining deep and often lifelong relationships with people around him.

Bear in mind Yash became a full professor at the tender age of In all respects he wanted us to see him and treat him as a brother. Many of us were in our mids. What male Asians cooked at that time? Moi's other preparations for the transition were initially thought to be masterstrokes: the appointment of Yash Ghai a respected academic to head the Constitutional Review Commission and the formation of a KANU-National Democratic Party parliamentary alliance Displaying out of 10 results.

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