Prominent activist Nasako Besingi has been convicted after a protracted and controversial legal process on two counts of propagation of false news against the US agribusiness company, Herakles Farms, and two counts of defamation against two employees of the company. He faces three years in jail.

President Kenyatta’s government is growing less tolerant of informed policy debate and dissent each day. This is immensely troubling. It is creating an atmosphere of state coercion and intimidation.

Free education is not only about money, resources, student to lecturer ratios, the end to the outsourcing, although it clearly does mean this. It also means an education that works towards freedom. It means working through legacies of apartheid difference that persist in the present.

Students are insisting that the social value of education must come before its commercial value. Just as land should not be bought and sold, so also education is not something that should be bought and sold.

History has time and again shown that violence does not take place in a vacuum and until the ongoing issue of an illegal and brutal occupation is addressed, there is unlikely to be peace and justice for Palestinians and Israelis, Jews and Muslims in Israel/Palestine.