Thread by @wmnjoya

Kikuyu people are burying their historical trauma with alcohol, suicide, domestic violence and trooping to the polls for Muigai, but the elites keep cheating them that those problems come from neglect of the boy child.

Then clueless Kenyan men from other communities join them.

The Kenyattas have retraumatized the Kikuyu since 1963. At independence, Jomo told them to forget the Mau Mau because they now had "arrived," and that celebrating or extending the demands for land would cause turmoil in Kenya. So they covered the pain of the emergency.

Then in 1969, Kikuyus were forced to oath to protect Jomo. Kikuyus my age will tell you that parents completely refused to talk about that oath. It's only when Rev. Gatu's book was published that families reluctantly revealed the secret. Imagine that pain. standardmedia.co.ke/article/200022…

Then in 1992 were the Molo so-called clashes. Yet Muigai was chosen as Moi's successor in 2002. Then followed by PEV in 2008. Muigai, yet again, showed up, and eventually was indicted by ICC and shared the Jubilee ticket with his fellow indictee Ruto.

As the trauma gets buried, psycho-social problems arise. Alcoholism. Suicide. Domestic violence. Abandoned families. But instead of addressing the trauma, poverty and landlessness leading men to despair, the Kikuyu elite men blame the girl child and come up with kiama for men.

Kikuyu men are mocked for not "coping," and some people like Njoka come up with a #boychild cause. And men from other communities, clueless about the roots of the boychild nonsense, join the bandwagon. I don't know if those other men should be pitied or scolded.

So what Muigai did at the Akorino event over the weekend was to retraumatize the Kikuyu. Muigai blasts Ruto's supporters to basically communicate to the Kikuyu that they are alone and have no choice but to do what he says, if they want to be safe. It's an evil and deadly tactic.

Kenyans have to stop being united in trauma. Politicians' only tactic for power is to keep reminding their ethnic groups of their traumas, so every Kenyan feels unsafe unless within an ethnic group, but ironically also feels unsafe BECAUSE they're a member of an ethnic group.

Feeling safe, and mental wellbeing, are human rights. We deserve to be emotionally and mentally well, not just physically well. We must recognize the psychological torture that our politicians are putting us through, when they have these fights in front of media cameras.

In 2017, I said on @citizentvkenya that reconciliation, healing, justice and national apologies for atrocities should be the agenda of a regime serious about Kenya. But people said I'm refusing to move on.

Well, Muigai knows who hasn't moved on. He's using it to his advantage.

If we are safe only within our ethnic groups, but also unsafe because we're members of the same ethnic groups, it means that being Kenyan is a death sentence, and ethnicity is a temporary haven before the inevitable.

WE DESERVE BETTER.

WE DESERVE TO LIVE IN DIGNITY; NOT FEAR.