Thread by @wmnjoya

We cannot keep on with this mediocrity and stupidity in politics. In 2008, we went down a bad road because we were unable to talk coherently about injustice in Kenya. Politicians are destroying our capacity to think and talk intelligently, and people are trying to be funny.

Dr William Ruto has a PhD. He can find other words to talk about politics other than taunting Raila with bedroom talk. It's insulting to our intelligence and dignity, and a way of withdrawing politics from public conversation, since bedroom talk is about privacy and intimacy.

And the media and Raila are being irresponsible continuing with that metaphor, instead of calling it out for what it is. And as we laugh, we continue to forget the "harmless" metaphors we used before we landed in the mess of 2008.

This isn't funny, and Kenyans know it.

Lack of creativity in ideas are a huge part of our crises in Kenya. Politicians dumb us down through destroying education, censoring the arts and the press, and mocking public participation, so that in the end, the only language available to discuss politics is stupidity

I draw Kenyans' attention to works by two great scholars, Grace Musila and Dan Ojwang, for them to get how serious this issue is.

Grace Musila discusses the way rumor has become a source of truth in Kenya doi.org/10.1093/afraf/…

Because crimes and injustices are never resolved in Kenya, we resort to rumors as our source of information and news. The problem with rumors is that while they are informative, they difficult to action because they are not verifiable. And they give no right of reply.

The article by Dan Ojwang is about why Kenyan intellectuals are impotent, and especially in times of crises. Again, he says that information in Kenya is so brutally controlled, that the public has no memory because we are unable to get information from the recent past.

Lack of public memory means that politicians abuse us again and again, and we vote for them yet again, because we have no way to collectively remember what happened before. We say this all the time - that Kenyans forget. It's because we have an infrustructure for forgetting.

Our infrastructure for forgetting is in violent schools, in abusive changes like CBC from insulting CS's like Magoha and Matiang'i, the refusal to teach our real history beyong prasing politicians, and it's in the war on the arts.

This is Ojwang's article journals.co.za/content/afrins…

So when politicians reduce political conversations to bedroom talk, they are hammering the last nail in the coffin they've built for us. They are sending us to our graves by denying us space to talk about politics intelligently and with respect across our diverse identities.

The media need to improve on their calibre of reporting, if they want to continue doing business in Kenya. Promoting mediocrity does not help their cause, and if they don't care, let them try doing business in war zones and see how that works.

And @MediaCouncilK @AMWIK need to intervene. Tell journalists that studying only media is too simplistic in this day and age. People need literary skills so that they understand the complexity of stories, including language, history, characters, metaphors, discourses and emotion

@MediaCouncilK @AMWIK If media houses don't want to invest in good journalists and reporting, let them do business elsewhere. Many young Kenyans can intelligently report. Let us give them seed capital to start media houses, and the old owners of legacy media take this mediocrity elsewhere.

@MediaCouncilK @AMWIK But Kenyans must not walk into these dangerous politics of stupidity smiling sheepishly. We have suffered too much for these goons already. Sexualized political talk, such as talk of bedrooms, is a sign that politicians want to excite us but not with ideas.

That's dangerous.