Thread by @wmnjoya

Reading about Victorian England has clarified for me what the middle class is in Kenya.

The middle class is not defined by your wealth and whether you can afford private schools during the week and pizza at the mall during the weekend. The middle class is defined by two things.

1. The goal of the ruling elite
2. How you have to sell your dignity to stay in the middle class.

1. The goal of the ruling elite in allowing/creating the middle class is to have a layer of people between the ruling elites and the people they really exploit at the bottom.

So our job is to ensure that the rich never answer for anything, we do the dirty work of the rich. We are the ones who give the receipts to steal money from the poor on behalf of the rich and we then balance their accounts, we tell the poor that God wants them to be poor...

...we teach them a dumbed down curriculum, and we give them githeri optics through the media.

And we the middle layer are further divided into two:

a) the rank and file professionals, civil servants and entrepreneurs, and then b) another layer of M & Ms (money and management)

or the FIRE sector (Finance, insurance and real estate), whose job is to make the middle class miserable with soul-destroying metrics and sermons about entrepreneurship.

2. To stay in the middle class, you have to sell your soul and your sweat through two things.

a) You allow yourself to be tortured by the education system as 2/3 of your friends are failed by Matiang'i.

b) After you have proved yourself worthy of being an aristocrat, you torture yourself through debt. You take loans to buy a car, a house, a shamba, to pay hospital bills.... You join a sacco and pay pension deductions, which the rich use in the name of donating to the Covid fund

So those debates about whether a cop or a primary school teacher can afford a car on his salary are not the point. We're in the middle class to do PR and the dirty work of his majesty the king, her majesty the queen mother, and the knights payukaing in Senate.

And as we mutilate ourselves, the aristocrats go around the country proclaiming to the poor that stupidity like BBI is for their benefit.

When things go badly, the poor won't go to State House because again, it is the middle class (the ones given guns) who will protect the rich.

So the poor will come for us. That's why Ndii calls us #upperdeckpeopleKE. We're on the deck above the poor, playing music to calm all of us down as we sink, while the rich get on the rescue boats.

Minduklas is here