By free, I mean that the labor that produces Tekayo's wealth is labor Tekayo doesn't pay for. He doesn't pay salaries of KDF, NYS, police and prisons. It's the taxes that come from our work that pay the salaries. Prisoners are paid only 20 cents a day. nation.africa/kenya/business…
The other arm of free workers comes from the county administrators (former provincial administration, former colonial home guards and paramount chiefs). These are the spies and propagandists who keep the people from revolting against the Massah of the Kenya plantation.
When we say #TekelezaKatiba, we also need to include the dismantling of the county administrators. Chiefs and county commissioners need to be transfered to the county or national governments.
The administration was supposed to be disbanded in 2010, but it was kept. Politicians are not mentioning this because they know that the real power of the presidency is not in the vote or parliament: it's in the workers who do what he wants but who are paid by #wethepeople.
Basically, Kenya is operating like a slave plantation. The Massah and his mummy are in State House. The civil service plays the role of racist whites, policing us slaves from revolting, shooting us when they want. That's why the language of Kenya's civil service is racist.
Ordinary Kenyans then do the work which is underpaid or stolen through corruption. Then we are taxed to pay the salaries of the army, police and bureaucrats who serve the president, but we're cheated in staged elections that we have a say. We don't have a say through the vote.
We have a say in withholding our work and taxes. That's why we need a well organized boycott that can starve GoK of our work and taxes to pay those who help him oppress and exploit us. We need ideas how we can do this.
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By the way, we haven't talked about how CBC is giving your government data on your children. For years. I tried to flag those "assessments" as a form of spying, but you people said you preferred that to exams.
I know we hated literature in school (it's badly taught and very badly examined, anyway) but to understand the psyops happening here, we need to understand the difference between the symbolic and the literal, and why they matter. 🧵
Symbolic language is language that is able to capture what is said beyond the literal words. So, for example, if we say Zakayo must go, that's a shortened form of talking about our political problems and bad leadership.
Without that short form, every time you speak, you would start from scratch...Governance, elections, corruption etc before arrivimg at Must Go.
2nd benefit of the symbolic form is solidarity. Whether I'm talking about education, you about abductions, we land at the same point.
Like I said yesterday, I have outgrown caring what government does and what bills it writes. GoK is a parasite. Nothing it does is meant to help Kenyans. Everything is for containing Kenyans. The Creative Economy support bill is no different.
First thing to understand: GoK operates on "doctrine of discovery." You know the way wazungu told us they were the first to see Lake Victoria? That's how GoK operates, even with the arts. It fights the arts, then Kenyans struggle with the arts anyway, then GoK declares
it's establishing an infrastructure for the industry. But the industry was already there, despite being fought by GoK.
It's the same thing they did with Jua Kali. They told people "rudi mashambani," then ILO came and told them "look at fundis doing something new. How cute."
It's important to talk about corruption and the extent of looting in Kenya. But for me, my interest is also this: what does the looting reveal about the mind, character and soul of Kenyans? What does it say about the moral, intellectual and spiritual infrastructure of Kenya? 🧵
Sadly, the answer is limited to morality. It's that we have leaders who don't care and are greedy. We take it as a natural flaw of human beings, if not Africans. And that's where I disagree with Kenyans.
Yes, individual human beings can be greedy. And we know from our folk tales that greed was something that was loathed by our cultures. What we have now isn't individual greed. It's a system of institutions and values that instil, promote, and protect greed.
To understand my argument you have to understand this premise which I argued from 2017, even before CBC was implemented.
EXAM OBSESSION IS AN ECONOMIC PROBLEM, NOT A CURRICULUM ONE.
If you don't (want to) get that, don't follow the thread.
I made this argument so many times, in so many stations, and on #MaishaKazini. The refusal to accept this point made me despair that Kenyans would demand change. 7 years later, the Gen Zprotest has finally proved me right. The problem is our political economy, not the curriculum.
For more on this, check my interviews with Spice FM and the Lynn Ngugi show.
Now, one of the stupidities
CBC brought was an extra layer of schools called JSS. Instead of primary, high and uni, now we had primary, JSS, high school and uni.
We Africans have to replace is our metaphor for oppression. We see empire and the African elites as predators because they monopolize violence. But they are not predators. They're parasites. Parasites are almost worse than predators, even though the end result is the same.
Predators are more noble because they have their own system and simply use the prey for food. When they're not hungry, they leave the potential prey alone. Parasites are different. Parasites create nothing, and have no system independent of the host.
Worse, parasites need to make themselves invisible, and if they can't, they appear friendly.
The Kenyan state monopolizes the mainstream media. Kenyans created for themselves an alternative media to speak. Now the state is invading those alternatives.