The role of the government, this Anglo-American contraption which gives us grief, is to contain us so that a few royals who don't work survive on our work. Unless we get this basic reality, we'll continue to tell stories like #DegreeOfDoubt
Thread #maishakazini
Some history. First the missionary came to prepare our hearts for capitalism. For them, conversion to Christianity wasn't abandoning African culture. It was entering the capitalist economy as a worker. #degreeofdoubt#maishakazini
Missionaries attacked mostly cultural practices which interfered with Africans working for wazungu. They talked about human rights and whatever, but their evidence of conversion was if you got employment at a mzungu farm and used the money to buy mzungu trinkets. #degreeofdout
Then after that came the REAL interests of colonialism. BUSINESS. Kenya was set up as a business of the Imperial British East Africa company in the 1880s, and only became a colony in 1920. It took a whole 40 years for the British state to show up. #degreeofdoubt#maishakazini
Why the gap? Because the role of the state is simple: to provide the violence with which to ensure that we do what the imperial business interests want. Africans were already revolting in the 1900s. How else could they force us to work?
The principle is simple. The business interests can't openly tell you "I'm here to make sure that your resources are mine and that it's your work that hands them over to me." People will riot. And they did. #maishakazini#degreeofdoubt
So the business interests came up with A GOVERNMENT to be a buffer between you, the exploited, and the exploiters. The government provides "law and order" and policy based on so-called neutral principles #maishakazini#degreeofdoubt
The government tells you that it exists to take care of your education and other social services, because that's the story you'll accept for them to stay. But their real job is to protect wazungu interests. They tell us that all the time. #degreeofdoubttheelephant.info/features/2018/…
All this to say that the government of Kenya has NEVER wanted Africans to get university education. Ever. It's not in their business interests. Their job is to extract our resources and our labor. University education makes people say No. #degreeofdoubt#maishakazini
During colonial times, the settlers successfully campaigned against Kenyans getting education, to the extent that of the 3 EA countries, Kenya provided the least resources and sent the least number of students to Makerere. #degreeofdoubt#maishakazini
The Mau Mau revolt made the British government finally accept that a white face at State House was bad for business. Governement run on "neutral" policies wasn't enough to pacify us. The business interests needed black faces in governement. #degreeofdoubt#maishakazini
It was only then that the British government from London accepted to create a university college in Nairobi. University was for creating an elite who would serve in the state, and steal from us and then send the resources to London and New York. #degreeofdoubt#maishakazini
That colonial philosophy was also Jomo's philosophy. He never increased the number of universities in Kenya because he had the elites he needed. Too many elites being produced in universities was politically dangerous. #degreeofdoubt#maishakazini
Do you honestly think that KEPSA, GOK and @EduMinKenya are going to tell you this? Of course not. So they come up with a story.
#degreeofdoubt says the same thing the colonial settlers said: higher education interferes with the workplace. The only difference is that while settlers said African minds cannot handle knowledge, @ntvkenya is saying that there are no jobs except menial ones. #maishakazini
But the basic argument is the same. Africans do not deserve to make decisions about their destiny and the economy. Their job is to work where they are told. #degreeofdoubt GoK wants to defund university education, because it is afraid of informed and educated Africans. Period.
And the only way you will accept GoK doing what it did in colonial times, which is denying Africans higher education, is by accepting that degrees are useless in the economy. Of course university education is useless in a plantation economy. Duh! #degreeofdoubt
If Kenya really cared about a good and decent economy, it would let graduates be creative and work. But do you think a family made up of Ichaweri settlers, who have no ideas except to grab, would want such an economy? Priss, Kenyans. Ati #degreeofdoubt. Mschew.
This is what happens when Kenyan graduates imagine doing work other than plumbing. The wazungu come steal their ideas in the name of investment. The settler-grabber elites don't mind, because that's one less Kenyan using their mind. #degreeofdoubt
So Kenyans, we need to grow up and ask mature questions about education. AND THE ECONOMY!!!! This "no jobs" story is the story of colonial settlers, not ours. The media are on the side of the settlers, not on our side. #DegreeOfDoubt#maishakazini
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Where Gen Z's are today was where my generation was 30 years ago. In our 20s, stuck in IMF SAPs, an AIDS pandemic, and a clueless political class gatekeeping a new generation out of adulthood.
We need a discussion about reconstructing Kenya to avoid these 30 year cycles.
The first thing we need to understand, which my generation didn't, was the role of the West. The @IMFNews and @WorldBank are main actors in these 30 year cycles. They are scared of a new generation of Africans rising and are manipulating our economies to block them from doing it.
@IMFNews @WorldBank It is not a coincidence that the hammers which the foreigners are dealing to African economies also coincide with the same thing in Nigeria and AES, and with the dumbing down of our school system. Gen Z's are in an anti-imperial struggle.
Grade 9 parents have been given this whatever called RIASEC which they are supposed to use in choosing career pathways and schools for their children.
I know we want to concentrate on our kids, but we're Africans. Nothing we are told to do is innocent.
So we have to understand where it's coming from, and why GoK bureaucrats, in their wisdom, decided that Kenyan parents should be subjected to it.
RIASEC is what people call psychometrics, where tests are used to measure people's intelligence or personalities.
Psychometrics are the offspring of scientific racism. Their roots are in 19th century attempts of Euro-American scientists to use tests prove that Africans were intellectually inferior.
And of course, they coincide with the end of slavery, when Africans start seeking education.
I cannot warn enough that the damage CBE/CBC will do to our children's psyche is going to be phenomenal. Parents, you have to wake up and listen. You have to stop looking at the what (content) of education, and think of the how your kids are developing. This isn't a joke.
The relationship between children and parents should be sacred. No teacher should be telling you what to do on weekends, less still, they shouldn't be telling you to take PHOTOGRAPHS of that activity. In this day and age? THINK! Do you want photos of your children in a data base?
As a parent, your job is to develop intimacy, trust and identity in your child. At home, your child should be learning to help around without the threat of a stick or a lower grade. This cannot happen if teecha is always telling you what to do over the weekend.
The only thing keeping the GoK in power is ignorance of Kenyans. And I don't mean the ignorance Jomo was talking about. Jomo was using the racist idea that Africans are ignorant because they don't know Western civilization.
I'm talking about ignorance as a war on consciousness.
Even the most vocal of voices, who were supposedly Gen Z, do not have political consciousness. They think that the right bureaucrats in the government will make Kenya work. Almost all the doctors who led #lipakamatender less than 10 years ago are now trying to make SHA work.
It's a complete failure of political philosophy that makes Kenyans think that GoK's problem is merit of the personnel. The majority of educated Kenyans think that way. And after school, they stop reading, so they sincerely think they are the messiahs whose skills will save Kenya.
We have no opposition because Kenya's democracy is elitist. Kenya's "democracy" is code for elites controlling the masses. Elections are for recalibrating the elite. They block us from fighting on issues. They fight each other and force us to watch and take (ethnic) sides.
The recalibration of the elite through elections is for giving ordinary Kenyans that they have the power to choose their leaders. But once the vote is cast, the recalibration begins. Lawyers in European wigs make fancy arguments in court, media looks active reporting numbers,
pastors pray for peace, private sector lectures us on going back to work, embassies endorse the vote, and Kenyans start following the appointments and sending congratulations. For the next 4 1/2 years, the elite keep circulating positions, making more appointments.
I'm convinced that Kenya is sustained by Western money. We can't have an extremely insipid, corrupt elite, an anti-intellectual academy, a non productive economy, and the economy hasn't crashed. There is an outside factor sustaining this Kenyan economy, but not on our behalf.
Our lives are becoming more incoherent and more chaotic, but the institutions are still standing instead of collapsing. Then the Kenyan journalists and international media sustain the image of a coherent intelligentsia who can explain Kenya with the right theories and data.
Kenya's chaos must be being contained with foreign money. That's why no matter what we shout about the mess, GoK ignores us.
Kenya is one big collective cognitive dissonance. The world can see it, but we, who suffer it, can't.