Just because #hudumanamba is digital, don't imagine that this is the first time when Western racist capitalism is putting a number to black bodies. They did it when they enslaved Africans in the Americas. They are just changing the mode of data collection.
What makes data necessary is the huge parasitic class that needs to make money from the work of others without working. How do you extract labor from people? By making sure there there is an infrastructure that counts and quantifies everything they do. #hudumanamba
What #hudumanamba aims at is to strangle us to do what the government wants. Refusing means that you can't get services and you will most likely go to jail to give prison labor by force. That is the definition of enslavement.
Africans have always fought against these kinds of numbers. One of the contentious issues that Kenyans fought against during the colonial times was the kipande system, which is now the ID and the precursor to #hudumanamba.
The kipande made people prisoners in their own country. With a kipande you could not quit your job without your mzungu boss signing off on it, or you would be arrested. That made wazungu able to exploit Kenyans without paying them a salary. #hudumanamba
Those days, people could escape from the radar of the colonial govenrment. #hudumanamba seeks to make escape not an option because the government intends to jail us for not having a huduma namba or jail mothers for not marking their babies with the sign of the beast.
By its own admission, the government said during the fake public participation meeting on #hudumanamba that data is the big oil. So this is about commercializing the sale of Kenyans, which is a deal GoK has already entered with Master Card newsroom.mastercard.com/mea/press-rele…
#hudumanamba is also directly related to the private interests of the Tekayo family and his bank. This is their way of making sure that any money earned by Kenyans through small scale enterprises goes through his bank. theelephant.info/op-eds/2019/04…
#hudumanamba is about enslavement of Africans for business. It's not about democracy. Instead of the whiplash of the slave master, the rich are using techology. But it won't make the system any less brutal.
#Hudumanamba is the 666.
First beast: Anglo_American corporations
Second Beast: The Kenyatta empire
Causing fire to come from heaven: American fire power to rescue Tekayo in case he needs it
The number of the beast: #Hudumanamba
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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.
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.