The argument an MP gave on Citizen TV for BBI is the same argument kumirans gave for voting for the ICC suspects in 2013: we're traumatized and tired of dying. We'll do anything for "peace" and "development."
"And anyone who tries to say that we can't keep on letting politicians lynch us is an insensitive ethnic supremacist who doesn't know what suffering is."
Surely, what kind of a conversation is that, where we are comparing not ideas and dignity, but whose wounds are more painful?
This Kenya is just toxic. Politicians are a lynch mob who hang us every 5 years precisely so that we can say "Stop! Do no more harm." When do we end this cycle of violence, and blackmailing each other with our trauma?
In 2017, when we were waiting for the decision on the petition against the presidential election, I said on Citizen TV that we need to acknowledge and mourn our trauma. A Kenyan said that that is refusing to accept and move on.
But we haven't moved on if we have never demanded for justice for victims of state violence during elections since 1957. We're letting politicians increase their demands, like mutilating our constitution, by accepting the very toxic argument that "we don't want to die any more."
In fact, the tangatanga argument is the same as the #BBIreport. People dont want bloodshed, but instead of the streets of Kisumu it's in the shambas of Rift Valley.
Surely, what kind of a conversation is this, where we compare not ideas and dignity, but our wounds?
Every time we repeat that argument, we're justifying more violence against ourselves. Every election, every alliance, every deal, is justified by not wanting to die any more. What kind of people are we to accept that as politics?
BBI will not stop the lynching. In fact, it will have proved to politicians that they need to kill us to get what they want. They'll kill us in 2022, then someone else will handshake and we'll be told that the problem is devolution or something else.
We'll keep widening that door until we get a Hitler who will promise Kenyans that the problem is certain people who need to be eliminated.
We have to mourn our victims stop allowing political deals that exploit our unaddressed trauma. m.soundcloud.com/wmnjoya/strang…
We also have to stop repeating the racist lie loved by the American and the British governments that Kenyans kill each other over elections.
We don't kill each other. Kenya politicians kill us so that the world can accept the rigged election results as better than war.
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.