I watch this documentary by @AfUncensored and I'm so frustrated. Because I know this: there is no language in Kenya for us to see this as a violation of human dignity.
I have occupied the fields of education and Christianity for all my life. I know that people who pass through those institutions are taught to be inhuman. Despite all the language of religion and knowledge, to be educated and to be a Christian is to be anti-human.
Which academic, which clergy, will speak up for the downtrodden in Kenya? None. The students will never talk about them in class, the congregation will never hear about them on Sundays. When Magoha says nonsense about the poor, students write theses to justify his ideas.
I get so surprised when, in my classrooms, or in academic forums, I hear people repeating extremely stupid ideas voiced by politicians as if they are fact. It doesn't occur to them to even subject what politicians say to analysis.
The church and the schools exist to brainwash Kenyans to become insensitive and hardened. They are taught not to see human beings, but to justify the status quo even if it means human beings suffer. The church will call it "God's will," the schools call it being "objective."
So Christianity and schools teach Kenyans to respond to everything in life with these two tactics
1. avoid recognizing an injustice 2. if the injustice is too big to ignore, blame the victim
Because the state is God, and must always be blameless.
The basic idea is to teach Kenyans not to see anything. If there is an injustice, never see the state. Or the church. Or the rich. See only the victims and blame them. Because not seeing the perpetrators means they are blameless.
This IS the colonial education that trained colonial officers to be crude and violent, and taught the police and the civil servants to be the same.
Unless we humanize our education and faith, the mindukras will ignore injustice because they are taught against naming it.
Either that, or we create alternative institutions that see us. An alternative state, an alternative community service instead of police, an alternative education, and an alternative theology of Jesus as a colonized subject, not as CEO in the same boardroom as pirate sector.
Which leads me to question @johnallannamu: What's the value of getting interviews from GoK officers like the DPP? They are as poisoned like everyone else. These institutions cannot be cleaned up. They need to be destroyed, everybody sent home, and we start new ones from scratch.
Civil servants are trained to be inhuman. When they talk to the media, they answer questions to protect GoK, not to affirm our humanity.
GoK is too racist, too inhuman, to care about Kenyans.
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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.
There are two ideologies struggling for supremacy in the Kenyan space. Both are saying #RutoMustGo. But they differ on what is needed.
The first thinks that the Kenya colonial state can be managed better if we hire the right people on merit, and if we follow "the rule of law."
This ideology is largely supported by people in institutions: politicians, journalists and the church, although they differ on the moral angle about whether to engage with the establishment or not.
This ideology never discussed inequality, education or ideas. Just governance.
The 2nd group, to which I hope I belong, sees the colonial state as incapable of reform, and putting in nice people and following the constitution will take us back to the circumstances we are now in. We need an overhaul not just in morality, but also in our mindset. #RutoMustGo
When Samora Machel was assassinated, Thomas Sankara said: who killed Machel? To know who killed Machel, you have to look at those whose interests are served by his death.
That's how I see the raid on Bunge. Whose interests were served most by that raid? #rejectfinancebill2024
I get my answer from 3 things: 1. Zakayo's tasteless speech that said nothing about #rejectfinancebill2024, and justified the use of the military 2. The subsequent massacres in Githurai 3. The similarity with what happened in Sri Lanka in 2022, and a reference to it
by a member of a top member of Zakayo's government, who told me in July 2022 that nothing else matters except preventing a Sri Lanka
What are the chances that that would happen 2 years later? And then we'd be told about security and defence of Katiba?
#rejectfinancebill2022