#LandIsNotProperty Mwalimu Wandia Profile picture
Jun 3 11 tweets 3 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
There's no new middle class you're building with CBC. CBC is for keeping poor kids in TVET so that no new people join the middle class.

And saying that the only productive middle class is Asians needs to be flagged as racist and ignorant of how the colonial economy was organized
Asians were the only people allowed to be industrial by the British. At independence, the African elite maintained the status quo because they could easily control a minority through nativist nonsense about African identity. As they winked at what Idi Amin was doing in Uganda.
And even then, the Asian community still struggles getting IDs, passports. They are targeted with extortion and even violence by the African politicians (as we know from the violence after the 1982 coup). So presenting them as the model for capitalism is really disingenuous.
For the Africans, the principle of the Kenyan political elite is that we're too stupid to do anything beyond pushing paper. Frantz Fanon explained it so well in The Wretched of the earth. He said that African elites reduced the continent to the brothel of Europe.
Our middle class is busy inventing s*** for wazungu and the middle east, after being exported there by companies owned by cabinet members. As Ndii calculates what to do with the remittances. African middle class being unproductive is just inferiority complex bs.
In Kenya, you dare be productive and see what happens to you. You'll have to deal with a range of vultures - if it's not KRA, it's a politician whose small ego is threatened by you, or it's a mzungu pretending to invest in your idea. Isn't that why Tabitha Karanja ran for Senate?
Hustling without political consciousness is terrible for the soul. That's the Kenya Kwanza problem. Hustling is about looking for gaps to exploit. Hustling for people kwa ground is different from the hustling for people in the corridors of power. Hamko pamoja.
When hip hop people sing of the hustle, it's not about money alone. It's about the political economy and their place in it as disenfranchised people. It's not hanging around State House and aristocrat snobs who don't accept you.
There were other types of hustlers, like the colonial explorers. People like Cecil Rhodes who came to Africa to hustle because they couldn't live on European incomes.
Fanon also called the African bourgeoisie at independence hustlers, people of an intermediary kind, whose only sense of work was not fighting for freedom but being a go-between for Europe and Africa.

So hustling doesn't mean the same thing for everybody.
In Kenya, our fundamental problem is that our political class mesmerizes us with formulas so that we never do anything innovative. It's a pathology maintained by the Anglo-Americans and their school system. Visit #MaishaKazini for such conversations.

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More from @wmnjoya

Jun 3
Oh please. We've been saying at #MaishaKazini that to invent or innovate in Kenya AS AN AFRICAN is to invite a small minded politician or bureaucrat to crush you. I told Ndii before elections that our economic problem isn't financial. It's institutional. He dismissed it because
he was scared of a repeat of Sri Lanka in Kenya.

Ndii is the ultimate middle class whose destiny is tied to GoK and is scared of falling. He joined government to prop it on stilts.
I also told Ndii that the role of the schools is to discipline Kenyans so that they don't innovate or invent. You know what he said? That's not a priority.

So now he's isolating the African middle class in Kenya for not being productive. That's racist blaming the victim.
Read 4 tweets
Jun 2
Ten years ago, this would have been music to my ears. I struggled to have arts programs against a hostile environment. Those days, Matiang'i used to announce in public how the arts are a waste of the country's resources.

I saw the light. It's too late to be impressed by this.
Of course the government is hollow and cant never understand the problem with this commercial philosophy of the arts. And I don't care for government. Its problem is spiritual and no policy can solve that.

But seeing arts for only its economic value is a problem.
I have explained why in my chapter on the church and arts education in Kenya. Private sector, the church and the government have boxed the arts into such a narrow pipeline where arts is not for society, but for specific goals of business, evangelism and politics. Image
Read 4 tweets
May 29
The fundamental gap in the heaven which we are being promised in affordable housing is: for whom will that housing be affordable? Instead, we're getting miscellaneous promises about construction jobs and being generous to those who don't have.
Their chief economist tells us that the issue is how much untaxed and floating money is being passively earned by landlords, and so GoK's plan is to compete with the landlords by building cheaper houses to manipulate the rent prices.

I don't accept this thinking.
First, if the AF goes through, the people who will afford the houses are the same landlords whom GoK is dreaming they can undercut. The landlords have disposable money. We people on salary do not. If we had, we would be affording mortgages right now.
Read 16 tweets
May 28
Tell your relatives at home that affordable housing is about deducting money from the middle class to build houses for the rich to rent back to the middle class. And when that happens, the cost of living goes even higher because wealth is transferred to those who don't work.
Unemployment is deliberately created by the rich so that the poor constantly do and believe what politicians tell them. It does not come from the absence of a housing levy to make the poor build houses for the rich to rent to others.
Ask them if they've seen empty malls and houses along the roads, and remind them what that land on which those malls sit can do.

Tell them those empty malls can be converted into affordable housing. let the mall owners be patriotic and do their fair share in the country.
Read 5 tweets
May 28
This argument that affordable housing will provide jobs is annoying. And this obsession of politicians with construction, as if it's the only industry and employer in town, is unhealthy. Did I not keep warning that this nonsense of TVET for construction jobs was a problem?
But when politicians were saying that the poor should go to TVET to become masons and plumbers, the same middle class that is now being taxed to build houses for the rich was rejoicing.

The tragedy of the middle class is that they think as individuals instead of as a class.
Affordable Housing should be housing for the poor. But Kenya Kwanza is saying that AF is for the poor to build houses for others. Politicians are not saying who those others are. But it's for themselves, and for the people now paying housing levy to rent from the politicians.
Read 5 tweets
May 28
GoK, we don't want calculations about what rich people earn from rent. Why not tax them, instead of taxing us who have to save with saccos to construct a house? And "why pay for houses we don't need" is a philosophical argument that cannot be answered with calculations.
"Why pay for houses we don't need" is a stupid argument that comes from the same class of rich hustlers and their foolish followers who don't think. Our argument is different. It is that AF will not do what it's intended to do, especially not in the kind of economy we have.
During the Cabinet interviews, many of the nominees counted their wealth in the hundreds of millions, the bulk of which was in terms of property values. That's where the problem is. Wealth measured in terms of buildings means those whose source of income is their work struggle.
Read 8 tweets

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