Thread by @wmnjoya

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

https://twitter.com/DavidNdii/status/1664639607055499264

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.

https://twitter.com/wmnjoya/status/1361960005356965891?s=20

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.