I think colonialism in Kenya has to be analyzed in unique terms. I've read about settler colonies in the Atlantic and Pacific, in Zimbabwe, South Africa and Algeria, but I don't think any of those countries has produced an indigenous middle class as confused as Kenya's. I've tried to figure out what was unique about Kenya, and the only thing I can come up with is that we were colonized by British elites. Bruce Berman says that Kenya had the highest number of public school British people in the colonial administration and missions.

We're being gaslit here.

1. CBC was not a curriculum review. It was a system REPLACEMENT. If it was a curriculum review, all that would have changed is the content (curriculum is a posh term for content) without bringing back pre-8.4.4 system.

But politicians wanted optics.

https://twitter.com/SpiceFMKE/status/1765244832383959392

2. Competency is not a new thing. It has been around for over a century. In fact, it's quite similar to the logic of TVET, that's why Zakayo didn't replace the system. He believes in TVET, where knowledge is only physical or technical. #thesituationroom

https://x.com/wmnjoya/status/1074066521339637761?s=20

My thoughts on housing levy, which I hope are the last.

The point of thinking is to put events in their context. I have now learned that that is absolutely hated by the Kenya elite and the middle class. But I will do it anyway. 🧵

My context starts here.
dw.com/en/smoking-out… We were told in 2019 that CBK was replacing the old 1000 notes to get rid of money laundering. But in Kenya, we know that the truth will never be in the newspapers, and so we cannot ignore explanations that are not officially endorsed. Grace Musila talks about this reality.

It's so useless to talk of decolonizing the mind when we don't even know what the mind is. Kenyans' hatred of knowledge and thinking, no matter the source of knowledge, shows that we don't even know what the mind is. So what are we decolonizing? For example, we seem not to see that there's a difference between knowing an event happened and interpreting what that event MEANS. To interpret what it means requires knowledge of history and consciousness of narratives.

This is simple the way to understand these fee hikes.

We're being charged for existing. That's it.

The very act of being alive is being reduced to a cost of the government. It's a colonial, anti-human, philosophy that makes should make us extremely angry. 🧵

https://twitter.com/PeopleDailyKe/status/1724693750947922176

Think of it this way.

Can we live without ID cards? Yes. Can we be married without government certificates ? Yes. Will we die without death certificates? Yes. Can we c ross borders without passports? Yes.

In other words, government documents are not a necessity.

The cruelty of the arts industry leaves me speechless. I've talked about that cruelty many times, but the Euro-centric glam discourse of tabloids makes it very difficult to have a sober conversation about the arts in Kenya. nation.africa/kenya/life-and… I tell students that they must sit and reflect on the arts, not just perform the arts. You know what? They don't listen because they are getting gigs from corporates at minimum pay. Nini Wacera mentions it when she talks of companies hiring babies with no professional experience.

You all said you don't want your kids to have knowledge. Only skills. That's what quacks are: people who think things can be done without knowing anything. Your kids will be the next ones.

We need to grow up. We even pointed out the serious psychological issues that will arise from that kind of thinking. Remember what you said? What we have is what people get in Norway.

You think only you can ridicule what I say. Goes both ways.

Yesterday I noticed that the Twitter website is now transitioning to . With that, I've decided I've taken as much changes from the Musk that I can accommodate and I'm going to start transitioning out of this app.x.com I find this x thing spiritually disturbing. Why X? X, is supposed to represent the unknown. Meaning that we have to remain in the zone of the unknown with this app, depending on one man to decide what to do with our conversations.
The X I know was for Malcolm. It remains Malcolm.

In my historical research, I found that the thing the Western imperialists imposed on us called school was designed to subvert African learning, both in the US and in Kenya. 🧵

https://twitter.com/KaranjaMatindi/status/1696626342014419086

In the US after the emancipation, African Americans wanted to teach their kids to have knowledge for citizenship. The robber barons of the industrial revolution worried that this would upset the racial hierarchy. They used their money to veer black education towards TVET.

The reason why Vasco da Gama is important, Mr. President, is because it would have made you know that the first thing to do in office is be POLITICAL. Not a technocrat. You should have opened the public debt audit, told us who stole the money rather than that there was no money. You should have treated us like mature citizens and let the public know what had happened. That would have proved that you were a break from the dynasties.

Instead, you gave us formulas from technocrats and told us they will be a bitter pill to swallow.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

https://twitter.com/Nairobi_Leo/status/1664653619004690432

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

https://twitter.com/DavidNdii/status/1662521781725413377

"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.

I'm amazed at Kenyans expressing horror at individual acts of terror and insanity, but completely avoiding the socio-political questions that tie all the episodes together.

The Kenya media, especially, have no right to be horrified. They laid the foundation for our madness. Two years ago, women were being hacked to death and thrown off buildings in the name of love. We tried to say that this was an indication of a larger suffocation of our mental and spiritual spaces. Instead, men and women had a go at each other over gender.

Cults are made possible by the enlightenment split between reason and faith. In socio-economic crisis, reason is not enough to bear the weight of struggle on the soul. Reason is heartless and impersonal. So people cant apply reason to tear them away from religious exploitation. To end this exploitation requires ending the separation between reason and faith. People need BOTH, at the same time, not one or the other. Reason helps us think and religion gives some courage. That's how Africa has a history of opposing oppression through religion.

We are in a very risky place as a country where people convert lived experience, especially traumatic lived experience, is imported in its raw form into a form of knowledge, and worse, a form of advocacy. Say my toe got damaged by a shoe, then the toe had to be amputated. I then form a society for the amputated toes, and start saying there must be a law that requires shoe makers and sellers to get a license demonstrating safety to toes. I also start a short course on how toes fit in shoes. I raised money to lobby with MPs and MCAs over the same.

There's culture, there's education and there's consciousness.

In the early 1960s, this man, Frantz Fanon, tried to warn African leaders and intellectuals that complete liberation needed all three elements, not just culture.

They didn't listen. Culture is the accumulated knowledge of a people. It reflects what a people consider valuable and praiseworthy. It is the store where we put our tools for interacting with our environment. It's like a database that we can quickly refer to without doing long research.