African. Woman. Wife. Teacher. In the 99%. Love + Revolution.
Elimu ya ngumbaru on the Kenyan socio-political context for the price of bundles - Betty Guchu
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Aug 21 • 14 tweets • 4 min read
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
Aug 10 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
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.
Jul 29 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
Why we should go back to 8.4.4. 🧵
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.
Jul 18 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
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.
Jul 15 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
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.
Jun 26 • 17 tweets • 3 min read
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
Mar 10 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
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.
Mar 7 • 24 tweets • 6 min read
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.
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
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.
Nov 28, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
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.
Nov 15, 2023 • 16 tweets • 4 min read
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. 🧵
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.
Nov 5, 2023 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
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.
Oct 21, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
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.
Sep 17, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
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.
Aug 31, 2023 • 28 tweets • 6 min read
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. 🧵
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.
Jul 13, 2023 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
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.
Jun 3, 2023 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
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.
Jun 3, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
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
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.
Jun 2, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
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.
May 29, 2023 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
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.
May 28, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
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.
