This week, the Nation Media Group held another installment of its Leadership Dialogues, this time focused on the new system of education being launched next year. In the opening minutes of the event, clearly designed to build up legitimacy for the new system, anchor Smriti Vidyarthi referenced  the common narrative of Kenya’s dysfunctional education system in her first question to KICD CEO Dr Julius Jwan. 

“The competency-based system aims to address the weaknesses of the 8-4-4 system.” She stated. And then she asked: “Dr. Jwan, what is the CBC aim to achieve?”

Dr. Jwan replied: “Maybe I would just try to modify that [question] a bit. In working on a curriculum reform, you don’t necessarily start from the weaknesses. It just happens that a time comes when the society has moved on, and the education system has to move on.”

In the folklore of several Kenyan communities, the story is told of a hyena that sensed the sweet smell of meat, and decided to follow the smell to reach the meat. The smell led him to a fork in the road, and the hyena could not tell whether he should follow the road going to the left or the road going to the right. So that he wouldn't lose the meat, the hyena decided that two legs would take one road, and the other two legs would take the other road. In a short time, the hyena split and died because of his greed.

A similar fate seems to be eminent for William Ruto's political ambitions. He seems to have decided that to become president, he needs to play by the rules of daddy's (and mummy's) boys, (Raila, Muigai, Gideon). However, he also wants to appeal to Kenyans by portraying himself as one of us, thereby adopting the tag "hustler."  However, trying to do both at the same time leads to the contradiction we see in Ruto's relationship with the Kenyan university.

On this great occasion where we come to reaffirm the people as the center of Kenya in this People's Charter, m​y fear is that it is not specific enough. We live in a neoliberal age where the language of progressives, language about rights and pain with injustice, is hijacked by the oppressors from the oppressed.

For instance, the president won the elections in 2013 by saying he was a victim of imperialism, until even those whose relatives were killed in the crimes for which he was charged pitied him.

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The history of Kenya is a story of distracting the people of Kenya from fundamental economic reforms that would allow the Kenyan people to participate in their economy and have institutions that serve Kenyans, rather than serve the interests of Western capital and its local caretakers in government. The latest referendum push led by Raila Odinga, against our will, despite claiming otherwise, is just the latest installment in scuttling economic and social reforms.

And yet, Raila's insistence on a referendum to restructure political power is, strangely, a fulfillment of his father's Jaramogi Oginga Odinga's principles. Until this week, I held onto the romantic notion that Jaramogi was interested in fundamental social reform, and was opposed to the capitalist and feudal accumulation of wealth by the Kinyatta family and their fellow ethnic elites. That was until I stumbled about the work of Nicola Swainson, author of The Development of Corporate Capitalism in Kenya, 1918-1977. I now understand what Julius Malema calls the "arrangement" of Kenya, very differently from before.

To understand the Jaramogi paradox, one must first go back to what happened with colonialism and independence.

Many Kenyans complain that the church has fallen silent as the people are oppressed. The implication is that the church doesn’t care. But I don’t think that’s the problem. I think the church has just become clueless. It doesn’t know what citizens are facing, but most of all, it is blind to the citizens because it is infected by the ideology of the day.

​And this lack of self-awareness of the church is not new. During colonialism, the church turned a blind eye to – and sometimes actively supported –colonial oppression of Africans, because missionaries also believed that we Africans were backward and needed to be civilized by the love of Christ. 

OPEN LETTER TO DR BEN OKITA
Chairperson, Consumptive Wildlife Taskforce

I write to you as a citizen of the world domiciled in the African Motherland, and particularly in a territory that the imperial British forces carved out and called "Kenya."

I would like to voice my loudest opposition to the proposal to introduce "wildlife consumption in Kenya.

By now, many Kenyans have been made privy to the heated debates surrounding the death of 11 rhinos in a botched translocation exercise by KWS, funded by WWF and overseen by the embattled Tourism minister Najib Balala. Now that Balala lost his cool and told  unnamed people to go to hell, Kenyans are spoiling for him to be fired.

​It appears that Balala is way out of his depth in handling this issue. But focus on his sacking still misses the crux of the debate.