What do you do when you live in a country where the minority are rich but don't work, own the majority of the land, rule the country as a monarch or prime minister despite being unelected, and appoint a mediocre bunch of bureaucrats to run the government?

You become passive aggressive. Or childish. You refuse to directly say what you really think, and attack people who do. You never take responsibility for your position. Instead, you blame the next person for not saying what YOU want to say. Or better still, you offer them a cup of tea and completely evade the topic.  

​This has become the Kenyan character, thanks to very effective lessons from Great Britain. We too are ruled by a royal family which considers Kenya its personal property, maintains power through an election by the minority, and has a government run by bureaucrates who refuse to be held responsible for their actions. To cover up our trauma, we become passive aggressive.

he persistence of the Kenyan politicians in discussing who might win the presidency in 2022 is part of a larger hegemonic tactic of narrowing the Kenyan national consciousness to the future. This narrow national view has been internalized so much by the Kenyan public, that we have developed a vocabulary of abuse against anyone who tries talk about where Kenya has come from and where it is now.

This narrow obsession with the future is not new. During colonial times, we Africans were promised "civilization" if we adopted European cultures, and "heaven" if we worshipped the European god. After independence, we were promised "development" if we did what IMF and World Bank said.  Today, we are still promised development by the current president on condition that Kenyans refrain from all political discussions.

​This statement is to express complete opposition to, and disgust with, the Huduma Bill (2019). No sovereign country that respects the humanity of its people should contemplate translating into law the inhuman ideas that are entrenched in this bill.

The bill is due for public participation today, Wednesday 31 July from 9 am to 1 pm at at the Kenya School of Government, Lower Kabete campus, off Lower Kabete Road. 

The draft bill can be found here, and details on to send views to government can be found here and here.

This is my statement.
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1. MANDATORY STATUS OF HUDUMA NUMBER

a. The stated purpose of the Huduma Bill, which is “to promote efficient delivery of services,” is contradictory, because access to health and education are inalienable human rights, both under the United Nations Charter for Human Rights and under the Bill of Rights in the Constitution of Kenya (2010). Therefore, the respect of these rights cannot be made conditional upon bearing a document of the state. 

The arrest and release of Boniface Mwangi last week brought about a conversation among Kenyans that is uncomfortable, painful, but absolutely necessary. While Boniface saw in the arrest an opportunity to discuss revolution, for many Kenyans, the whole incident revived old pain, that had been opened again just a week or two before with the arrest of Beatrice Waithera, or Betty wa Shiro, for being a prominent voice in the anti-corruption demonstration that ended in the usual Kenyan way. With the police firing tear gas.

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.