This Is the Season We Are In,Life Upcountry in a Time of Coronavirus

Tributes to a Great African Mind: From Nyong'o, Mutunga and Shivji

By Anyang' Nyong'o, Willy Mutunga and Issa Shivji

I remember one weekend in Dakar, Senegal, when Thandika and I had had a long afternoon talking and having some beer in his apartment. We were discussing Marxist approaches to the study of African politics which Thandika thought was rather deficient, with “everything being reduced to relations of production however poorly understood.” The year was 1979, and the African Institute for Economic Planning and Development (IDEP) was at its highest point of radical intellectual firepower, headed by Samir Amin, the eminent political economist of the “accumulation on a world scale” fame. The Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) had just been born literally on the ribs of IDEP, headed by Abdala Bujra, the well known Kenyan anthropologist. Thandika straddled between the two institutions, subsequently succeeding Bujra to ensure that CODESRIA became the springboard for most young African scholars as astounding social scientists.

I remember that afternoon very vividly. Thandika was full of innovative ideas and impatient with some pedantic social science scholarship on the African scene. I was surprised Thandika had hardly published on any of the innovative ideas he had which he expressed so convincingly. So I challenged him to stop being a typical African in love with the oral tradition and begin writing and publishing. It did not take long before he hit the road, leaving me miles behind in a very short time. Not long ago Thandika sent me the following mail: “Here is an article I recently published in World Politics. Remember it is you who once challenged me to begin writing when we were in Dakar. I will never forget that.”

The article was on “Neopatrimonialism and the Political Economy of Economic Performance in Africa: Critical Reflections” (World Politics, Vol. 67, No. 1, January 2015). I found this article perhaps one of the best analysis and critique of development theories in Africa, debunking theories of those who view the state as a pariah in Africa. Those who lump all African heads of state and government as “big men” out to eat state and society to the bone didn’t sit pretty with Thandika in this article either. Seeing the future of Africa as foretold, doomed and bereft of any meaningful development almost for ever is something that could pass as propaganda but not social science. On 25th of October 2013, Thandika wrote me as follows:

“Early this year I met Willy Mutunga (later our Chief Justice) who reminded me of a meeting at your house where we drafted the principles of the Kenyan constitution. It is nice to see some things come true.”

Neither Willy nor I worked on these principles with any idea that after the constitution was promulgated we would occupy the positions that we eventually did. Thandika was, of course, miles away only to be happy eventually that his contribution to our struggle eventually paid some dividends in Kenya’s social progress.

That is why Thandika could never accept a “one shoe fits all” view in of Africa’s political economy. Not all African middle classes are “comprador” nor are all African states dependent in the same way on external forces. Class relations are historically given within social formations which can be subjected to analysis by the same theoretical models of political economy that are capable of bringing out their similarities and differences. This comes out very clearly in Thandika’’s World Politics article I have referred to above.

When I was writing the “Introduction” to a book I recently published on “Presidential or Parliamentary Democracy in Africa: Choices to be Made”(Nairobi: Booktalk Africa, 2019), I remembered that sometime in the mid-nineties, when we met as young Kenyan academics to discuss how we could advance the democratic struggle in our country, Thandika happened to be among us. As usual, he was always very ready to contribute productively to such discussions. We were so sure that the Moi regime was the only impediment between us and democracy.

But Thandika, always ready to be an intelligent gadfly at such times, posed the question: “Have you people thought about what kind of government you want to put in place after Moi which will be acceptable to the Kenyan people and which will achieve the democracy you seem to be looking for?”

From this statement one can see where Thandika’s theory of the “national democratic and developmental state” as a progressive alternative to the presidential authoritarian regimes of the Moi type came from. He had a deep commitment to democracy rooted in popular acceptance by the people because it is, among other things, capable of paying democratic dividends.

On a light note, we used to drink a beer in Dakar called “flag”. For Thandika, these letters stood for “Front de Liberation Alcoholic de Gauche.” We were definitely leftist Africans committed to the liberation of our continent. But we were not always drunk!

Rest In Peace Thandika.

P. Anyang’ Nyong’o is a public intellectual, educationist and is the current Governor of Kisumu county. ***

I first met Thandika in Nairobi in 1993. Kenya Human Rights Commission was then engaged in drafting a model constitution that was published in 1994. We used the model constitution to mobilise and organize Kenyans to demand a new constitution to breathe life into the then new political dispensation, multi-partism.

I have this great photograph of Thandika seated next to a dosing Peter Anyang Nyong’o. The two of them gave us a brilliant discussion on the ideology, politics, and economics of constitution-making. Thandika was wide awake through out. When Peter woke up he amazed all of us by responding to Thandika. This is the only time I have witnessed geniuses at work, one with his eyes wide open, and the other with eyes closed. The major difference between the two was not just the status of their eyes. Thandika was persuasive, calm, patient, always smiling, a present-day Socrates, and the very nemesis of what we used to call in Dar “academic terrorists.” (Let me be clear I do not believe Peter was one of those, but he can be at times intellectually intimidating and arrogant!). That Model Constitution owes a lot in its content to the advice both professors gave us. That critical education has accompanied me in my various careers. I have come to frown upon the lawyers professional refrain and brag that we are learned when we are, indeed, very ignorant of other disciplines that are foundational to our discipline. Thus I have come to value multi-disciplinarities and inter- disciplinarities.

This encounter was long before I read Antonio Gramsci, the Italian exemplary revolutionary and philosopher who spent 10 years in Mussolini’s fascist prisons. We now know that Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks developed the theory of the organic intellectual, the intellectual Jan Ziegler in Foreword to Yash Tandon’s book, Trade is war: The west’s war against the world writes, “who, through his analyses, his visions, becomes an indispensable auxiliary of social movements.”

Thandika was an organic intellectual. He has died. However, his vision, writings, analysis, and his intellect are all immortal. He has, along with my other teachers (Issa Shivji, Karim Hirji, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Micere Mugo, Angela Davis, Wangari Maathai, Yash Tandon, Paul Zeleza, Alamin Mazrui, Dan Nabudere, Samir Amin and many others) fundamentally educated me in the social movements I have been in since the 1990s, and in my careers outside those social movements, through his writings.

As we envision Africa and a planet that is just, peaceful, non-militaristic, non-violent, ecologically safe, equitable, prosperous, and socialist, Thandika’s immortal work will be among those that will help us resurrect radical Pan Africanism, think through a new free and emancipated Africa, and a new world without neoliberalism.

Dr Willy Mutunga is a public intellectual and former Chief Justice of Kenya

***

A renowned and well-respected Pan-Africanist intellectual, Thandika Mkandawire, joined the ancestors on 27th March 2020 in the early hours of the morning. Sadness enveloped his colleagues, friends and the African intellectual community at large. Issa Shivji could not find prose to express the loss – he just jotted down these words (a poem?) in Kiswahili on the same day. Ida Hadjivyanis translated it to English.

Thandika mpenzi wetu Tunahuzunika Tumetandika mkeka wa kuomboleza. Thandika anatabasamu: Ewe Issa, mkeka wa nini! Sherehekeni maisha Kifo ni usumbufu tu Msisumbuliwe Endeleeni na mapambano Kukomboa Africa Kuunganisha Afrika Kujenga ustaarabu mbadala Uliosheheni haki na usawa

Issa Shivji Dar es Salaam, 27/03/2020

*** Thandika our beloved We are grieving The mat is laid for mourning. Thandika smiles: O Issa, why this mat! Celebrate life Death is but an interruption Let it not unsettle you all The struggle must continue To liberate Africa To Unite Africa To create that alternative civilisation That overflows with justice and equality

(Translated by):

Ida Hadjivyanis London, 28/03/2020

Prof. Issa G. Shivji, author, poet and academic, is one of Africa’s leading experts on law and development, presently occupies the Mwalimu Julius Nyerere Research Chair in Pan-African Studies of the University of Dar es Salaam.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

By Anyang' Nyong'o, Willy Mutunga and Issa Shivji

If we covered coronavirus like we covered Ebola

In 2014, I spent more than six months covering Ebola in West Africa, two of them in the “hot zone” of Liberia. Global press coverage spurred clichéd response back home in the USA, from negative stereotypes about culture and hygiene to irrational panic. This is a piece of satire that imagines covering America’s global health emergency in the same way the US looked at one “over there”—revealing both the absurdity of imperial exceptionalism and the unwelcome fact that the weaknesses of the American “superpower” are not so different from those in so-called “s**hole countries.” But of course they are. Yet most of us are schooled to see the familiar as better than the foreign, and it’s easy to forget that we share the same weaknesses—and the same risks—as those we are taught, implicitly and explicitly, to see as less capable, less valuable, less worthy.

A new, deadly disease is exploding virtually unchecked in the United States of America, threatening the global economy and public health worldwide.

The US, as it is known, is the largest economy in the world, a position secured unfairly by its imposition of the US dollar as the global trading currency. The country regularly styles itself as “the leader of the free world”. That leadership has failed miserably in recent weeks, as a pathogen known as SARS-CoV-2, or “coronavirus” for short, has spread, with very little detection, across the country of more than 300 million people.

“It’s spreading like wildfire from person to person,” said Papi Kabongo, a bus driver in Kinshasa whose uncle, Jean-Jacques Muyembe, discovered Ebola in 1976.

“There are clear, simple, easy things we know can help, but people there don’t listen. They don’t even wash their hands!”

The spread has largely overrun the country’s crumbling healthcare system and outmanoeuvred its byzantine insurance infrastructure. Doctors now fear there will not be enough beds or ventilators for the critically ill, nor enough supplies to protect healthcare workers.

“We’ve been telling them for years, ‘Your system is fragile. You need to be ready for this’”, said Albert Williams, Liberia’s minister of health during that country’s unprecedented Ebola outbreak. “But they’re deeply uninterested in international cooperation or advice”.

A frightened population has begun hoarding chloroquine pills following the recommendation of the American president, Donald Trump, who has acted as a kind of “witch doctor”, or traditional healer, during the outbreak. Trump has said he believes the pills may treat the disease. A supposed preventive dose has already killed one man, in the hot, dusty region of Arizona.

Some US government officials have made efforts to encourage or require people to distance themselves from each other—measures which are known to have helped contain or end outbreaks in China, South Korea and Hong Kong—but the US president, Donald Trump, is prioritising the economy over public health, and Americans themselves have largely refused official advice.

Meanwhile, traditional American social practices, as well as entrenched cultural values like individualism, have greatly contributed to the spread of coronavirus, whose carriers can be highly contagious even without showing any symptoms.

“If I get corona, I get corona. At the end of the day, I’m not going to let it stop me from partying”, said Brady Sluder, a student on spring break in the infamous party town of Miami, Florida. “I’ve been waiting, we’ve been waiting for Miami spring break for a while”.

Experts say that even young, healthy individuals can contract the disease without their knowledge, putting anyone they come into contact with at risk.

“Before you know you have it, maybe you’ve given it to five people. And who did they give it to? And if they are elderly, you maybe have signed their death warrant”, said Muhammed Abubakar, dean of humanities at National University in Abuja. “This is a sad example of American exceptionalism in its purest form”.

In addition to Americans’ almost magical belief in their immunity to rules of all kinds, the country has faced a serious erosion of trust in official institutions in recent decades.

“These people don’t trust their government,”, said Emmanuel Mawema, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Zimbabwe-Harare. “They still manage to hold what we would technically call elections, but the wider society has been broken for a long time.”

This breakdown in trust has a deep history. Though the country has not experienced violent conflict recently, the United States is wrought with long-standing political divisions between its urban and rural tribes, which have repeatedly renounced efforts to find common ground.

“It’s almost as if they are opposed to the common good on principle”, said Tesfaye Haile, who spent eight years as Ethiopia’s ambassador to the United Kingdom. “This kind of division and the institutional inertia it creates is simply the way of life there”.

Experts say the US is poised to soon look like neighbouring Europe, where cases of the virus have soared in recent weeks, and doctors in some countries are disconnecting life-support services from patients over 65.

“In countries like the US, where life is cheap, it can create painful choices”, said Simon Odhiambo, who directs the Global Human Rights Network, headquartered in Nairobi. “We’ve been saying for years that health is a human right all states must respect, or it can put everyone at risk. This is what we meant”.

Other countries, too, fear the failures of the United States will put their own populations at risk.

“We don’t have any cases right now”, said South Sudanese President Salva Kiir. “We’ve closed the airport and our land borders. This may create real economic hardship for our people, but we won’t allow anyone coming from or through the United States to put our people at risk. It’s a matter of national security”.

CORRECTION: Europe is not a neighbour of the United States. We regret the error.

Ends

All the names here are fictitious, unless otherwise indicated (with a link to verifiable, accurate information).

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Tributes to a Great African Mind: From Nyong'o, Mutunga and Shivji

By Anyang' Nyong'o, Willy Mutunga and Issa Shivji

January to March is my favourite time of year, despite the heat and the dryness, or the humidity, depending on which part of the country you are in. I’m a sun worshipper and this season accords me numerous opportunities to wrap around a kikoy or wear shorts and a vest almost daily. I like the blue skies even though I have to plan my movements to avoid the noonday sun.

When the rains do kick in—and they seem to have checked in almost on time this year—I’m ready for the grey leaden skies that pelt the earth with rain. A new season has come. It has to. Funny thing is, I get impatient when the rains delay because I know prolonged seasons come with their consequences. There has to be a time for everything. Acceptance is a tough word, I’ve discovered. A friend and I were talking about acceptance, and he reckons acceptance is giving up but I disagree with him. Acceptance for me is recognising the situation that you are in. Acceptance is recognising the now. This present moment.

There will be tomorrows but who knows what they will be like? Finish dealing with today first.

I’ve been social-distancing and moved into self-quarantine just over a week ago. For someone who works from home and is an ambivert, this situation is almost kawaida. I don’t like how it has been imposed and its indefinite nature, but I’m in a familiar space. This was an easy situation to accept. I can’t hit the shops the way I want to and nor can I go down to my local pub in the evening for a serving of human contact. I’m grateful that we aren’t on total lockdown and I have the luxury of going for a bike ride and staring out to sea. But again, I live in Kilifi town, where we as a community are on tenterhooks following the irresponsible actions of our Deputy Governor.

I was angry for two days. Very angry, because so many lives had been put at risk. But I’ve come to accept this situation for what it is and put in place measures that will not expose me to possible infection.

I won’t lie; it’s tough. Tough learning to accept and deal with a situation that is not of your own making. It was only this week that I was reminded that I have been in this place before and I hope that remembering that experience will see me through this period.

As a cancer survivor, I’m in the category of vulnerable groups. My immunity isn’t what it used to be and I need to protect myself. I’ve read about safeguards against COVID-19 in relation to myeloma and cancer, and I’m keeping tabs on other survivors like myself. My friend Muthoni has a way of articulating things in a very gentle “you-go-deal” kind of way and her words resonated very well in our WhatsApp group.

“We are back to the initial days of stressing and anxiety about not knowing what to expect. I joked and said the world is now having a taste of a typical cancer patient’s world. The anxiety, the seclusion, the insane fear of picking up an infection and reading all information coming your way with all manner of advice and tips (even the outrageous ones) and basically getting to the point of understanding that we are totally not in control of our daily lives. The best we can do is appreciate every minute/hour/day and this helps one slow down and appreciate the simple things in life. Dropping all the shenanigan things we bandika [put] on ourselves and prioritize the crucial aspect of being alive—building meaningful relationships and leaving a legacy and not a CV.”

Acceptance. It is important to live in the now. We don’t know how long we as a country or the global community will be in this period. Yes, it is unsettling and at times fearful. But this is the season we are in. Let’s be honest; as human beings we’ve had an uninterrupted good run on this planet for a while. The last time we had a worldwide pandemic was in the 80s.

Twenty-twenty was going to be my year. Seriously! It was not said as we crossed into the new year in merriment, with a drink in hand. Thought that night was something else. For me, Olympic years seem to hold wonder. This year, I’ve gone as far as creating a vision board for myself. This is the year. Now twenty-twenty is more like twende, twende, (let’s go, let’s go), the phrase you hear matatu touts use often. We’ve been shown dust and it is only the first quarter. They are many that want to cancel this year and have already written it off. Economically, the books aren’t looking pretty, I’ll admit. But we still have nine months to go and I’m still hoping that this year will still bring some wonder. I’m learning to be an optimist. Seeing the glass as half-full doesn’t come easy to me. So, this global pandemic is teaching me things and taking me to uncomfortable spaces internally. That’s where I am now. This season has taken me to back to October 2015 when, in a Nairobi hospital, I was diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma, a type of blood cancer. I didn’t know what lay in front of me, but I decided to accept my situation. It was tough. It was kinda rough, for I was thrown into a whole new season.

It takes a lot of strength to pick up those lemons and start making lemonade or whatever you choose to make with them. Those lemons represent the now. This moment. Our present.

Acceptance. June 2016, Mumbai, India. A room at the BLK Speciality Hospital. Kenyan patient, age 43, has been prescribed confinement to a room for at least fourteen days. The room temperature is strictly regulated. My only exercise was in the corridor outside my room. And whenever I left the room, I had to wear a face mask. I had a total of thirty minutes of exercise a day. I spoke to my visitors through a glass door. That now sounds familiar for a good many folks. The internet became a lifeline, I watched at least an hour of news and even started watching Cake Boss! And my phone and meds knew nothing about social distancing. I prolonged all meals (when I had the appetite), and in between those meals I was mentally writing and rewriting my five-year plan. By day five, I didn’t care about tomorrow. I just wanted to get through the day and deal with whichever side-effect came with the treatment that was given on that day. If I wasn’t watching the news, it was MTV India, Master Chef Australia or even more Cake Boss. Being quarantined isn’t easy. The toll it takes on your mental health cannot be overstated. You may have the luxury of being in self-isolation or quarantine within your home, with your loved ones around you. If you are alone, you start naming the geckoes on the wall. I have a golden orb spider called Freda and two frogs that show up religiously each evening at six o’clock like askaris. I’ve tried kicking them out but I’ve been unsuccessful. It was only yesterday that I accepted that they are here for the duration of the curfew. I hope. Isolation can do that you. You may have resorted to spending a little longer in the loo or shower so that you can get a little more me-time away from either the partner or the kids. Count yourself lucky that your isolation isn’t within a hospital. During my sixteen days in confinement the “fun” activities were measuring my pee and recording its colour and describing my poo on a chart. You have no idea how excited I was when I started having solid bowel motions. It meant I was getting better. I appreciated each victory during this period when every day was just that, every day. Fortunately, I had my step-mom with me as my carer and roommate.

It was during this period that I willed my body to get better. Every day was another chance to fight on. There were battles with nausea, constipation and then diarrhoea. However, the main battle was willing my stem cells to be re-accepted by the body that they had been harvested from. Every day was hoping that my blood markers were better than the previous day. It was tough and all I could do was bide my time, wait and believe. Acceptance.

I’m back in that space of accepting the new normal. The difference here is that I’m not alone. There are billions of us in this place. But there are shed-loads of battles and fears that are being fought within the confines of our minds too. In these days of the University of YouTube, swiping left or right, Tik Toking, globetrotting and just-add-water happiness, the uncertainty of tomorrow is unsettling. There are fears about incomes and deals put on hold, separation from loved ones, not being able to touch or even sneeze or cough without getting stared at. We all just don’t know. I mean, even our election years now look tame! Many have cancelled the current season and would rather wake up in 2021. Sadly, life isn’t like that. We’d gotten used to the season of plenty to do, people to see and places to go. My vision board can testify to that. And I think along the way we overlooked the people, the planet and the peace that makes us human. I’m a fairly laid back guy, so when cancer came knocking on my door, I was told to pace it. Now, we are all being told to pace it.

“If you think about worry, it’s an energy that’s used up thinking about all the ways things could go wrong, or not happen or not go according to plan. But it’s just that, In your head. If it doesn’t translate into action or spur us into movement then it’s wasted energy . . . Which in our [cancer patients/survivors] situations is a precious commodity”, says my friend Muthoni. “Adversity will not change. Life will always throw us curveballs. Having been able to beat this monster has given most of us clearer perspectives of what’s important and what isn’t”.

Acceptance. This is a season. Its length and breadth we do not know. And if we all look at our respective lives, we’ve all been here before. It could be a cancer diagnosis or another malady, or a loss in the form of a death, a marriage, work, finances or even heartbreak. You’ve managed to get through it. There may be scars, there may be lessons learnt or not, but, man alive! that was one hell of a season then. You are still here now.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

By Anyang' Nyong'o, Willy Mutunga and Issa Shivji

It’s ridiculous I know, but I have been reduced to hoping that the lady I met at an agrovet in Nyahururu town last week is right after all, that above all other peoples of the world, God loves Kenyans the most. She made this extraordinary statement when I hesitated to shake hands with her, citing coronavirus fears and pointing to the critical situation prevailing in Italy, which had gone into lockdown in an attempt to contain the pandemic. “We shall be ok, God will make sure of that because he loves us very much”. More than the Italians? Much more!

A few days later, a retired veterinary officer of my acquaintance came to have a look at Dolly-the- calf; the girl had weeping eyes and I was a bit worried. Upon arrival, the vet found me on the phone and I was able to avoid shaking his proffered hand by vaguely waving at him instead. He was clearly miffed and took off in the direction of the cow pen before I had got off the phone. When the vet was done with Dolly, I explained to him that I had not meant to be rude but that avoiding shaking hands and keeping at a distance from each other was the recommended thing to do but he pooh-poohed me and said that those were problems of Nairobi people. Here in mashinani we were perfectly safe from the virus, he said. The following morning, as I was driving off to run an errand in the next township, I was waved down by a woman who looked vaguely familiar to me and, thinking she wanted I lift, I stopped. The woman came straight at me, grabbed my hand, shook it vigorously and proclaimed, “Praise the Lord! We will not die! The Lord is with us!” What could I say?

I live on the edge of a small township, about 30 kilometres from Nyahururu town, which nevertheless boasts a Level 3 health centre complete with a maternity ward and a functioning ambulance. The township is also host to many churches of various denominations; I have counted ten, including three of the main established churches, within less than a square mile. Sunday mornings used to be a competing cacophony of hallelujahs and hello-hellos as the pastors in their tin-shack churches tested their microphones before blaring out their summons and silencing birdsong. But a quiet word with the sub-chief seems to have worked and the noise has largely abated, with the loudspeakers back inside the churches and the volume significantly reduced. This is a largely church-going community and the arrival of the coronavirus in Kenya had not changed that in any significant way. When I enquired with the pastor of my church about the measures he was taking in the face of the COVID-19 crisis, he informed me that handwashing facilities would be placed outside the three entrances to the church and that the service would be shortened. Otherwise, life was continuing as usual.

Well, news of Nairobians beating a hasty retreat to their homes in the Kenyan countryside – or at least to the homes of their parents and relatives – has got me worried that the virus is already lurking among us, shortly to manifest itself to devastating effect. And so, being a mild hypochondriac, and convinced that the slight tightening in my chest does not augur well, I have decided to commune with my God from the relative safety of my house and compound.

Born and bred in the city, I came to live here a few years ago armed with a copy of John Seymour’s The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency, a highly romanticised view of country life, no practical skills and absolutely no knowledge of farming. But I have endured and could remain behind my gate for a couple of months, living off my vegetable patch, my maize reserve, Daisy’s milk and the eggs from my chickens. The rains have been unseasonably generous and the locusts flew high up above our heads a couple of weeks ago, headed south, sparing us that particular scourge. How the market traders will fare is what I’m wondering though. Last Saturday morning county officials did the rounds of the township and asked the market traders, who flow in from the surrounding countryside and neighbouring townships twice weekly, to pack up their wares and leave.

Those who sell second-hand clothes can always store them until the Wednesday and Saturday market days are reinstated – whenever that will be – but what will the vegetable sellers do with their stock? And how will the traders get by if they cannot trade? I buy avocados from Mama Wangari who recently introduced me to her last-born daughter, a charming girl who, against the odds, had done extremely well in secondary school and was hoping to enter university to study pure mathematics. Her mother is the family’s sole breadwinner and sending Wangari off to college was always going to be a challenge. Given the uncertainties linked to the coronavirus pandemic, the odds of Wangari sitting in a lecture hall any time soon have just diminished.

The shops remain open for the time being but business is bound to suffer without the custom of those people who come into the township to trade and buy goods on the weekly market days. Bars have already taken a direct hit and those who like their tipple will have to take it in the comfort of their homes. The police did the rounds of the local watering holes last Sunday night, supervising the ordering of last rounds and, on the stroke of midnight, all bars in the township were closed until further notice.

Soap and water dispensers have been placed outside most shops and the grocery store that my city nephew refers to as The Mall – on account of its having two tight aisles and a large assortment of juices – is well stocked in toilet paper, although I doubt its sudden disappearance would cause as much distress here as it would in the city; maigoya (plectranthus barbatus leaves) are in plenty along the hedges. Prices of goods have already gone up, however; a kilo of sugar that I bought at SH95 last week is now trading at Sh105, a two-kilogramme packet of a popular brand of maize meal that was going for Sh110 is now selling at Sh140 and my butcher tells me that the number of customers crossing his threshold has diminished considerably in the last week.

“Andũ aingĩ gũkũ matihotaga kwĩigĩra mũthithũ, marĩaga iria mathũkũma mũthenya ũcio”, he says (Many people have no savings, they consume what they earn daily). Five hours of casual work will earn you Sh250, Sh300 if you’re lucky. And if you’re lucky to find the work.

Esther Wa Tu-Twins called me early this week, enquired after my health and assured me that she and her children were equally fine. We talked about the rain the night before, and how the patch of maize that she had recently planted was doing. Then she came to the point of her call and informed me that her store of maize meal was finished and she couldn’t find any work. Esther and her family of five – four children and a younger brother in her care – are among the 4,000 families that were resettled by the government at the Makutano Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp in Laikipia West following the 2007-2008 post-election violence, a region where the rains are uncertain and the hunger season long most years. Esther’s crop of maize and beans is still some months to harvest and the coronavirus pandemic has only come to compound an already serious problem for her family.

The police are also back on the roads, white masks over their mouths, ensuring that matatus are respecting the directive to carry not more than eight passengers and booking recalcitrant crews. It had been a relief for many, not least the boda boda riders, when the police were ordered off the roads in an attempt to put a halt to the rampant bribe-taking. (A pair was recently been discovered hiding in the bushes along a dirt road from which they would suddenly emerge at the approach of a boda boda, hoping to cow the rider into surrendering a bribe. Their business was short-lived, however; our boda boda community is no longer prepared to put up with that nonsense). Matatu fares have gone up though; a trip into Nyahururu town, a distance of just under 30km, will now set you back Sh200, a 100 per cent increase. And it is expected that shortages of diesel and petrol are soon to be experienced in my neck of the woods; a friend called me with advice that I should tank up and limit my movements to the absolutely necessary. I have no plans to leave my compound any time soon, however, so that quarter-tank remaining is sufficient for any emergency that might cause me to venture beyond my gate.

It has been barely two weeks since the first case of coronavirus was detected in Kenya yet the ramifications of the pandemic are already being painfully felt within my community. May the prayers of the woman I met in Nyahururu be heard.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

By Anyang' Nyong'o, Willy Mutunga and Issa Shivji

Re: COVID-19 in Kenya

Your Excellency,

COVID-19 is here. Fatal errors have been made. People from Italy managed to travel to western Kenya when Italy was already the global epicentre of the pandemic. One of them was infected. This is unacceptable.

Last Sunday, the government suspended international flights and imposed mandatory quarantine. Passengers did not find quarantine plans in place. They were held up for hours, and then allowed to go home and report back the following day. The following day, they were shuttled from place to place for hours. Yet, the Government had given assurance that a contingency plan for every scenario was in place. This is not true. It was the usual public relations, then shambles. Unfortunately, we are accustomed to this.

Last week, in only your second address on the pandemic, you launched an Internet service. This was a serious error of judgment on your part, and distasteful opportunism on the part of Google. People are worried about food, and you call the nation to attention to launch balloons? Many Kenyans have accused you of being a prisoner of your privileged upbringing. Yet you continue to reinforce that perception. This was yet another one of many let them eat cake moment. It is one too many. Learn from it.

I do not know what your analysts and advisors are telling you but here is the low-down I think you need to have.

If the pandemic progresses to Europe level, we are sitting ducks.

The data we are observing shows that availability of intensive care (i.e ICU) beds is the most critical survival factor. Germany has 1.5 times more infections than France, 30,000 and 20,000 respectively as I write, but France has seven times (860) the fatalities in Germany (130). But it is also the case that Germany has 29 ICU beds per 100,000 people, three times France with 11.6 beds per 100,000 people, that is a 40/100 ratio. What this means is, for 100 people needing ICU beds at the same time, Germany will save most of them, but France could lose all 60 who fail to get ICU beds. In every country, deaths have risen sharply once intensive care capacity is exhausted. The UK delayed its emergency response. With only 6650 confirmed cases, a fifth of Germany’s, they already have two and a half times the number of deaths. But the UK has only 6.6 ICU beds per 100,000 people, less than a quarter of Germany’s capacity.

I gather that we have a total national ICU capacity of 200 beds. That works out to 0.4 beds per 100,000 people, or one bed for every 250,000 people. The global critical illness rate is at 4%. To exhaust our 200 ICU beds at this rate requires only 5000 infections. But many of these beds are already occupied; therefore the actual capacity that will be available is much less. We cannot afford 1,000 infections let alone 5,000.

Allow me to turn to the economy. As Kenyans watch other, mostly European governments roll out economic mitigation and social protection measures, they are wondering when their government will come to the rescue.

We could not be more ill-prepared.

You will no doubt recall that as Finance Minister, you rolled out an Economic Stimulus Package (ESP) to aid recovery from the 2007 global financial crisis and 2007/8 post-election violence shocks. You may also recall that the budget deficit at the time was running at below 4% of GDP, which left plenty of headroom to borrow and spend without risking macroeconomic stability. You will probably also be aware of a fiscal prudence rule of thumb, a deficit “red line” if you like, of 5 – 6 percent of GDP that should not be crossed for too long. You will certainly know that your government has been running a deficit in the order of 7-8 percent of GDP for six years now.

What this means then, is that we do not have the fiscal space for a borrow-and-spend fiscal stimulus. This year, your government has revised domestic borrowing upwards by more than Sh200b from a target of Sh300b at the start of the financial year, to the latest figure of Sh514b. The going just got infinitely tougher. Tax revenue performance which has been in decline throughout your tenure, is about to go in free fall. The deficit will rise regardless.

Ten days ago, I expressed the opinion that fiscal or monetary economic stimulus—what we call demand management instruments in economics— are not the appropriate response and argued instead for a “lifeline fund” to protect jobs. Several countries including UK, Denmark and the Netherlands have since adopted this approach.

What do I mean by “lifeline fund?” Let me use the simplest of examples — a hair salon or barber shop. Hair grooming is the very opposite of social distancing— and it can certainly wait. But thousands of people depend on it for their daily bread (ugali and githeri more like it). Most live day to day. How are they surviving?

The lifeline fund is first and foremost, a safety net for workers like these whose sectors are most badly affected. This is the government’s responsibility just as it provides relief to drought and natural disaster victims. These people, particularly those in the urban informal sector, have nowhere to turn.

Secondly, the lifeline fund aims to keep businesses, especially those that are providing essential goods and services open instead of closing because of low business. We want to avoid shortages that could encourage hoarding, heighten social stress, and drive up prices. Third, the more businesses we keep alive, the faster the recovery will be.

For people in Nairobi’s crowded informal settlements and elsewhere, who do not know where their next meal will come from, the language of social distance and on-line working comes across as a cruel joke. We already have volatile powder keg of gross inequality and social exclusion, and as I already remarked, you personally have reputation for elitist insensitivity. If people get hungry, the soldiers you love to turn to will not help you. Let us not tempt fate.

I have estimated in an op-ed published today on The Elephant that a lifeline fund in the order of 0.5 – 1% of GDP or Sh50-100b would be sufficient to save the situation. But having already argued that it is not prudent to borrow-and-spend, I am obliged to offer suggestions on how else this might be funded. I see two options.

Watch: The Political Economy of Coronavirus: Dr David Ndii Speaks

The first is budget reallocation within the existing deficit by (a) drastic cutback on development projects and (b) mothballing non-essential functions thereby freeing up some non-wage recurrent budget. Certainly, monies budgeted for international travel; workshops and public events can be redeployed immediately. This will require political resolve and execution discipline, the lack of which has been the bane of your government. Time and again, austerity plans are announced, but not followed through. You do not have that luxury anymore. You can no longer kick the can and hope that we will muddle along until it becomes someone else’s problem. Mr. President, your luck has finally run out. If you do not impose financial discipline, you are looking at a financial meltdown in a few months, if not sooner. That will be your legacy.

The second is external finance. The IMF has stated it can avail $57b quickly to low income and emerging markets. If it was shared pro-rata between low and middle countries based on GDP, our share would be in the order of Sh18b ($180m), significant but inadequate in the context of the revenue shock referred to earlier. The Prime Minister of Ethiopia has appealed to the G-20 to advance Africa $150b in emergency funds and to write off debts. I am of the view that African leaders should unite around a moratoriam on debt repayment to official creditors (i.e. multilateral and bilateral lenders). New money even if it could be made available, which I doubt, couldn’t come fast enough, and all sorts of paper work would have to be prepared. The same applies to debt write- offs.

A debt service moratorium on the other hand is equivalent to budget support with money we already have. It is a case of a bird in hand being worth two in the bush. Moreover, on this, it is we the debtors who have the leverage because we can’t pay. Won’t pay is an option.

Our foreign debt service budget to official creditors for the coming financial year is in the order of Sh220b. I propose you reach out to Prime Minister Abiy and work together to champion this alternative. The next question is how would the lifeline be delivered. The western countries are offering partial salary subsidies, up to 80 percent in UK to companies that keep workers on payroll. I think we should do it differently, for two reasons. First, I need not belabour that the government is broke. Simply put, they are rich, and we are poor. Second, and to my mind more importantly, it will be very difficult to target grants efficiently and fairly in our predominantly informal economy. If money is free, demand will overwhelm supply, and if truth be told, the corruption opportunities are beyond measure.

For these reasons, I propose that the lifeline fund be in the form of a very soft loan with long grace period (6 – 12 months) and reasonable tenure (3 – 5 years). The amount should be a fixed sum per employee and disbursed monthly over a fixed term. Should be entirely linked to the number of employees to the loans should be made available to both workers (as check-off loans) and businesses (business loans). To illustrate, working with a figure of Sh30,000 per worker per month for four months, a restaurant with 10 workers would be entitled to borrow Sh1.2 million. If shared equally between the business and workers, and is interest-free over five years, the business would repay Sh10,000, and the workers Sh500 a month each once the crisis is over. The screening of eligible businesses and actual nitty-gritty of loan administration should be left to banks.

In conclusion Mr. President, allow me proffer what I think are your leadership imperatives:

1. Broaden your leadership team by establishing a National Covid-19 Response Task Force that includes the other arms of government (Judiciary, Legislature, and Council of Governors) as well as private sector, private healthcare providers, professionals and other leaders in society, with you as Chair. The task force should meet at least twice a week, daily if necessary and update the public on a weekly basis. May I propose you personally take charge of this by way of a weekly press conference. 2. Establish an independent scientific advisory panel, along the lines of the UKs Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) to advice you and the National Response Task Force. You need doers (the taskforce) and thinkers (the advisory panel). What we don’t need is provincial administration enforcers donning fatigues and issuing edicts like they have done since colonial times. If we don’t adapt, we will die. 3. Task the health authorities to mount an aggressive testing effort of high exposed people and clusters (airline and international hotel staff, tourism centres e.g Malindi and Diani etc) to establish the extent, if any, of local transmission. This is imperative because many urban Kenyans have travelled back to rural homes, and they, as well as the Government, needs to know whether they and their families are at risk so that the appropriate response can be mounted. 4. Task the Treasury, Central Bank and the Kenya Bankers Association to set up a Lifeline Fund along the lines proposed. Task the cabinet to craft an austerity plan within the next seven days with a target of identifying (a) development projects that will be frozen and (b) non-essential functions that can be mothballed with immediate effect. 5. In addition to the lifeline fund, it may become necessary to provide a social safety net at the community level in the near future. In this regard, may I propose that Ward Level response teams comprising of political (MCA), county and relevant government officials (ward administrators, chiefs, social workers) and community leaders be established, and tasked the responsibility of identifying vulnerable households that may need assistance, if and when that time comes.

Mr. President, you need to get your act together for this. This is our last big ask from you. It’s also your last scene on the big stage. God knows your performance has not lived up to its billing—and that’s being polite about it. It is your chance for public redemption. It many not matter to you, but it matters to us— to the thousands, maybe millions of lives at stake. Stop listening to your buddies, sycophants and frontmen for commercial interests. You will not get away with throwing up your hands and asking the public what they expect you to do.

The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor wealth to men of understanding, nor favour to men of skill; but time and chance happens to them all. For surely no man knows his time. Like fish caught in a cruel net or birds trapped in a snare, so men are ensared in an evil time than suddenly falls upon them. (Ecclesiastes 9:11-12)

Godspeed

Most respectfully,

David Ndii DPhil(OXON)

Nairobi, 25 March 2020

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Tributes to a Great African Mind: From Nyong'o, Mutunga and Shivji

By Anyang' Nyong'o, Willy Mutunga and Issa Shivji “Ok, Generation Uhuru!” We are tired of waiting; we are tired of you insisting that you can still do this.

The current economic, pandemic and social mess we are in is an indictment of the Uhuru generation. In many ways, the current holders of the political and economic, and therefore social power have not delivered on their inherent promise as the generation to pursue the independence project to battle disease, poverty and ignorance.

We are in the midst of a pandemic.

To be fair to them, no one could have predicted just how much the world would change in the decades following independence. The very essence of society is shifting faster than the structures within can adapt—as it always has—and there are so many ideas in the public sphere but not one stands out.

Passion, and opportunity, marked a similar growth point in the Uhuru generation’s 20s and 30s. That generation grew up in a radically optimistic world, where the traumas of the Second World War and the liberation struggle that their parents were forced to participate in—either directly or indirectly—had led them to want to build a better world for their children, even as they themselves were trying to figure it out. In that space, the priorities of the preceding generation, acquisition by all means, dimmed as societies moved back into their own internal generational wars.

While our history of the 60s and 70s and 80s might appear grim, because of the assassinations and the many other political and economic blunders, they were, in reality, a time of widespread positive change. To be young then was to experiment with the world, with its TV and global culture, a new world where being black, for example, was a positive thing. Public provision of social goods and services was fairly accessible to all and that service which was not free was dirt cheap. Economic opportunities were in plenty.

But by the 80s, with the Uhuru generation now in their 20s and 30s, and more learned than those that held power at the time, and with the passion of youth, it was time for the start of its claim to determine the course of the country. They watched their counterparts—now closer than ever before—bring down empires. So they demanded more political space, before taking away the throne itself. This generational switch was negotiated between the pre-independence generation of the Mois and Kibakis, and the post-independence generation that started rising through the ranks in the 70s and 80s. Just like the political negotiations of the late ‘50s, men and women in their mid-20s and 30s got high-ranking jobs, the social status that came with them, and the support they needed.

“Generation Uhuru!”

While the post-independence generation was in its infancy, the generation in power was walking the tightrope of trying to keep it together while navigating a new world with a governing structure of sorts. They tried everything, from trying not to choose a side to trying to be on each side’s payroll. While understanding the need to play the global tug of war, they also tried to police the kids who were also experiencing this new world. Google miniskirt and hippie hair bans in 60s and 70s and see how far down a wormhole you will go of the things that they banned. In many African countries, young men with guns got rid of old men, before descending into their own wars, coups and counter- coups.

When they crossed into adulthood and became young parents suddenly aware about how the world works, Generation Uhuru began demanding, and taking over, the tools of power. They took over, for example, religious power by simply speaking directly to the people themselves, without going through the traditional, inherited structures. They did the same with political power, forcing Moi to co-opt them into political power and expand the political space for those who were left out or could not be convinced to join his negotiated reality. To not do so at the time would have been to declare a generational war.

To keep society running, Moi and his age-mates had to give in to the independence generation. They did this while also affirming their belief that the Uhuru generation would mess up; telling them that calling for many political platforms would lead to tribalism and a break-up the country they had built. In the ways in which each generation mythologises its wars with the succeeding ones, it might appear as if all Moi and his cronies did was harass them for being young and radical. But the independence generation liberalised the economy and politics in the ways they thought Kenya should work (and that the new global order demanded), and became rich and powerful while at it. Yes, people died, but in the larger scheme of things, Moi lost the generational war, and it was a good and inevitable thing.

Liberalising the economy and politics helped the independence generation directly, by opening up enough chances for them to get jobs now that they had mounting bills to pay, and to live in a society where they did not need to have gray hair to sit on the boards of government institutions. They had the qualifications because their parents had encouraged them to get the education that they themselves hadn’t received, to thrive in a world where education mattered.

But it was the liberalisation of telecoms—as in the rest of the world—that really did it for Generation Uhuru.

Just as their parents had, the independence generation encouraged its children to go to school so that they could get jobs in this brave new world it had created. Like the generations before, the independence generation forgot that it would need to give up the things it had fought for in order to nurture a generation that would understand what this world now needed. As it aged, its pointed criticisms of everything millennials were doing led it to miss a critical learning curve that would have allowed it to know when it was time to go. It still tried to police everything based on the lessons it had learnt from its predecessor, and to maintain the power structures it had inherited and built upon. With one foot firmly in one century and the other in a new one, Generation Uhuru failed to recognise its own obsolescence and mortality. Even with their successors —the millennials- popping kids and carving out their own paths and demanding a kinder world, the independence generation joined its global peers in trying to make the millennials feel that what they had done back in the 80s and 90s was enough for the world. That there was enough, for example, for them to continue stealing and holding onto the reins of power. To continue, for example, defining how millennials should determine their own course, or even understand how the world actually works. To insist to them that what was good or bad in 1980 was still good or bad, even when it was evidently stupid.

What the independence generation failed to realise is that while it had arrived at a critical moment where it was still living in the same world as its successors, they were both experiencing two very different existential crises.

In 2010, an aunt of mine called my mother incessantly to tell her I was a devil worshipper because of the memes I shared on Facebook. She lives in the States, which makes the entire thing even more hilarious when I think about it now. But all I had to do then was unfriend her, and she was as good as dead to me. Not emotionally, at least not in the way the independence generation understands the word, but because I could simply go to her profile and unfriend her. It would save me uncomfortable conversations, with me trying to placate my parents’ generation’s sensibilities, even when I didn’t need to. It is for the same reason that I do not talk with them about my atheism, my radical world view, my refusal to vote, my work, my hair, or my life choices . . . all of which appears alien to them. And I don’t need their approval any more. I do not even feel the need, at this point in this story, to assure you that I love them. That goes without saying.

A few months ago, my father asked me to cosign a loan with him. The bank had told him that he was too old to get one, and he needed someone younger, a lot younger (he is in his 70s) to partner with him. He asked this while I was sitting with him together with one of my siblings, and for a second, we both went quiet. I wasn’t sure which question to answer first, because he had actually asked two questions, one of them unspoken. The first was whether I could. I couldn’t. I’ve been listed with a credit reference bureau for years because of my erratic payment of my student loans. I’ve wanted to pay them for years, but the immediacy of doing so has faded over time, because I’ve never used the degree for the obtention of which I had taken the loans; and if the loans were an investment in a better future, then it was an absolute waste of time.

The second question was harder to answer though, because I wanted to navigate his sensibilities about it. It was the question of why a man with a near-perfect credit record stretching back more than five decades could not get a loan by himself. There were many ways to explain this, but I chose the one he would understand best. The refusal of his generation to give up power progressively had mixed things up, as its ideas were coming up against a world that was on a different path. While I only used the example of the 2016 interest rate cap because he would understand it (he is a Kiambu voter; it is the Kiambu MP who sponsored the law), I could have pushed the timeline back by a decade and found a link to that decision, a point in time where his generation, implicitly or complicitly, had built a world where a social safety net like a cap on the interest rate would eventually hurt them. Had he pointed out that it is not his specific generation that is in power today—he was born in the ’40s —my rebuttal would have been simple; it is, because he voted for Uhuru Kenyatta in 2002, and every time since. He consented to what Uhuru Kenyatta’s generation, his younger siblings, would do even before they did it.

2016 would not be the first time our elite class has tried to tame runaway interest on credit to protect their interests. But this time the tables turned on them because, while they had the power to pass the law, they are at the tail end of the working-age population, and it was always going to hurt them first. And then it would become a cycle because the generation that holds power could not pay their employees, who were mostly millennials, and would have to fire them and still try to grow old in a world where their successors were now old enough, qualified enough, and still young and radical enough to do something about it. A similar scenario played out a few years ago when the desire by the Uhuru generation to take care of their parents by giving them money, ruined rural economies in Kenya because old people no longer needed to work and those who were young enough to take on the jobs wanted to do other things.

The refusal of the independence generation to give up the reins of power, or even actually acknowledge that their watch is ended, means that we actually can’t afford, and nor do we have the emotional or physical space to take care of them when they age. And more importantly for them and for us right now, we can’t afford it.

For millennials, the 2010s were a fast-paced journey that will define this next decade in ways we do not yet realise. Now parents to a younger generation looking to us for direction, elder siblings to a Generation Z that is walking out into a broken world, and with an ageing generation of parents that we now realise doesn’t actually know or have the capacity to deal with what we need, there is a glitch in the matrix.

In the last decade and a half, we the millennial generation have built a new world by our sheer numbers and we are constantly aware of what is good or bad for us. While our joining Facebook, for example, was mainly due to the fear of missing out that is probably experienced by every generation, our use of it has made us acutely aware of just how creaky the world the independence generation built actually is. Since they can no longer afford to pay us, because their priorities are not ours, nor their dreams nor language, we are now seeking for direction among ourselves. We are also realising that the words that drove them, such as “development” and “corruption” and even “economy” have a different meaning for us because they are impacting our pockets in real time. And they are words from a different time and context.

One good thing about how nature works is that while it abhors a vacuum, and will fill it to maintain the balance, it does so slowly such that it only makes sense in retrospect. Where we have allowed the independence generation to continue beating the “corruption” drum, for example, our sense of fatigue and individual economic awareness, have blunted the fangs of the war on corruption. It is not our war, because we do not even have the opportunity to join in. Our war is different. And it is one rooted in a context we are slowly understanding; that we are in fact the adults now, and we need to determine which war is ours and go into it without apologies to our parents.

For previous generations identity was still rooted within geographical borders, which could be claimed, fought over, and even cut off from the world. To us, identity is increasingly physically individual, such that we can actually run our entire lives, from the social to the economic, without ever having to breathe the same air with more people than we want to. And for a time, we were made to feel like we were doing this life thing wrong, that we do not read newspapers, that we spend too much time on our phones and laptops (which the independence generation gave us, in many ways) not connecting with actual blood-and-bone humans. But to us, a person in our physical space is no different from someone a world away, and literacy, the ability to read and write, is no longer novel or even attractive. It is part of our language, from love to fights to work to our very existence. We do not need to suffer uncomfortable spaces because we can afford, both economically and socially, to work with each other without actually wanting or needing to meet and shake hands. Even banks, brick-and-mortar businesses that thrived in Kenya under the independence generation, no longer need to actually exist in a physical space. Coronavirus will teach this generation hard lessons that they gleefully ignored.

And geographical borders no longer mean what they once did, because the world they built has made protecting them a dying idea especially with regards to their cultural significance. Not only can you take a virtual tour of practically any place in the world, but you can also learn about where people are thriving without it being a class thing. Anyone can Google whether there is (still) work and racism in the West or the UAE, or we know someone we can trust to do it. You can apply for a passport even while checking whether whatever little money you’ve saved can pay for a flight, all without moving from your bed. These things are no longer novel, they are part of our world, and they are not what is wrong with the world. The independence generation understands, for example, that to switch off the internet in Kenya today is far riskier to their idea of national security than stealing money or jailing and killing people. It would not even be those of us who have been on Twitter for a decade who would form the core of the ensuing revolt, but literally everyone because now everything depends on our ability to be online. The internet might as well be the fifth element at this point.

Many of the decisions the Kenyan elites have made in the last two decades and especially now—BBI included—are simply outdated for the country and trying to steal ideas from their forebears and also learn from the generation they have to hand over power to eventually isn’t working. So they are experimenting, grappling to balance between sticking to their decisions and their waning ability to keep up with young men and women who are on a completely different plane. They are understandably afraid of the fact that millennials are now not only old enough to vote and drink, but they are parents themselves and can actually decide things for themselves with none of the consequences parents threaten their kids with. And millennials are realising that none of what they have been told is true; what they say about tribes is actually about identity, and our generation’s tribes need new names that do not weaponise a history we haven’t lived.

The looming generational change will not be kind, or polite, or even decent. It was once supposed to be a “youth revolt”, a point in time where young Kenyans born after the 80s would rise up and protest. But we are now adults, with bills and kids, so a decision to go out into the streets is existential. Our revolt may not even be physical, because it does not need to happen there for it to matter for the generation. Revolutions are fundamentally about language, and we can speak a language using a single hashtag the same way Generation Uhuru built their revolts around gathering in a common physical space. At the time, the world allowed them not to have to gather in the bushes with guns, as their parents had, because they spoke a language that only they understood. We are at that point in time too, where they have sullied the joys of existing in a common physical space by threatening to kill, maim and jail, and actually doing so. We do not even need to take the risk of working together simply because we exist in the same spaces and speak our own language in so many spaces online, since to know what we are doing online, independently and together, you must be part of the generational in-group.

It is impossible to predict the 2020s, because to imagine what a generation will do when it realises its predecessor/parents are just normal people who don’t know as much as they claim to, is impossible. Will we vote for whoever we decide, and support them with the skills they so generously made sure that we obtained, in such significant ways that the power of money and land the independence generation has been so obsessed with stealing and acquiring will be blunted by the same sheer force of numbers and skills with which we have defined our lives so far. Or will we simply decide to relook at everything we know about business and life, and build our own structures if the independence generation insists on imagining that it has the time to wait and rectify its mistakes.

With millennials, the independence generation needs to know that it is no longer dealing with compliant children or young adults who still need them, or their approval, to exist. It is dealing with fully-fledged adults who are slowly realising they have everything they need to demand their space, and feel a glitch in the matrix so profound that we need to explain what’s happening to each other in a language and on platforms that we understand.

This looming generational change will not even be defined by the rules that Generation Uhuru has demanded the millennials live by because we no longer care much for those rules. We have stopped trying to separate how we live online and how we live offline, because both are part of who we are, and we have grown weary of being shamed for it, and coronavirus has affirmed our point of view. We’ve lived online long enough to see our younger siblings and kids join in, and it is scary to think of any subsequent generation trying to make sense of the world as it is now. This world needs us to claim our space, loudly and unashamedly, and to take it by force if necessary. The independence generation, both the elites and the others, doesn’t know what it’s doing anymore, as it tries to shout across the generational negotiating table in a language only it understands. Millennials are progressively realising that their inheritance is not negotiable, and the independence generation is not ready for what’s coming.

As the current “owners” of nearly all that matters to keep a society together—Generation Uhuru—has a choice, either to give up the reins of power in the same way they themselves demanded and got them, progressively and for each other, or they can watch the world they built burn, as we build city-states by our rules. Negotiating only works if each side gives the other all, or some, of what they want. So far, we have given them time. They have given us stasis and a society that is now dealing with a looming food crisis because of locusts among other things, a global pandemic, a place in time where it is cheaper to die than to be sick, and nothing of value in the future that we are staring at.

Our goal as millennials is to build a kinder world so that our younger siblings and our kids can build a better one. And we have to start from there, looking at everything as it is now, and bringing down anything that is unkind to us and others; because the Uhuru generation forgot the basics of a working society that they learnt from its parents. They wanted to build a new one, only tapping into the old ways when it suited them (such as weaponising ethnicity).

But they inherited the trauma properly, and have since tried to force-feed it—together with the fears such individual and collective traumas carry—to us. And now, as they feel the walls closing in on them, they would rather not ask for help from us but continue shuffling among themselves and those of their parents that are still alive, looking for solutions. What they should be doing is progressively handing over everything they fought for, bought, and stole, to the people who need them now.

We will build them retirement homes they can afford to die in, and for some, better prisons than the ones they inherited and never improved, so that we can focus on the job of bringing this world back to its senses. The alternatives to negotiating this transition are simple, not just in Kenya but the world over. I doubt that the post-World War II generation wants to be known as the generation that inherited a world traumatised by war, racism, pandemic and colonialism, and bequeathed that same inheritance after enjoying one of the most peaceful periods in recorded history.

But what do I know about how the world works? I am a millennial, after all. An eternal child.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

By Anyang' Nyong'o, Willy Mutunga and Issa Shivji

Very rarely do I speak publicly about my family and my relationship with my father, because I am an intensely jealous daughter. I refuse to share my relationship with my father with the public, because our lives were public already, both due to my father’s career as a church minister but also due to the political positions he took.

When I was young, I often used to be asked what it felt like to be a pastor’s child. I would reply that I don’t know, because I only know him as “Dad.” I learned to do that from my mother who constantly refused the label “pastor’s wife.” She argued that that label was used to the disregard the clergy as workers who needed to be treated decently because they too had families. Unlike the prosperity gospel churches, the PCEA sometimes treats clergy like TSC treats teachers, posting them at the drop of a hat with little consideration about what the relocation means for their families. So I learned from my mother to protect my relationship with my father.

But with his piece entitled “Moi, the passing of a father figure,” Oyunga Pala has made me temporarily break the rule of privacy. His writing is a work of art that pierces through our intellect into our soul. Oyunga argues that Moi’s wounds are painful because they are father wounds. Moi presented himself as a father who disciplined us with violence because he “loved” us and knew that peace and unity were good for Kenya. Days after Moi’s death, this narrative was repeated in the mainstream media by people who were wise enough not to deny the atrocities of his regime. We must understand, they argued, that Kenyans are a disorderly lot (epitomized by the August 1982 coup), and Moi had to do what he had to do to maintain order for the Kenyan state.

There are two deeply contradicting tensions that Oyunga’s piece highlights: intimacy and violence. Being a citizen of Kenya means constantly grappling with the state that is in our business, which hurts us so much, a phenomenon which Christine Mungai and Dan Aceda referred to as “death by a thousand cuts.”

As Oyunga demonstrates, Moi’s rule was characterized by intimacy, which was in turn cultivated by his ubiquity. Moi was in every aspect of our lives, not just administratively, but also at a psychic level, thanks to his workaholism and a media that reported his every public appearance. Moi was so caring; he was the father who gave us children free school milk.

And this intimacy implies another emotion: inescapability, which Oyunga captures with the metaphors of “helplessness” and “entrapment.” Moi was inescapable not only as a person but also as a role model, because in Oyunga’s words, he became the alpha male who set the tone of fatherhood in Kenya. Because Moi was so dominant, men are implicitly doomed to become Moi in politics, as well as at home and in the workplace, despite what they may feel about Moi. Like the persona of Joe Crocker’s song says, “Yes, I’m my father’s son. I am inclined to do as my father’s done.”

The toxicity of such a situation becomes apparent when we think of the violence that accompanied this intimacy. In a normal relationship, intimacy implies validation. But in an abusive relationship, intimacy makes us experience shame instead of self-confidence. This would explain why, as Oyunga observes, our desire for justice is whittled down into a refusal to let go of the pain. And, unfortunately, this refusal has become all consuming, so we adopt a “victim mentality.”

How do we get out of this toxic relationship?

In summary, Oyunga argues for new national intimacies, new rituals where we are not so personally invested in the ruling elites that they hurt us both physically and emotionally. These intimacies should be cultivated by rituals which force the ruling elite to “share the bitter herb of truth” with their victims. Also, we must remember what happened, because memory helps us understand “the circumstances that gave birth to those motives [of our offenders] so that we do not end up becoming what we hate.”

It takes the village.

Oyunga’s piece answered my bewilderment at the reactions to my father’s and my own memorialization of Moi. As a child of a man whose humiliation by Moi is still exploited by the media for shock effect, people expected me to rant and cry about how bad Moi was, and not to do as Oyunga says, which is to understand the circumstances that created Moi. For taking that approach, I was told that I was suffering from Stockholm syndrome.

The same thing with my father. When my father explained that he had no grudge against Moi because he was aware he was going into battle, and that he won the argument for a new constitutional dispensation, an audience member asked him to stop sugar coating his experience and tell the truth about how much he had suffered.

Oyunga’s piece helped me understand what upset people about our positions on Moi. Kenyans were upset that we were not emotionally invested in Moi as a father. For us, Moi was simply a politician and instrument of a colonial state. Why my father didn’t see Moi as his father is something my father would have to explain. But for me, I can say that I never took Moi as a father figure because I had my own father. The nature of my interaction with my father is complex enough not to have been supplanted by similar expectations of Moi.

And in contrast to the state which projected fathers as violent and infallible, my father is tender and vulnerable. When I was young, my friends used to get surprised when I would tell them that it was my father who explained to me things like why the church opposed FGM. “You mean you can ask your father such questions?” they would say in surprise. And my response was “you mean it’s not normal to ask a father such questions?”

Sometimes my father and I disagree. Of course we do. But never do I doubt that he loves me, and he reminds me of that all the time. I have learned from him that vulnerability and weakness are strength because they make people elastic enough to bend in adversity, rather than make people brittle so that they break. That is why I feel no shame in naming weaknesses, either my own or those of others, to which Kenyans often react in shame by telling me not to blame others.

When Moi’s thugs publicly beat my father, I simply grieved with him. I still do, that is why I look away from those pictures which Kenyans like to remind me about, as if invoking beatings automatically makes a profound political statement. But for me, those pictures are not about Moi’s rule, brutality or betrayal; they are about my father’s pain and commitment to justice.

When my father recently said that he won his battle with Moi, I believed my father because I see it all the time. I could not understand why others could not see it, and my husband suggested that maybe, they look at Dad and see no political position or wealth, so they can’t see what victory Dad is talking about. Because my father does not fit the profile of extreme wealth and brutal power, he could not have won any battle. This means, as Oyunga suggests and has written about for several years, we must have a new Kenya, with new structures and new rituals that allow different and multiple models of masculinity and fatherhood which affirm us.

I would like to push Oyunga’s argument further and suggest that we also need to break these father ties we have with the ruling elite. Politicians are not our fathers. They are not family. They are representatives who asked to be elected (or pretended to be elected) to serve us. We are not supposed to request them for services in the same way, as Jesus said, a child asks a parent for a loaf of bread. We need rituals to dismantle the intimate father role that politicians have snatched for themselves, distorted and dominated. Maybe more men would feel empowered to be fathers when they are not manipulated by the media and the state to compare themselves with the thieves in office.

We also need to either question the assumption that “fathers start out as heroes to their children,” or else we define what to be a hero means. For one, I think that the assumption of the heroism of fathers puts too much pressure on fathers to be infallible. On the other hand, we need to remember that heroes belong to tragedies. Heroes are not the infallible, unrelenting and ubiquitous masculine figures that Hollywood, colonialism and Western theodicy have taught us to consider fathers to be. In tragedies, heroes may strong, but they are also fiercely committed and humanly vulnerable to the will of the gods and the ancestors, and to the people they love. In tragedies, heroes don’t cover up their vulnerability. Their heroism is in their vulnerability.

So remembering history, as Oyunga suggests, is enacting tragedy, or the circumstances in which our fathers live. By remembering, we are able to tell if our fathers are victims or heroes. And right now, in the current global economic order, our fathers who should be heroes are being reduced to victims: of state brutality in the streets like the youth of Kisumu, at the airport like Miguna Miguna, or at the police stations for saving a child’s life. Despite being hard working, men are humiliated with poverty to the point that they smuggle their own infants out of the hospital in the same way Joseph smuggled Jesus to Egypt or Moses’s mother put her son in a basket to float on the Nile to save her son’s life.

Above all, we must perform rituals and ceremonies to remind ourselves, and the ruling elite, that they are not our parents or our fathers and mothers. If they want a claim to this title, they must be the village that supports parents to be parents, not destroy the economy and rewrite history to replace our parents with themselves.

A few years ago, I lamented that the Kenyatta family philanthropy had subjected us to the humiliation of having our parental roles performed by their children, as if we too were not parents who want to raise and fend for our kids like Muigai and Margaret have done. Today, the message is slightly different. We too, have parents. Oyunga’s piece has helped me articulate why I am not bitter with Moi. Moi did not betray me as a father, because I already have one, and a cloud of witnesses who provide humane and affirming male role models better than Moi ever did.

By telling the story of my father, I am not advocating for every child to have a father like I did, the way the Euro-centric church demands of us by forcing nuclear families on us. I strongly believe in the village raising the child, precisely so that villages cater for the humanity of fathers. It is not an accident that in our languages, we talk of younger and older fathers (baba munyinyi/baba munene) instead of paternal uncles. In defining our male relatives that way, there is an implicit expectation that they are supposed to be a fatherly figure of support, whether or not our biological fathers step up to their responsibilities. In other words, we ideally have several fathers, not just a sperm donor who must be also god, king and priest at the same time.

Neither am I advocating for everyone to remember Moi the way I remember him. Every individual pain is different and is mourned differently. Rather, I’m affirming Oyunga’s position that “our bigger task is to restore the broken social fabric that is devastating our communities and the disrupted social harmony in society.” We need not be the children of Moi, but it will take memory, justice and social change to redefine our relationship with him.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

By Anyang' Nyong'o, Willy Mutunga and Issa Shivji

On the 21st of July 2019, Citizen TV aired an investigative news feature, described as the “heart- rending” story of a young Kenyan man who, despite years of hard work and an excellent academic record in some of the country’s best schools, ended up homeless in the rough streets of Nairobi. The young man, Kelvin Ochieng’, is a 24-year-old who scored straight As at the famous Maranda High School before proceeding to the University of Nairobi where he studied Actuarial Science and graduated with a 1st class honours off the back of a Higher Education Loan and a scholarship.

Prior to the exposé, it had been reported that Kelvin resided in the Kosovo area of Mathare, where he was being hosted by a friend—Christopher Oloo—who had rescued him from the streets and taken him into the refuge of his tiny single room which he also shared with three other men. Kelvin had sought employment with several companies without success despite his impressive academic qualifications. Returning home to his rural home where he grew up was not an option. He remained acutely aware of the grinding poverty of village life and he bore the burden of the shining star of the family who was destined to change their fortunes thanks to his academic success. His failure to meet his family’s expectations weighed heavily on Kelvin and he confessed to having contemplated suicide on more than one occasion. Kelvin could not even afford the four thousand shillings needed for his graduation, let alone attend the ceremony.

Kelvin’s story is shared by hundreds of thousands of the unemployed youth who place all future prospects on the value of their academic qualifications. Kelvin was among the top-ranked in Maranda High School class of 2011, when the school topped the country in the KCSE exam school rankings and seemed assured of a spot in the university and on the path to secure employment. When the television cameras found Kelvin, he was one among the many young men who scramble for cars to clean at a car wash in Nairobi city. The television report ignited an engaging public response on social media and a lengthy debate on how the education system fails Kenyan youth. The trend of knee-jerk public reactions of sympathy to heart-wrenching stories in the media, where ordinary members of the public rally in support of the highlighted case, masks a deeper problem. On the one hand is the troubling pattern of media profiling of the suffering poor to gain high audience ratings and, on the other, the exclusion of millions of others whose stories never get heard and hence receive no attention or assistance. What is the plight of those young people with a fraction of Kelvin’s level of education who are forced to grapple with harsh daily realities? The ones living in Mathare, like the selfless Christopher Oloo? Like myself? It is worth noting that the altruistic benevolence of Kelvin’s graceful host was mentioned only in passing, that his story was easily shunted aside as a normalcy to be used to draw greater attention to the “special” case of an unemployed graduate. Which is why I dare state, without fear of contradiction, that the report was insulting.

Allow me to put this into context. The general analysis of how degrading it is to live in a filthy environment with no proper sanitation and to endure the heavy stench of raw sewage was valid. But they were wrong to continue perpetuating on national television the single story of Mathare Valley as one of the most dangerous slums in Nairobi, and that you’ve got to watch your back because armed men live here. They had very quickly forgotten that what had brought them all the way down into the valley was indeed an act of great kindness.

What the news report was insinuating is that people with first-class degrees don’t deserve to be homeless or without income and that the insecurity and stench of Mathare is the preserve of the “less educated”. Mwalimu Wandia Njoya boldly refers to it as an “education-based discrimination” perpetrated by a kleptocracy. I couldn’t agree more. Nobody deserves to be poor, educated or not. Every person should be economically empowered regardless of his or her level of education. But as bad governance, impunity and class betrayal prevail, tolerated dehumanisation will only continue to escalate. Today I purpose to not only tell the story of Kelvin Ochieng, but also that of Christopher Oloo, who represents an infinite number of untold narratives of young Kenyans whose future is being greedily swallowed up by grand corruption which is stealing the resources that should go to development and potential job creation. Christopher’s story is my story. And I am neither on the outside looking in, nor am I on the inside looking out; I’m in the dead center, living the experience.

Mathare is rarely understood from a resident-centered perspective. Specifically, youth in Mathare are construed as being central to a critical urban problem of criminality and idleness, which constitutes the crime of which I accuse our mainstream media: that through their misguided reports they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives either through ignorance or through an established culture of bias. The media has a profit-driven mentality that has put the kibosh on its ability to assume the role of ally to the marginalised urban youth in speaking truth to power. It appears that the news agenda is solely to retain and expand the horizons of viewership. For many youth from urban ghettos, the media owners are seen as the authors of devastation who use media stations as propaganda machines to manipulate and exploit ethnic animosity among the working poor during election cycles.

Kenya is a country that sends its youth to the slaughter like innocent lambs. Most of us in Mathare did not choose to be born here and we face the odds that we face in life because we are poor and for no other reason. The limits of our ambitions seem forever set and we continue to be stereotyped as “dirty”, “crime-driven” people who are a threat to public security. The police operate in the valley as if it is the only place they need to control in order to tackle the problem of drugs and weapons.

Here, an encounter with the police is to be avoided at all costs. These wakubwa are the epitome of legitimised robbers. They stop any young man in sight on a whim and vigorously search them for clues of illegal possession, or so they make you think, while in reality this is just a strategy to check how much cash you have on you, giving them enough leverage to start building a case against you. Next, they sniff your fingers and in some cases ask you to spit on the ground to check the state of your throat and ascertain if you are a marijuana smoker. It is always important to remember that you are guilty until proven innocent. Everything has a price, too. Should the smell of marijuana be detected on you, negotiations about the purchase of your freedom begin at a thousand shillings, with an actual blunt costing you about two to three thousand shillings more. Think of this what you may, but failure to grease the palm of the mkubwa in question could earn you a painful whack on the back of the head: “Nyinyi ndio mnatemebea bila pesa mkisumbua watu hapa!” You are the type that walks around without money while causing disturbance here! Follows the threat to push you into the trunk of a nondescript car. You dupe yourself if you imagine your situation to be different and make the blunder of claiming that you know your rights. The only time you ever hear a change of tone and the words “Kijana, rudi hapa”, come back here young man, is when you have parted with “something small”.

People like to say, “If the poor don’t like the ghetto, why can’t they just leave?” and I wonder where one can really go when this is all the life they have known, where they have raised their children and have invested their little capital, if any. Go where? The few lucky enough to “make it out” of Mathare often only end up in another immiserated part of Eastlands, where the home will usually be a more spacious and solid structure, but with the same level of limited access to basic amenities, or worse. Following a fire at our house about two years ago, I helped my mother move to Githurai where I was convinced she would not have to worry about her belongings going up in flames, but less than three months later I was informed that she had moved back to the Kosovo area of Mathare. It took me a while to understand and make peace with her decision, and finally accept that she ached for a more familiar environment where she knew and could trust people, where she knew all the life hacks needed for survival. You know how they say that an old broom knows the room’s corners all too well?

The 2019 International Youth Day was themed “Transforming Education”, highlighting the efforts of the Sustainable Development Goals agenda to make education more relevant, equitable and inclusive for all youth. As kids, we were taught that in order to lead a good life, we needed to work extremely hard in school. I am more informed and mature now, more persuaded that education is meant to help you understand the world and its systems, that it should lead to effective learning outcomes, with the content of school curricula and pedagogy being fit for purpose not only for the future of work and life, but also for the opportunities and challenges brought by rapidly changing social contexts. More profoundly, it is supposed to provide the basics of a subject, then you decide on what you are going to do with the knowledge. However, Kelvin’s story is a sad commentary and a serious indictment of the state of the education system in this country. Students are not being equipped with skills that can help them survive after school. While it is a good thing to complete the education cycle and acquire some qualifications, graduating with stellar grades is not enough to set you up for success in the real world. Degree holders should also graduate in the school of life, to venture beyond the theory of the classroom and design solutions for the everyday problems facing the common man.

Less than twelve hours after Kelvin’s news story, some 1,000 job vacancies suddenly sprouted within a great number of companies around Kenya. I couldn’t for the life of me fathom why the offers for employment had not been made before. I bet a multitude of those corporations had already received Kelvin’s CV in the past. What had changed so drastically as to avail all those positions in such a short time baffles me. I now like to think of ours as governance by acts of magic. To make meaning of one’s life, therefore, youth have been left to rely completely on the beneficence of unfair advantage: family fortune and connections. The rest of us have been condemned to lower our expectations in the system, be patient and hope that things will get better eventually. Again, Kelvin was singled out when his story should have been used as a case study from which tangible solutions to youth unemployment can be derived. I mean, Kelvin is sorted out; then what? And this is the sad reality of youth only being presented with opportunities when it is expedient for institutions to exploit the situation. In the end, there are never really any sustainable solutions to young people’s issues. We wind up tied to short-term fixes that have more to do with harvesting cheap labour through catchy words like “platform”, “stipend”, “youth inclusion” and so forth.

Worse still, youth agendas are largely discussed in their absence, through cosmetic symposiums and panel discussions. Important decisions are often made without their invaluable input and perspectives being taken into consideration. This in turn strips young people of the power to determine their own futures, thus perpetuating generational sabotage. In Mathare, young people are putting away their imposed differences of religion, tribe and education to rely on themselves and organise around economic empowerment with the little in their pockets, whether this means registering a youth group to formally operate a car wash, boda boda business or go into urban farming. It is a step forward towards economic liberation, a rebellion against the status quo that dictates that we should be blindly patient and hopeful that opportunities will be thrown our way one day. For until the youth are allowed to own their spaces and shape their own futures, nothing substantial will ever emanate from these conversations.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Tributes to a Great African Mind: From Nyong'o, Mutunga and Shivji

By Anyang' Nyong'o, Willy Mutunga and Issa Shivji This article is also available in audio format. Listen now, download, or subscribe to “The Elephant In The Room” through your favourite podcast app.

Nyayo! The word Nyayo conjures up the image of a past president and the experience of living under his regime. The term Nyayo had fallen out of usage for many of my peers until it was revived following the death of the former president of Kenya, Daniel arap Moi. I felt the power the word evoked before I knew its literal meaning. Nyayo means footsteps in Kiswahili. By the time Moi vacated power in 2002, I had become a proud member of a generation that believed in second chances and the eternal hope of a new spring. 18 years after Moi left power, his legacy still casts a long shadow. And so, for my generation, his death and memorial has created a moment for deep reflection.

I completed my 8-4-4 journey during Moi’s presidency. My first recollections of Moi are in primary school. This is the shared experience of a generation. I read with amusement several accounts of other Kenyans describing the anticipated presidential meet-and-greets, usually nothing more than a wave of the hand and a word of encouragement. From places as diverse as Turkana, Kitale and Nairobi, we shared the same stories. Each spoke of the reverence they accorded to a close encounter with the president. Many still speak of the Nyayo school milk programme with nostalgia. I remember the loyalty pledge and recall the words to the many songs composed in praise of Moi and his rule. These are the good memories we hang onto because the other memories of Moi’s rule are not pleasant.

After the failed coup attempt of August 1982, the sense of uncertainty grew as the regime’s aggression became more brazen. A normalisation of violence permeated society and the police operated like a predatory force. I remember the feeling of suppressed anger among the adults as life in Kenya became ngumu.

Moi was the nation’s father figure and therefore 24 years of Moi’s discharge of the role of fatherhood, both in the public and private spheres, was bound to have a tremendous influence on Kenyan patterns of masculinity. They say children ape what they see. Baba Moi was presented to us as the epitome of virtue yet what we experienced was the immorality of his power. Baba wa Taifa, the fatherly figure I had grown accustomed to in primary school, had turned into an ogre in high school and by the time I joined university two decades later, he was a despot whose rule had become untenable.

The theme of fatherhood is a big part of Moi’s life journey. During his memorial service, his political protégés, President Uhuru, Deputy President William Ruto and opposition politician Musalia Mudavadi, all fondly remembered him as a father figure. Moi began his presidency in 1978 with a demand for blind loyalty and a public declaration that he would follow in the footsteps of the founding father of the nation, Jomo Kenyatta. Moi coined the Nyayo philosophy of peace, love and unity, which was no philosophical treatise at all but a command to comply unquestioningly. Moi took on his role with a zeal that in Mzee Kenyatta was never witnessed. He led from the front, touring the country building gabions and manifesting sporadic acts of generosity.

From the outset, Moi encouraged a culture of political sycophancy that thrived in the 80s. I became accustomed to seeing highly accomplished members of his cabinet heaping praises on Moi and pandering to his ego. No longer dazzled by the spectacle of majesty, I started becoming conscious of the contradictions of life under Nyayo and learning the place of fear in the patterns of duplicity I noticed in adult conversations. We rarely discussed politics at home or said anything negative in public about Nyayo because walls had ears. Witnessing those who suffered the consequences of engaging in anti-Moi politics drove us deeper into denial.

Moi the man, as many who met him have testified, was disarmingly charming. He was the head of a large family that he shielded from the spotlight. I knew of his famous sons—the late Jonathan, ace rally driver, and Gideon the polo player—as men of the world enjoying the perks of privilege. The other members of the family never, ever got any media coverage and were not easily recognisable.

The details of Moi’s marriage to Helena Bomet were never open to public scrutiny; better known as Lena, she was erased from public life and remained a mystery even after her death in 2004. (The grapevine did whisper, though, that the former president maintained a discreet bevy of mistresses.) We therefore readily accepted Moi as a bachelor by choice. A tall man who maintained good posture, dressed impeccably and exuded authority, Moi cultivated an ascetic persona and his robust form was attributed to a disciplined lifestyle that embraced a strong work ethic, eschewed alcohol and made sound nutritional choices. Moi also portrayed himself as a good Christian, scrupulously keeping up appearances of religiosity. He was the embodiment of the Jogoo (KANU’s party symbol), the dominant cockerel in the homestead, reinforcing his virility with a phallic symbol in the form of a rungu, a ceremonial club that became the subject of intense fascination among the youth.

I didn’t know anything about Moi’s own father or the stories of his childhood and how his upbringing influenced his adult life. That part of his life remained shrouded in mystery and in its place was the single story of an orphan boy from a humble background who, despite the adversity of the early years, was divinely destined for leadership.

Moi mirrored the stern father figure in the patriarchal tradition and Kenya was thus caricatured as a household with diverse personalities dominated by a harsh father who terrorised all into submission, a father who brooked no dissent and was consumed by anger. This is the male persona many of my generation experienced as the norm and Moi was just the extreme manifestation of a familiar parental figure. And so, while his methods were questionable, his motivation could be rationalised. He was the product of the prevailing cultural mindset.

Fathers start out as heroes to their children. The father epitomises the ideal a child aspires to become. It is the role of the father to bless the innocent child as he welcomes it into the world. A father who loses the capacity to bless becomes a curse to his children. So when a father turns abusive, the loss of trust overwhelms the psyche and pushes the child into a state of learned helplessness. A friend described being forced to watch as his father viciously caned the problem child of a large family as a more traumatising emotional experience than the actual physical punishment.

The overbearing personality of the father of the nation was familiar within many Kenyan households. But it is only after I became a father that I began to realise that a father’s bravado and outward show of strength is often a cover for vulnerability and in a culture where vulnerability is a sign of weakness, the façade is maintained even after the death of a patriarch.

Moi was not a relaxed man. He was rigid and vindictive. So when Mwai Kibaki came along with his unhurried manner and famed love of beer, the physical and emotional contrast between the two men was glaring. Kibaki came accompanied by a first lady, Lucy Kibaki, who had her own voice. The country witnessed the drama of a president’s private affairs playing out in public and a sense of vulnerability never previously seen from the holder of that high office. Kibaki was not pretending that he had it all together and he did not seem particularly bothered to be judged weak. Kibaki’s successor, Uhuru Kenyatta, has been humanised by the calm presence of his wife Margaret Kenyatta, despite the overriding sense of an irresponsible father completely divorced from the effects of his actions on those under his care. However, it remains apparent that Moi’s exaggerated masculinity has become the default position for political posturing. The Nyayo years birthed an alpha male complex that is still thriving and where politics is a charade of might, on display for the single purpose of retaining power, and that often involves violence.

It is difficult to mend a relationship with a father who uses violence to obtain validation. The refusal to forgive becomes an act of justice for those who have endured suffering. One can respect the context of the offender but forgiveness is much harder to arrive at without the active and honest participation of the offender. So many adopt a victim mentality, since we are socialised into a culture of violence that arose from the legacy of colonialism, and brutality is accepted as a rite of passage into adulthood.

The betrayal of a father figure and the shame the victim endures feeds an anger that can become self-consuming, leaving one feeling helpless. This is a national condition that has set in with the complete loss of trust in the ruling elite’s motivations, and is compounded by a sinking sense of entrapment because, even though Moi—personified as the original tormentor—is dead, his disciples still rule in the house that he built. It is the collective trauma of a generation communicating loudly in a silence that has been mistaken for solemnity. Death offers some exoneration, for it allows for courage to voice out one’s truth as an exercise in closure and as part of the process of forgiving a father shackled by his own notoriety.

In a society that retains rituals that build and preserve the community of the ruling elites, the citizens who are held hostage and turned against each other in the contest for power by the elites lose all hope of justice. After the conflict, the elites perform elaborate rituals of redemption and reconciliation while the citizens, torn by violence, are left with the bitterness of sharing space with their offenders. The leaders, guided by firm precedent, are never accountable for their excesses and those who have suffered under them learn to grieve in private.

The elaborate charade of Moi’s redemption ritual has been exhausting, knowing that those who share responsibility for the transgressions of the Moi regime continue to manufacture their own narratives of conversion. As justice is deferred, memory becomes the last space for contest but even that is no longer sacred.

To achieve closure for past atrocities and inhumanities and bring healing, one has to remember correctly. Though we are socialised to forget our pains through the doctrine of “accept and move on”, Sigmund Freud warned that we repeat what we don’t want to remember. Memory is necessary for healing for it aids in scrutinising the motives of the offender and the circumstances that gave birth to those motives so that we do not end up becoming what we hate. Psychologists talk of the limitation of focusing hate on a father when the problem lies beyond him. In understanding the circumstances that created the father, we gain a real chance to liberate ourselves from the bondage of our past.

We are a generation that seeks closure yet the death of a father figure only seems to have opened an old wound that we thought had healed. Therefore, we are called upon to engage in an honest introspection of the Nyayo era in order to understand what it takes to initiate the exercise of healing and reconciliation. Beyond the apportioning of guilt, the bigger task is to restore the broken social fabric that is devastating our communities. We need new rituals in the face of an impotent justice system, to get the offenders and the victims to share the bitter herb of truth lest we give over our whole lives to defending our positions and forgetting the value of restoring the disrupted social harmony in society. And it starts with acknowledging that Nyayo broke us and that our pieces were scattered to the four winds.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Tributes to a Great African Mind: From Nyong'o, Mutunga and Shivji

By Anyang' Nyong'o, Willy Mutunga and Issa Shivji The death of former president Daniel Toroitich Arap Moi has drawn mixed reactions from various quarters. On social media, there are those who are feting his strengths, from his health and discipline in keeping physically fit, to the Maziwa ya Nyayo school feeding programme, to keeping Kenya “an island of peace”. Then there are those who remember him as the man who ruled Kenya with an iron fist, under whose regime there were several hugely controversial and still unresolved murders, most glaringly that of former foreign affairs minister Robert Ouko. Then there are those others who, in cynical Kenyan fashion, are demanding a public holiday because, well, am not sure why, but that’s just the Kenyan condition, in its fearful and wonderful glory. To say the reaction to Moi’s death is a mixed bag is an understatement. That different people have different ideas of his legacy should not be something to be resisted but something to be accepted and celebrated.

I remember as a child in the early 90s sitting with my late dad, an avid historian—and my sisters, watching Moi on television addressing a huge crowd. One of my sisters wondered why people would choose to come out and cheer such an awful politician with such a terrible political record. (For context, I was born and raised in a region that made no bones about its disdain for Moi. Combine that with a household that approached politics with a critical fascination and that conversation wasn’t out of place.) It is my dad’s response that I so clearly remember: “Regardless of what we know or think about him, look at that turn-out, history will judge him as a popular man”.

In a country with a short memory, a terrible grasp of history and a hugely youthful population where more than two-thirds is under 25 years, it may be difficult to recall a time when the level of expression and openness we are currently experiencing was unheard of. That we can say what we think about the late president should be celebrated as a sign of freedom of expression, one that wasn’t available under his regime. Moi is like that elephant in the old poem that several blind men touched and interpreted to be different things. Just like the elephant was a wall, a fan, a tree, etc., Moi was a dictator, a tribalist, a corrupt individual, a political strategist of Machiavellian genius, the man who ruined a country, the tree planter, the gabion builder and, of course, just Baba. Baba who walked with his ivory rungu (with all its phallic symbolism), the emblem of his power and exclusivity. Moi was all these things to different people.

However one felt about Moi, we can collectively agree that Moi made his presence felt everywhere. It was in the way his activities dominated the news bulletins, in the way graduation ceremonies were at the mercy of his diary because he was chancellor of all public universities. It was in the way we were reminded of his benevolence through the milk that was periodically delivered to primary schools. It was in the way development projects were withheld from areas of the country he perceived as opposed to him. It was in the way schools and other public institutions were named after him. It was in the way he hired and fired senior government officials on a whim and kept them glued to the one o’clock news. How he mastered and liberally weaponised divide-and-rule politics, creating and destroying political careers like the all-powerful sovereign he had fashioned himself to be. It was in the various random acts of kindness he extended to certain citizens, for which the recipients were eternally loyal whilst others viewed them as nothing but exercises in pious performativity. It was in the way he named a public holiday after himself and on the very first Moi Day got the popular Congolese musician Mbilia Bel, then in the prime of her career, to re-write one of her hits and perform the song live, in praise of his regime. And it goes without saying that the song was played all the time on national radio. Many other songs were composed in his praise, ad hoc compositions for the numerous Harambees he attended. Moi also captured the national imagination with his almost invisible private life. The wife we only heard about but never saw, not to mention the rumours of the incident that led to her banishment. Moi captured the state, made the ruling party KANU his domain, and remained a fixture in the visuals and imagination of Kenyan citizens. He was The Sun King of his time, l’état, c’est moi could have been his alternative slogan, it certainly was the zeitgeist of the time for those who remember his rule.

It is Moi’s luck that he ruled at a time when the flow of information could be controlled by the government. With limited independent news and TV stations outside of the compromised state broadcaster, it was difficult to get news narratives outside of what the government wanted reported. Distances, in terms of geography, and lack of freedom of speech meant that we got to hear what the government wanted us to hear and any alternative stories were quickly killed, and if they couldn’t be contained, they would be easily delegitimised. Of course, it really helped that his regime existed in a technologically different time, before the era of citizen journalism. He did not have to deal with the narrowcasting headache of citizens practising everyday resistance by filming, shaming and naming his political misdeeds, socially organising beyond geographical limits and demanding political accountability.

And so there are stories that we will never know unless we actively endeavour to record them as part of our history. We will never know the accounts of the victims of tribal clashes in Kenya, particularly the 1992 clashes. The Parliamentary Select Committee chaired by Kennedy Kiliku compiled a report, popularly known as the Kiliku Report, but it was shot down by Members of Parliament and its findings aren’t available to the public. One of the few things we do know is that six cabinet ministers were adversely mentioned in the report and they wasted no time in pre- emptively lawyering up. This is but one example of the histories that we have failed to record under the Moi regime.

Reminders of Moi’s violence are present with us, physically and metaphorically. They are in the Nyayo House Torture Chambers where unspeakable acts of violence were committed against people whose only crime was to have a contrary imagination of societal happiness. They are in the shame of our complicit national silence, that we refuse to honour these individuals who risked so much to give us the political freedoms we enjoy today. The freedom that allows me to write this article, which at the time of my birth would have been labelled seditious material, eliciting dire consequences. It is in the failure to open the torture chambers to the public as a memorial to our dark history. We are reminded of him by the Nyayo Monument at Uhuru Park which looms over the city like an avenger ready to whip errant citizens back into line.

Perhaps Moi’s greatest political legacy is being felt today as his political acolytes of the early years of his rule now run the country. In a country that is struggling economically and experiencing a social breakdown of order of sorts, many have been quick to draw the symmetry between the current times and the economic dire straits of the Moi regime, especially from the 90s to the early 2000s. The Jubilee government has been kind to Moi, sanitised him some will say, and helped erase his little black book of political misdemeanours, leaving in its place the image of a benign granddaddy/Baba whose leadership Kenyans fondly miss and yearn for. More glaringly for those pursuing the symmetry angle, is the transition politics Kenya is currently undergoing. Deputy President William Ruto is facing hostility and frustration from sections of a government that he is part of, and this has been linked to efforts to prevent him from ascending to power in 2022 when President Uhuru’s term comes to an end. Ruto—who entered into a political pact with Uhuru Kenyatta in 2013 as a way of countering the charges brought against both of them at the International Criminal Court in The Hague—has been likened to Moi, who faced humiliation and opposition from a section of President Jomo Kenyatta’s regime.

As Kenyans get to express their various opinions about their second president, he will also be remembered abroad. For the people of South Sudan, there will be those that will remember the support Moi gave to the Sudan Mediation Process in one of Africa’s longest-running conflicts, a process that, under the stewardship of Rtd General Lazarus Sumbeiywo, led to the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2005 and ultimately to the birth of South Sudan as a nation state in 2011. During the Sudan civil war, the Kenya government gave the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) leadership tacit support, allowing them and their families to live in Kenya and taking in refugees from South Sudan. Kenya’s role during the cold war cannot go without mention either. As a littoral state, geographically positioned in the horn of Africa, Kenya was of great interest to the Cold War powers. The country allied itself with the western capitalist bloc and proved to be a significant American ally, signing military agreements giving the US naval access at the coast. At a time when most countries in the Horn were deemed to be socialist-leaning, Kenya became a key entry point for the capitalist bloc in the proxy Cold War excursions in the Horn of Africa.

A lot can be written about Moi; these contested narratives about him should be taken as a boon, an opportunity to write the complete and contrary histories of this man who ran a country for 24 years as head of state but whose political career preceded the birth of Kenya as a nation state. This was a man who joined the Legislative Council in 1955, was part of the Lancaster House delegation of Kenyan leaders that negotiated our country’s independence. Moi was in the first opposition government of newly independent Kenya as a member of Kenya African Democratic Union, KADU. He served as a cabinet minister and eventually as vice-president under Jomo Kenyatta. All this took place more than two decades before he ascended to the presidency. All Kenyans, and specifically the critical thinkers of our time, ought to explore the structural consequences of Moi’s regime on the Kenyan condition. While Moi might have been credited with keeping Kenya peaceful during his tenure, as events in 2007/2008 would show, this was but a Potemkin village whose internal contradictions eventually unravelled. The vagaries of Moi’s regime, the physical, economic, political and psychological violence all took a toll on the nation state; something had to give. He perpetuated a political legacy that he had inherited, where the country was at the mercy of powerful political and economic interests keen on extracting and enriching themselves. Beyond the political repression were the economic consequences of his regime: rampant looting and corruption. It is our responsibility to critique these political and economic actions and their effect on the social breakdown of our society.

That we must deconstruct and interrogate Moi’s political career is not just about freedom of expression. It is our civic duty. It is our responsibility to future generations whose only glimpse into who this man was will be in the written and oral histories we will leave behind. We should as a nation engage with this man’s political career especially since he was present during so many critical political moments in Kenya’s history. Part of understanding our history involves understanding pivotal political personalities around this history. So we must critique him, we must hold him accountable for his wrongs, we must allow the stories he suppressed to be told. This is necessary as it is also cathartic. This exercise can be the beginning of an exorcism that this country’s troubled soul so desperately needs. From Moi’s death we can find life, we can choose to reconstruct what our country will look like into the future as we discard the ills his regime and those before him foisted on us. From these contested narratives we can set a new trend where we honour dead public figures by thoroughly examining what their life as public leaders was. This is how we create a culture of transparency and accountability, holding our public leaders accountable in life and even in death, particularly those whom we couldn’t fully hold to account during their lifetime. Ours is a nation with a troubled soul and this could be the beginning of our healing.

Moi’s death will certainly expose Kenyans to an experience similar to what Zimbabweans went through following the death of their founding father, Robert Mugabe, in 2019. There are those that will love him and will let that love come shining through. There are those that will hold him accountable for the grievous political, economic and social injury he inflicted on the country and its citizens. For those whom he wronged, the victims that never received recognition, compensation and/or closure, they will experience a myriad of emotions; from anger at justice miscarried, to sadness. It is a time they are likely to relive their trauma at the hands of the former president. The Kenya government position is clear: instructions for flags to be flown at half-mast, national mourning up until the burial, and a state funeral. A hero’s send-off. Given that the President and Deputy President have a shared history with the late former president, this doesn’t come as a surprise. For the rest of Kenyans, we are passionately split into two constituencies: those that remember him as vile and reprehensible and those that remember him as Baba. Then there is that other constituency that couldn’t care less, the one that just wants a public holiday.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Tributes to a Great African Mind: From Nyong'o, Mutunga and Shivji

By Anyang' Nyong'o, Willy Mutunga and Issa Shivji They call it Shalom. Peace. A vast plain in Laikipia West dotted with United Nations-blue corrugated iron roofing. The people who live here used to live elsewhere until the somnolent demons of tribalism woke up in December 2007. They had lived in Burnt Forest, Kipkelion, Kuresoi, Kitale, Kapsabet, Koibatek, Mogotio, Nakuru, Eldoret, Molo, Subukia, Nandi Hills, Kaptembwa, Eldama Ravine, Timboroa, Koru, Mau Narok . . . places with beautiful, evocative names. They had made their homes there over decades, generations even, raising children and farming their own land. Or renting housing and working for others. Running businesses.

Then, suddenly, they were not welcome any more, chased away by marauding gangs of their once friendly neighbours, escaping with only their lives (when they could), and the shirts on their backs. Their names are Wangari, Barasa, Wanjiru, Kwamboka, Wangui, Mugo, Muigai, Wagichohi, Rioba, Kariuki, Kombo, Nyaboke, Robi, Twethaithia, Karema, M’bwii, Otsiro . . .

They endured the hell that was the Nakuru showground, where many had sought refuge, and survived the punishing cold at Mawingu, high up in the clouds over the Aberdares, where the piece of land they tried to settle on proved to be too small to contain them. Years went by, children became young adults and parents died of illness or despair. Yet they endured, organised, lobbied, and finally—after years of homelessness—found themselves resettled at the Makutano Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp on land purchased by the government from a family of wealthy landowners.

A bunch of bureaucrats well ensconced in their important offices had taken the executive decision to organise the IDP families into four villages, creatively naming them Villages A, B, C and D. Each family in each village (there are around 1,500 families in the whole of Shalom) was given a quarter of an acre of land on which to establish a homestead. To this end, each family was provided with building materials in the form of 20 UN-blue corrugated iron sheets, wood for the trusses and 25 poles to hold the whole thing up.

The IDPs had to use their own resources to finish building the houses: for the external walls, they used the plastic tarps under which they had been living in Nakuru and at Mawingu, or whatever bits of carton, wood and sacking they could salvage. The government also brought electricity right up to every homestead—which is presumably why the families had been organised into villages in the first place—but, alas, the vast majority couldn’t afford to properly finish their homes, let alone pay for the luxury of having electricity to light them.

Each family also received two acres of land on which to farm. These two acres are not situated next to the homestead but somewhere else on that vast expanse of grassland, making it that much harder to fructify the land. Something as simple as keeping backyard animals and using the manure for fertiliser becomes impossible; finding fencing material is a challenge in this treeless landscape and keeping animals—both domestic and wild—away from the crops a constant fight.

Not that there is much agricultural activity taking place at Shalom. Finishing the family home was always going to be the priority and, having arrived with nothing in the pocket, money must be found to keep the family fed and, eventually, properly housed. Yet there is little work to be found here, your neighbours being in the same situation as yourself. Going further afield means walking for miles and earning Sh200 at the end of six hours of work if you are lucky, enough to buy some maize meal and a handful of greens.

You could always start a kitchen garden – and many do – but the rains are erratic here and the water from the two boreholes that feed the four water points in the four villages is saline. A well-meaning NGO did finance the digging of small water pans in some of the homesteads but these have not been of much use. The pond liners were not suitable and started leaking. Besides, the pans were a hazard to small children often left alone at home while parents went looking for their daily bread. And so they have been drained and abandoned.

Yet the resettled at Shalom are not completely forgotten. Indeed, they are every so often remembered when it is politically expedient.

A slow death

I was running an errand for Isaac in Village C when I was waved down by Wa-Lillian, a grandmother of three orphaned girls. She thanked providence for sending me along just as she was about to give up trying to walk all the way to Makutano, a motley assortment of small businesses on the Nyeri- Nyahururu road, a couple of kilometres up a gentle slope. Wa-Lillian had been poorly of late and it would have taken her the better part of an hour to get there. As we drove up to Makutano, she told me that, together with other elderly women living in Shalom, she had had her name put down to receive a Meko, a combination gas burner and cylinder of the type one might take on a camping trip. Deputy President William Ruto was the eagerly awaited benefactor.

Shalom is in my neck of the woods, a few kilometres down the road and over the Nyandarua-Laikipia West border. I would have known nothing of it, would have had no reason to go there, were it not for Isaac. They used to call him Karaka because of the clothes he wore – a medley of rags that he had learned to stitch together with needle and thread from a young age to avoid going altogether naked. His father, under whose care he had been left when his mother returned to her people, was already an old man when Isaac was born, an old man whose only conversation were the stories he told about the Mau Mau and the war for Kenya’s independence, and whose parenting was limited to ensuring that Karaka never went hungry. Somehow, despite the grinding poverty, Isaac went through high school and left home to make a life for himself and, many years later, we met when I moved to Ndaragwa where he was now the project manager at a children’s home.

But even as he was going up in the world, leaving behind the poverty and want of his childhood and finally finding a steady, salaried job, Isaac also took up his true calling as a missionary among the people of Shalom. He would solicit material donations from well-wishers that he would then distribute to the neediest of the needy at the Makutano settlement, all the while offering them words of comfort from his Christian faith. And so it was that I once went along to help him ferry foodstuffs and clothing and came face to face with the grim reality of the lives of the victims of the 2007/2008 post-election violence.

Kariuki, whom we call Karis, is a tall, gangly fellow somewhere in his late thirties or early forties. When I first met him, Karis was living in a one-room hovel built with the government-issue UN-blue corrugated iron sheets and wooden poles, with black plastic sheeting for the walls. He slept in there with his one goat, his few straggly chickens and the ghosts of his wife and children who were murdered in the post-election chaos. Karis has a green thumb and, despite the water challenges, he had planted a promising kitchen garden from which he gifted me a handful of soybeans when Isaac and I passed by with some maize meal and porridge flour.

Much further down the road from Karis, at the furthest end of Village C, lives an elderly gentleman. Guka is small and slight, barely five-foot tall, and walks with a cane, turned out in an ancient suit and tie, his hat at a jaunty angle. Isaac was alerted to Guka’s circumstances by a village elder; hunger had been driving the old man literally insane and he would walk around the village weeping and wailing and talking to himself. He lived in his unfinished hovel on his own, his wife having long passed away and his grown-up children living elsewhere and unable to provide for him.

Njeri I met more recently, when, together with a foreign couple that was visiting me, I went to Shalom to deliver some building materials at Isaac’s request. We found her sitting on the ground outside her shack, listlessly sorting through a meagre portion of maize kernels. Hovering around her were two very young boys who should have been in school but, for want of Sh30, were not.

Njeri was very thin, almost skeletal, and I thought then that she must be suffering from some serious illness. She couldn’t fend for herself and if her equally food-poor neighbours did not share what little they had with her, then she and her two orphaned grandchildren went without. On seeing that Njeri had visitors, her neighbour came over, greeted us and asked me in Gĩkũyũ, “Woka kũmonia njaga itũ?” Have you come to show [these foreigners] our nakedness? I felt deeply ashamed. Njeri died last August; the neighbours tell me no cause was given but she may well have died a slow death from years of hunger and malnutrition.

Kwamboka’s mother died an internal refugee at Mawingu, leaving a teenage Kwamboka and her two younger brothers to fend for themselves. The relationship with the father of her children – two boys and a set of fraternal twins – did not survive the hardship and Kwamboka was left to raise her children singlehandedly in an unfinished shack with plastic walls through which the biting winds of the Laikipia plains blew relentlessly, giving the children snotty noses and permanent coughs.

These are just some of the many residents of Shalom whose lives have been made slightly easier because Isaac did not forget where he came from, and that he was once called Karaka—he who wears rags. With the help of self-effacing well-wishers, Isaac has over the last five years found the wherewithal to finish the houses for Karis, Njeri, Kwamboka, Guka and the many, many others who simply were never going to be able to do so on their own. The houses are nothing fancy, just corrugated iron sheet walls lined with plywood on the inside to keep out the cold, and a covered toilet outside. (There were families that used to have to ask to use their neighbour’s toilet.) Isaac has also found the wherewithal to provide tanks for rainwater harvesting, and solar lights for the homes with school-going children. The elderly also receive a monthly food parcel and this past Christmas a warm blanket was thrown in.

As for Wa-Lillian, she was one of twenty elderly women who each received a small gas cylinder, not from Deputy President William Ruto (who only delivered a political speech) but from Laikipia Women’s Representative Catherine Waruguru. Alas, it did not come with a burner or indeed the stand on which to place a cooking pot but Ms. Waruguru did promise that those would follow. Still, Wa-Lillian might only ever use the Meko until the gas runs out, after which she “will wait upon the Lord”, as she told me. A refill costs Sh900, and she is too old and sick to work. The family survives on the wages that her three school-going teenage granddaughters earn every Saturday and during the school holidays, and on Isaac’s monthly food parcels.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Tributes to a Great African Mind: From Nyong'o, Mutunga and Shivji

By Anyang' Nyong'o, Willy Mutunga and Issa Shivji The details are getting hazy now, much to my annoyance. I know I have them somewhere in my many notebooks. But even then, I wrote them down unwillingly, as it meant beginning that process of converting a person I knew into a mere story, or statistic. As any writer will tell you, it is an alienating experience, the last thing you want to do when remembering someone after their death.

My August trip to Ethiopia was marred by the sudden death of one Kagwa. Within the details of the life of someone not yet twenty-five years old, was the story of the crisis of the upper end of Uganda’s youth population bulge, of what also happens when a government abandons its people to the ravages of an economy over which it long lost command.

The actual circumstances seemed clear enough: he was one of the many—estimated to be perhaps three hundred to four hundred thousand—mainly young, mainly male motorcycle taxi operators that have come to wholly dominate the road transportation spaces of Uganda, as in many other African cities.

They have very bad PR: they are seen as lawless, unscrupulous, and often chaotic, especially should one have the misfortune of a traffic entanglement with them. The expected modus operandi is for every other passing rider to stop and engage the motorist in a rapidly escalating war of violent words, and physical threats, usually ending in some type of extortion in which even those that arrived last, and certainly did not witness the accident leave with some form of “compensatory” payment. The issue of who was actually in the wrong is often irrelevant.

Kagwa was as similar to, and as different from, all the others, which is a normal thing with a stereotype—you would be hard-pressed to find any person who wholly conforms to one.

What I certainly do remember is that, like many of his colleagues, Kagwa was not as he wished to be seen. He was in fact a plumber by training, who had found little employment in his chosen trade. Much like the cliché of the restaurants of Los Angeles being staffed by waiting staff who see themselves as actors, many of these gentlemen seem to be at a remove from themselves.

Of the five or six I use regularly, one is also a land broker, another an electrician, there is a lawn cutter and even a police informant. Two others—brothers, no less—are also both grass cutters, and yet another two are chauffeurs who do the school run using the parents’ cars before joining their fellow bikers at the “stage”.

Like with all trades, their skills have deteriorated through lack of frequent use (the electrician once made some positively hazardous “repairs” for me), and so the skill that paid them was ferrying people through the grinding traffic to which they are a contributing factor.

As is to be expected with such a system, the oversupply has created a crisis.

On the one hand, the formal economy has simply not trickled down. There is little formal employment, skilled or otherwise, into which these youth can be absorbed. On the other, two decades of a government policy of dismantling the public institutions—such as cooperatives and agricultural banks—that facilitated a viable interface between traditional agriculture and the modern food commodities market, has progressively collapsed the informal economy, principally rural agriculture.

This has broken a previously frugal but stable rural family-based employment system, and left the youth streaming into urban spaces, or even just urbanising rural spaces in search of new occupations. Often, they have bought a one-way ticket out of the extended family network, cashing in their birthright to make a down payment on their first bike. This essentially lumpenised economy is the pool into which the human resource from all the other failing sectors drains. It survives because it must.

Having said that, incidents of boda boda riders being killed or suffering serious, often permanent injuries are legion. These young men are heavily over-represented in the orthopaedic wards. Kagwa was in fact the second fatality in our neighbourhood in the space of a few months after one Jjemba was flung helmetless over the bonnet of an SUV that had made a sudden turn, never regaining consciousness after his unprotected head hit the tarmac. The driver—a Chinese expatriate—was forced by a small mob to drive the man to a nearby hospital, but he refused to pay for the cost of a head scan despite having a substantial amount of cash on him, as was later found out at the police station he was then dragged to. The cash may have been more useful to him there, as he was later released without charge after a couple of days’ detention.

And so boda boda riders have acquired a reputation as violent and quarrelsome, a reputation complicated by the interests that then latch onto their predicament, like the constant inducements to work as informers while, ironically, being robbed by thugs pretending to be customers.

To be young is to have hope. So all these hinderances did not deter Kagwa from pursuing his interests. He was a keen member of the very local soccer league, replete with its own legends, and of their occasional jogging gang. He also knew where to buy the most lethal strains of moonshine, which was to be his undoing.

Among those hopes was Kagwa’s desire to become a grown man by starting his own family. This is where the youth crisis bites: at that point of attempted transition into full adulthood, or some semblance of it, through the struggle to secure three things: a permanent home, a family, and a steady income.

Looking back, I can see now that that was the point at which all the situations in Kagwa’s life—born of the crisis in our city and economy-—became unsustainable, and may have indirectly led to his death.

After over a year of knowing him, Kagwa proudly showed me the logbook to his bike. He had finally paid off the last outstanding installments of the loan he had taken out to acquire the bike, which then died the very next morning.

The credit regime is quite burdensome. On taking the loan, one must pay a monthly installment which includes interest and administrative fees. Defaulting makes one vulnerable to repossession, no matter how long you have been making repayments, and then one has to pay off the defaulted amount, the equivalent of two months going forward, as well as a penalty fine to get their ride back.

With some companies, I am told, repayment terms are enforced by means of a hidden tracking device. I am not sure if one had been planted on Kagwa, as his usual ruse of parking the bike in the nearby churchyard and then skulking nearby until the heat was off, usually worked. I learned this from the occasions when Kagwa had apologetically declined to pick me up because he was in hiding from the loan company enforcers.

Once, to my surprise, less than a month after he had fixed his bike, he collected me on a brand new motorcycle, of which he was very proud. I became curious because it was me that had gifted him the money to get his old one back on the road.

I asked him what had happened: was he hiring out the old one (as some operators owning more than one would)? He said no and told me that he had sold it off. I asked him whether he had used the money from the sale to make a down payment on this new one. No. I asked if he had saved the money somewhere. Again no, he had had to spend it. I asked him what he had used to buy his new bike, and he told me that he had taken out another loan, from another company.

This was a life of pressure.

I do recall late one night before Christmas receiving a phone call from Kagwa. He was in desperate search of a chicken, but could not afford the seasonal prices. His wife had made it clear that she expected there to be chicken for dinner, and was not interested in excuses. He knew that I raised hens in the backyard because I often hired him to deliver the chickenfeed.

Kagwa’s wife later left him. Her replacement came with other demands, foremost amongst which was that he begin formalising their union starting with a first customary visit to her parents. This is where the money from the sale of his original fully paid for motorbike went.

Then came the demands for an actual wedding ceremony. All this left him deeply in debt and under such pressure that, according to his colleagues at the stage, it led to him drinking heavily and then riding ever longer hours with hardly a break.

Part of me is left wondering just how much of an accident his crash was. We shall never know. Some witnesses report that he seemed to head straight into the path of the large oncoming car. His chest was crushed and he died on his way to hospital.

Kagwa’s burial took place deep in the countryside, on a piece of land so recently acquired by his estranged father, that his was the first grave in it. The stories that emerged from his colleagues, framed by his modest wake through to his internment, painted a picture of pressure and crisis. And it is from them that I pieced together this picture of an unfolding crisis of unrealisable and imposed expectations.

On my return from Addis, I thought to pay the customary visit to Kagwa’s home, but was discouraged by his resentful workmates, angry with the lady now technically his widow, with whom he had one child to add to the one he had had with his previous wife who had already taken up with another man.

And there we have it: hope and youthful energy preyed on from afar and at very close quarters. A life that begun already foreclosed.

And him nowhere near thirty.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.