The rich will toast Kenya @50, the poor will watch

Wananchi listening to a presentation during a public meeting. For many ordinary people, independence still means poverty, disease and ignorance. PHOTO/FILE

What you need to know:

  • We created a country of two nations – the haves who live in heaven and the have-nots who live in hell.
  • From the beginning, independence came to leaders, the educated and the elite.
  • Educational apartheid educates the rich and keeps the poor ignorant.

The Jubilee government is planning a huge party to celebrate Kenya at 50.

But this party is going to be one-sided. The rich few will make merry as the poor, hungry masses look on.

After independence, we did not create one country of all Kenyans.

We created a country of two nations – the haves who live in heaven and the have-nots who live in hell.

We also created a country of 42 ethnic nations that claim unity but refuse to eat together.

While the African elite got the big jobs, schools, mansions, residential areas, hospitals and farms of former white masters, poor people, workers, landless and peasants kept their hunger and jiggers.

EDUCATED ELITE

From the beginning, independence came to leaders, the educated and the elite.

It did not come to the poor, the masses, the landless, the unemployed, manual workers and peasants.

And independence failed to come to millions because it did not bring to people what they were waiting for – equality, freedom, stolen land, better houses, better jobs and better education.

At independence, we were told we would eliminate poverty, which the poor people have now accepted as their natural condition and divinely ordained for them; disease that has doubled for lack of medicine and good hospitals; and ignorance that the rich use to manipulate and govern the poor.

For many ordinary people, independence still means poverty, disease and ignorance.

In fact, today intellectual poverty is worse than material poverty.

Worse, residential apartheid separates slums from posh residential areas.

Economic apartheid maintains poverty and wealth side by side.

Educational apartheid educates the rich and keeps the poor ignorant, and medical apartheid ensures private hospitals for the rich and public hospitals for the poor.

At independence, the ordinary African like my father prayed for heaven but got hell.

He waited for Canaan but remained in the desert of poverty.

He hoped for an end of colonial oppression but got tyranny of one party dictatorship.

GRASS-THATCHED HUT

After independence, my father and his family continued to live in the same colonial grass-thatched hut.

He continued to sleep on the same bed without a mattress.

His children continued to learn in the same mud-walled school.

Black dictatorship oppressed him just like the colonial dictatorship.

Worse, “uhuru” arrested, tortured, jailed and detained his children.

Ultimately, oppression of independence killed him with a multiple stroke and kept him unburied in the mortuary for three years.

Before he died, my father was an integrated IDP.

The poor man is told to appreciate beautiful roads but he has no car and roads in his village are not passable.

LACK OF MONEY

He is told to appreciate good universities, but his child has neither the money nor the good grades to enrol there.

He passes by private hospitals but cannot be treated there for lack of money.

The poor man hears of beautiful game reserves but those are only for the entertainment of tourists and rich people.

The poor man hears of other lands like America, Europe, China, Japan, Russia, Cuba and other places, but he has no hope of ever going there.

The poor man cannot even dream of owning a television. Only his children will in future if they get an education and a good job.

Instead of living a life of freedom and happiness, the poor man dreams of having those things only in heaven and takes refuge from the burden of poverty in religion, deadly brews, European soccer or suicide after killing his wife and children.

So what societies did we create to keep the poor man in the periphery of life?

Instead of creating a welfare state that would look after the needs of everybody, we have created a society of 40 million beggars who may not even acknowledge themselves as such and 40 billionaires. 

Instead of creating a new society of real change, we have created an Animal Farm where Mau Mau revolution is betrayed, real change sabotaged and black masters have replaced white masters.

Instead of creating a society of just men and women, we have created a jungle society where few are carnivores that eat the majority who are herbivores, where the rich eat the poor and where the strong eat the weak.

Instead of creating a socialist society of equal men and women who look after the welfare of everybody, we have created a capitalist society where rich and poor worship the god of money and corruption is the national creed.

Kenya at 50 could be a celebration of independence and Jubilee to proclaim liberation of the poor from poverty, slavery, debt and ethnic hate of one another but it will not be. The rich will celebrate.

The poor will watch.  

What shall the next 50 years be for the poor?