Kenya has gone mad

Our country has gone mad. We actually put a man on trial for the high crime of desiring to see his child go home after treatment. What happened to the Linda Mama programme which guaranteed free medicare for children under five? Yet even if the treatment was not free, how inhuman are we as to detain a child in a hospital for debt? Is that not slavery and kidnapping? Aren’t we barbaric when we hold people against their will, so that we can recover money?

Hypocrisy

This logic of detention to pay debt seems to be spreading because soon after the CS of Education declared that HELB loan defaulters will be tracked down by the DCI and jailed. Is government so heartless.

Don’t they know the pain of living under debt? Don’t they know that being a jobless Kenyan with a debt ensures that you don’t even qualify for a KCB M-pesa loan? We are already economically challenged and I sincerely wonder how a stint in jail will help us become economically viable.

At the same time, it is claimed that billions meant for dams have vanished. A whole two billion more than CS Amina is trying to recover and about two hundred thousand baby bills at KNH. Yet the culprits are walking scot-free, imprisoned only by wealth and privilege.

In our insanity we decided that we would lash out not at the health CS Sicily Kariuki, but at poor people who had the gall to have children, KOT opined that those who are poor should have the decency not to have children because that is the reserve of the rich who would be able to afford maternity fees.

We forget that poverty is caused by the corruption of our leaders. A country as corrupt as Kenya cannot dare blame poverty on anyone other than the rich themselves who are stingy and obsessed with selfies on holidays and at fancy meals without an iota of thought given to the sufferings of the poor.

As though this was not pain enough to go through in one week, we had an argument about Akothee where Ezekiel Mutua decided that her performance was pornographic.

What African values

I wondered, as Kenyans demanded we restore African values, whether we have forgotten that true African values means. The values we claim to hold are not African - they are Victorian and are proof positive that our minds are still colonised. I would also like to inform you that it is not Christian either.

One prostitute even cried on Jesus’ feet and anointed them with oil and then wiped them with her hair. Jesus never once spoke about her dressing.

Now if Jesus was silent about such matters why are we so loud about it? I will wager it is because we aren’t Jesus’ followers we are religious zealots and Pharisees.

We forget that Jesus’ ancestors included Rahab the prostitute, Bathsheba the adulterer and Tamar who tricked her father-in-law to give her a child: He without sin cast the first stone. But this is what we get for the leaders we chose, they clearly do not care for the bottom, they are insulated from our reality and to them, our problems are mediocre.

We clearly are in a plutocracy where the rich are leading the poor. They oversee a system that exploits the poor and then blames them for their poverty. We are mad if we think these plutocrats will ever chart a path for us out of poverty. Their mountains of things have made them insulated and apathetic to the plight of being Kenyan.

Dismiss them all

They are not part of us and we are foolish to think they are. The president should do us a favour and fire them all, not just for corruption but also for lack of empathy. They are incompetent for they know not nor feel the people they lead. And if Parliament will not approve a new Cabinet, Mr President let us be “cabinetless”.

You see the Greeks had the pantheon of gods who were mad, wealthy and aloof; we in Kenya have a pantheon of politicians who think they are gods. Demanding a moral code that they themselves break, demanding our sacrifices in the form of tax which they gulp whole all the while forgetting that we their sacrifices are dying in hunger because the gods have forgotten, in drunken stupor and orgies of opulence, to send the rain.

Yet they will punish us with plagues and prison if we don’t sacrifice to them in time so that they can eat it whole again and reward us with another orgy of corruption all the while sending Ezekiel Mutua to tell us how to dance and sing in our poverty and pain. May God save us from these Pharisees.

Mr Bichachi is a communication consultant. [email protected]