Stop day-dreaming, nobody really cares about you and your problems

The passion with which Tourism CS Najib Balala told us to go to hell is a clear indicator of what the 1 per cent thinks of us the 99 per cent. The reality of his statement was and is that, the one per cent can do whatever they want and we the masses can do nothing about it.

Just yesterday, for example, I passed by a supermarket where the common citizen is not the target audience but I saw Kenyans busy spending their hard-earned dime buying from them. I wondered to myself, who bewitched us?

Who gets abused and then praises and funds their abuser? This is the reality of a people who have been kidnapped and are now suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. Kenyans are a people in love with their tormentors and we find safety in torment.

Have we been bewitched?

This is true of a few things, when racism was reported on our SGR, we were told to be glad a few thousand Kenyans have jobs, even if those jobs were discriminatory to the extent that sleeping on cardboard boxes was a norm. Who in their right mind takes a job, so they can sleep like a vagabond?

Even worse, which leader would defend a foreign entity coming into sovereign land to put up billboards in their language in the middle of its busiest highways?

This is sign that for the one per cent the rest must put up or ship out. And put up we are. We put up with governors whose terms have become a joke, less than a year in. Hospitals are failing, the Civil Service in the counties are in disarray, governors running from their own counties to live in neighbouring ones. And we dutifully take all this in stride. If your governor runs away from your county, how safe are you?

The comedy of errors continues, our sugar is laced with poison (or maybe not) it is safe or maybe not. There are sugar firms whose land has been hived-off by top government officials. Lady Justice my friends has become the accused.

Poison in the river

Another factory is poisoning the rivers so badly that neither man nor animal can touch the river. And of course there is Sony Sugar which cannot pay its staff but can import sugar worth Sh2.5 billion. This is the bitter state of sugar in this country.

Never you mind that your government seems more confused than Mr Bean in a supermarket. We have one side that says the sugar we are taking is more poisonous than a rattle snake and the other saying that they don’t recognise the results of tests. How hard is it to just take that sugar, and burn it like we have burnt ivory and drugs in times passed, give us a clean break, assure us that what is in the supermarket is safe.

This is what ought to be done: take action against the owners of the sugar factory poisoning people downstream; throw the book at Sony Sugar directors and for God’s sake, 9,000 acres is enough to change the lives of millions in Miwani.

And then simply put all the traders who bought and sold unprocessed sugar in jail for reckless endangerment or whatever law akin to murder applies to people who poison large parts of the population.

All this seems easy to do, but you see the one per cent doesn’t quite care for us the 99 per cent. They really don’t think that we deserve to know seeing a Kebs standard on a product is our only guard against poisons, diseases and death.

Because for them, the products they can afford come from Europe, their kids already study there, the poison in our shelves is not for the 1 per cent, they in their ivory towers are safe.

Of what use is a voter four years before an election? So live or die, share a hospital bed with two other patients, face insecurity, live between rivers of waste, burn your dormitories who cares?

The problem with us...

There is a problem in our society. It is not a race problem as we may infer on certain supermarkets and railways, it is not a tribe problem as we may infer on the Mau Forest, it is not just a corruption problem as the hundreds of court cases show.

It is instead a social status problem, like animals in a farm, the pigs are more equal than others. In this equality the pigs are the rulers of economy, politics and justice, we the chicken live in the dust, we scratch dirt to eat, cure our itching feathers and sleep in it too.

We, it appears, are children of a lesser God, we don’t need to return to dust, we are already in it. We are a little more than dust, a little less than human at least in the eyes of the one per cent. Who, I ask, shall save us and return our dignity?

Mr Bichachi is a Communication Consultant. [email protected]