High cost of thinking aloud

Activists and friends of Albert Ojwang' engage a police officer protesting outside the Nairobi Funeral home at the Mbagathi way- Ngong road round-about demanding justice following Albert Ojwang's death while in police custody. June 9, 2025. [Jonah Onyango, Standard] Malala Yousafzai once said, "let us pick our books and our pens, they are the most powerful weapons." In my beloved country, however, it is increasingly becoming illegal to embrace books and pens and to allow them to refine and guide our thinking. Last week, my father asked me to take a break from this column. While he was excited that I am finally writing, practicing what I trained to do, he was deeply worried for my safety. As much as he enjoyed picking his Wednesday paper, he felt it was not worth it if it means compromising my safety. For a man who raised me to love reading, who always ensured the Sunday newspaper was available for me to go through the children's pullout, this was a tough call. Last evening during our weekly catch up, he asked if I saw his point. A young man was dead because of something he wrote. Albert Ojwang is dead. Not because he committed a crime but because he dared to think aloud and express the same to the world. We are existing in a time when it feels criminal to think and dangerous to express ourselves. Instead of checking for grammar accuracy in our messaging, we now realise how important it is to check for egos and feeling's we may hurt for speaking our mind. The tragedy is that we have been here before as a country and the expectation would be that those days are far behind us. I was young during the fight for multiparty democracy but I always followed on the happenings whichever way I could. We saw acclaimed writers arrested, battered, and imprisoned for speaking their truth. We saw books banned and authors exiled for refusing to use the pen to flatter those in authority. Then came multiparty democracy. A new constitution was unveiled and, as Kenyans, we thrived intellectually knowing our brains were our greatest asset yet. How far back have we fallen! When Rose Njeri was arrested and arraigned in court last week, majority of us struggled to understand what exactly was unlawful in what she did. The essence of communication is dialogue. Getting feedback means your audience not only got your message but were interested enough to take their time to respond. A great success indicator for an engagement I would imagine. But here was a young woman being arrested for contributing to a civic exercise's success. Instead of celebrating her for using her skills as a service to a public cause, we had her standing in the dock for offenses no law could clearly define. Kenya stands out in the larger east African region for nurturing brilliant minds. Our scholars are globally celebrated, our public education system, even while strained and needing further alignment, is still envied by many. We have raised our children to be critical thinkers, to question theories and find deeper meaning in what is stated. We celebrate academic achievement so loudly our children learn the value of excellence from a very early age. It cannot be that we, the same people that moulded them into critical thinkers, now turn around to persecute them for being exactly what we trained and fashioned them to be. We can't be the same people demonstrating to them that their brilliance is a sure way for them to end up in cells or worse, in the morgues. As the older generation, are our egos so fragile our sense of importance so inflated that we cannot stand any narrative that isn't soaked in praise? Are we so terrified of embracing and confronting the truth that we would rather silence it by employing terror and brutal force in dealing with those we feel have used their thinking 'wrongly'? Today, Ojwang lies dead. Taken from his father's hands only to be pronounced dead 400 km away from home. Watching his father weep for his only child in the news, I can understand my own father's fears more clearly. Maybe the surest way to live peacefully today is to be dumb. See no evil. Hear no evil. Write no evil. Ms Wekesa is a development communication consultant. fnwekesa@gmail.com

High cost of thinking aloud

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