Let 2026 be year of zero stereotypes and liberated minds

Kenya's Emmanuel Wanyonyi wins men's 800m during the Diamond League Athletics meeting in Stockholm, on June 16, 2025. Kenya’s athletic success is no longer confined to the Rift Valley. [AFP]

Stereotypes are a kind of mental confinement. They encourage premature judgments, substituting assumptions for evidence. In doing so, they quietly shape how individuals are treated and understood, often to their detriment.

In Kenya, stereotypes tend to follow ethnic contours. Communities from the western regions are routinely cast as cooks or watchmen; those from the Rift Valley are lauded, sometimes reductively, as athletes and policemen. Central is associated with commercial acumen and managerial competence, while coastal communities are unfairly caricatured as languid and averse to manual labour.

Recent history, however, has steadily punctured these assumptions. Kenya’s athletic success is no longer confined to the Rift Valley’s well-worn pipelines. A new generation led by the likes of Emmanuel Wanyonyi, Mary Moraa and Lilian Odira, has emerged from beyond the traditional heartlands, taking place alongside established luminaries such as Faith Kipyegon and Beatrice Chebet. Even football defies the old cartography: Aldrin Kibet, now playing in Europe’s top leagues, hails from Rift Valley, rather than Western Kenya, long presumed to be the game’s natural cradle. 

In matters of leadership, the old canard of Central Kenya’s managerial exceptionalism has been punctured by the fiscal and economic wreckage left in the wake of the previous administration. It is the present government that has inherited the unenviable task of repairing this damage and returning the country to a sustainable recovery.

Mental confinement transcends the individual or communal sphere, extending into a globalised framework of perception. Labels such as “first,” “second” and “third” world are less geographical descriptors than cognitive constructs. In the so-called first-world nations; the United States or the United Kingdom; there exist enclaves that resemble the urban depravity typically associated with the developing world. Skid Row in Los Angeles, Chicago’s South Side or certain districts of South London are prime examples. Conversely, pockets of conspicuous affluence in Kenya, such as Muthaiga or Karen, rival the prosperity of Beverly Hills or Mayfair, underscoring the limitations of simplistic binaries in understanding global inequality.

It is the mind imprisoned by ideology that stubbornly refuses to acknowledge, despite a preponderance of evidence, that Kenya’s current debt predicament finds its roots in the policies of the previous administration. The same mindset clings tenaciously to the notion that the last national elections, hailed by international observers as the freest, fairest and most credible in the country’s history, were somehow subverted by actors outside the government of the day.

Such a perspective constrains the nation’s horizon of possibility. It dismisses objective economic indicators like moderate inflation, a stable currency, rising foreign-exchange reserves and the ready availability of affordable staples, as insufficient evidence of genuine progress.

It remains sceptical that the dualisation of both the Rironi-Mau Summit Road and the Rironi-Mai Mahiu Road can proceed concurrently without imposing additional strain on an already overstretched National Treasury. Equally, it casts doubt on the notion that Kenya could emulate Singapore’s development trajectory in the foreseeable future.

Redemption, according to Marcus Garvey and singer Bob Marley, requires self-liberation. In their words, to “emancipate yourself from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds.”

Best wishes for a liberated mind and a prosperous 2026.

Mr Khafafa is a public policy analyst