Its not Politicians,We are the mediocres.

BY owaah

            Image source: quora

We are broken, and we don’t know it. As individuals and as a collective.

We carry trauma that has nothing to do with our personal experience, and we see our experience through it. We refuse to learn, even when we accept knowledge as a vital part of our experience. 

We refuse to be afraid of the fact that the one thing that connects us is shortlived, and what will remain is not Kenya as a country, but its people.

We are brave and strong, but we also willing to let the car crash because it’s bad manners to tell the driver he’s drunk, and driving us into a ditch. 

We were raised well, and authority can never be questioned, even when it’s actively doing the wrong thing.

If you are even a half-interested student of history, then you already know how this story goes. Soon, we will be distracted with shenanigans that do not bring our cost of living down or fix our economy or society. 

There will be a lot of God in our lives, and fake political and social contests, and Ezekiel Mutua, and downright bullshit.

There will be handouts to anyone competent enough to host a Harambee, and an underlying hope that someday, maybe soon, things will improve by themselves. They won’t.

We are not even like this in our daily lives. Matatu drivers get beaten all the time for driving badly or doing stupid shit on the road. 

We walk out of restaurants that give us bad service. We fight each other in bars over disrespect. We fight each other in church over money.

We burn thieves publicly even when they’ve stolen a chicken to feed their families. In our daily lives, we denounce mediocrity.

But with the state, we accept it in its most rotten form. Who are we really, that we can let a minority run this country aground while just sitting quiet in the back seat, talking among ourselves.

We are not bringing ourselves to the story of the nation, and we have not only accepted mediocre rule for far too long, we have actually defended the very same political class that continuously gives us reason not to.

It might never end, actually. It is a real possibility that when the nation called Kenya eventually dies, as it will inevitably, the story of its people will not exist. It will not only not have been told, it will not have been lived. Not by its people, its animals, its land, its laws, or even its own hallucinations about itself.

We are a nation actively committing suicide, and the sad part of it is that we are not only in the room, we are the ones tying the rope around our own necks.

We can process any trauma so seamlessly that no one would ever know we weren’t okay. Even we don’t. 

Everything that’s happening to us is as strange as it would be if it was happening to anyone else, but we are eternal optimists.