Open letter 1: To Kenyan

Esteemed Kenyan. Allow me to tell you that you are impossible. Yes. All 43 or so of you. All 210 of you. And more so, all 93 of you. No matter where you look, there's an example of a Kenyan playing damn. All I need do is buy some popcorn, put the bucket in my lap, sit back and relax...and just like that, with no need for invitation, mission or permission, you'll pop out a bright idea and allow me to watch you go down in flames with it. Figuratively speaking. Or not.

Many of us would rather sell ourselves to other countries than deal with our own

If you ask the politician, he'll have a view on how everyone but himself is the problem. Seat the regular citizen down and he'll write you an entire script on how the politicos are the problem, and how what lies between him and the regular citizen is even crazier. It could be the jav driver who hikes the fares as soon as a drop of rain hits him, or when Osama kicks the seabed; it could be the Mobile Service Provider who 'clogs up the airwaves' every time they wanna halla at their Sugar Mamma, Mpango wa Kando or Chips Funga; it could even be the Institution of Higher Learning whose capacity to institute any learning -- let alone the higher kind -- you deem incredibly suspect.

Today, however, I take a split second off what was my paying job to moot you a question. Can we really all be the problem? To answer that, let me be Kenyan.

Hello; my name is Kenyan, and I am a loose canon. A troubled soul on a quest. Yet I am trapped; trapped because I have refused to free myself from four little walls, a ceiling and a floor with no door. I have refused to think beyond these walls, out of this fucking box. I am Adrian Monk meets Gregory House MD, completing my capacity to feel with a refusal to feel it. I am anathema to me either way. You would loose your canon too, because you are me. You are Kenyan.

 

If This Country Burns, We Burn With IT!

You hate politicians. You love your country. Perhaps you could hate the system, yet still love the country that runs it. I'm curious as to which is stronger. Can your hatred for the status quo spur you to be the water that calms the fiery storm we find ourselves in every so often? Or are you so 'determined' that you prefer to take matters into your hands and be the kindling that stokes it further?

You could be the teenager who claims that it's never that serious. A claim that comes off the deadening of your affect to all things yours; all things Kenyan. For how else can you be made to see that it actually is serious without your father or mother - figuratively or otherwise - being more than just a spectator in this arcade game we call a Kenyan existence? After all, Super Mario was never that serious either; we seem to think that we can simply press restart once we mess up and the screen screams Game Over.

Everyone has an opinion, and it is no coincidence that you, Kenyan, are thought a reckless teenager today. See Swaggalicious or Google "Teenage Road Carnage in Kenya" for further details. That you are thought a stupid politician. Think Sonko, Bad Boy of the 10th Parliament; UK with his Tuko Pamoja BS; Mututho with the crazy corruption-enabling law. That you are a greedy lot ready to sit around and do nothing while Kenya cries - insert many Civil Servants, Corporate, Media, NGOs in Kibera, Kanjow...name it.

The question should not be 'Who is to blame?', much as it should be how we can change.

(To be continued)