Raila and plutocrats’ quest for occupational apartheid

There is a Kenyatta University graduate going places in Nairobi. Adamant that he is not interested in being formally employed, he ventured into fishmongery, starting at the bottom, from scratch.

The youth, no doubt with tremendous hard work, powered by incredible determination and inspired by unshakable faith in his dream, has patiently grown the business into a trendy budding chain of swanky restaurants that remain faithful to the seminal fishmonger’s vision.

It is fair to say that this young hustler’s hunger for success in delighting fish eaters is going places, and it must have been in this spirit that the Raila Odinga campaign saw an opportunity to align their candidate’s profile with a fresh, authentic, youthful and aspirational brand.

After unveiling his running mate, Odinga, Senior Counsel Martha Karua and the top brass of his campaign repaired to the fish eatery for lunch and a spot of brand symbiosis.

Odinga must have been briefed about the founder’s education, daring and effort in raising such a business literally from the ground up.

It is now obvious that Odinga heard his own things, and was disconcerted by their implications.

Whilst speaking shortly afterwards at a political event, Odinga related how he had lunch at a restaurant operated by a university graduate who was essentially just roasting fish.

Proper jobs

The disgust with which Odinga uttered ‘graduate’ and ‘anachoma samaki’ forcefuly and eloquently convey his disgust at this evidently unsettling notional juxtaposition.

In his government, Odinga thundered, this would come to an end, as all graduates would have what he called ‘proper jobs’.

Odinga was in no mood to acknowledge the effort, sacrifice and ingenuity it must have taken the youth, or to commend his sheer entrepreneurial audacity in developing such an attractive and lucrative brand.

Instead, he was overcome with pity for a potential elite who had lost his way, and thus proclaimed his commitment to liberate him from the benighted travails of fishmongery, and redeem him from the throes of the delusions that led him astray.

The Big Fish debacle was a spectacle of the politics of self-righteousness in action.

Pity is the driving force of this politics. The sanctimonious elite is impelled by an urge to come to the aid of some wretched other, who is understood to be morally decrepit, materially desolate, socially inferior and potentially or actually dangerous to themselves as well as the elites. The firm patronising hand of plutocrats can keep ignorant and dissolute miserables from destroying the country with their volatile and infirm yearnings.

This pity effortlessly conflates with well-meaning autocracy, benevolent dictatorship and the entrenchment of a system where the elite exploit and oppress the majority for their own good.

Pity recognises all want as symptomatic of implacable bad fortune and irredeemable moral turpitude.

The elites are the lucky ones and must be kept untainted.

Pity and charity

According to this ideology, good governance consists in investing the elite with sufficient capacity to keep the others under control. The elites are agents of the social good, and the poor are objects of pity and charity.

A graduate, being a certified future member of the elite, must be socialised to normalise certain expectations and conditioned to affiliate herself with the privileged and ingratiate herself to dynastic oligarchs.

Everyone else must await institutionalised handouts.

In Kenya, as in many parts of the world, countless highly educated individuals, including university graduates, often renounce formal employment to pursue their fortune through paths seldom trodden.

Many join folk with less formal education to try their hand in various trades in the jua kali as well as trade in goods and services.

This should be a natural feature of a freewheeling market economy, where all comers ply their offerings, and the fit survive and thrive.

It certainly is the essence of the hustle: the audacity to wrestle with the angel of fortune through an endless night of bruising struggle, until in the dawn of blessing he yields abundance.

Self-righteous politics of pity and patronage envisages a rigid occupational apartheid.

Graduates must find ‘proper jobs’; they are inmates for life in the professional pigeonholes their education consigned them to.

They must never on any account admire or desire ‘lower’ occupations’, are obliged to ostentatiously disdain the informal and sneer at the menial.

The visceral antipathy to bottom-up economic policy, the bilious disaffection with the Hustler Nation’s mama mboga, bodaboda, makanga, kinyozi are typical reflexes of the self-righteous. This is why they are triggered to an apoplectic rage by images of basic implements typical of ordinary occupations, especially the wheelbarrow.

In the forthcoming presidential election, one ticket claims the authority to prescribe rigid parameters of permissible ambition, while another offers to embrace every aspiration and affirm all dreams as valid.

It is not the proper job of a president to dictate proper jobs for graduates.

Mr Ng’eno is an advocate of the High Court and a supporter of William Ruto’s presidential candidacy. @EricNgeno