Elite should aim at liberating Kenyans from debt trap

How dull it would be if all human beings belonged to the same gender, skin colour, hair texture and tribe? Moreover, each group has special and vital nature-given propensities.

Each has specific experiences that it can contribute to the larger specific whole to excite its inventive pathways and cause its development engines to rev ever more energetically.

Let us put it another way. If Kenya had a good and efficient system of national mental upbringing – including a thoroughly conscious and adequately equipped school system – it would teach all individual Kenyans to recognise, from a very early age, that all other Kenyans, notwithstanding their ethnic, racial and sectarian backgrounds, are their brothers and sisters.

Properly so called, development is the process of progressively minimising the existential differences – mental, productive as well as consumer – among members of any given human group to enable them to work together closely and permanently and thus to heighten their ability to produce and reproduce that same collective wherewithal.

CONSCIOUSLY AGREE

What makes us human – what raises us above all other animal species – is that we can consciously agree to sacrifice certain of our immediate individual, gender, national, racial, sectarian and tribal needs or interests so as to be able to tackle our environments together and thus to maximise and socially spread the benefits of our work in acquiring both our wherewithal and our defence against the natural environment’s other realities.

Imagine, for instance, how much money and other vital resources Kenyans pour every year into something that they all allege to be “education”, something which, however, succeeds only in releasing into our urban thoroughfares hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of additional ethnic, gender, racial and religious bigots every year that comes to pass.

As long as the number of Moses Kurias and other mental slaves of tribe, of religion and of gender, appears to be rising, wherein can Kenya claim to be developing in the vital area of thought and inter-personal conduct — in a country whose leaders swear by the term “development” every time they travel first class from one Western capital to another, a “development aid” beggar’s basket in the hand?

But, of course, two cheers if the number of swollen stomachs among the leading politicians and the leading businessmen and women and the leading civil servants and the leading priests is your definition of development.

Two more cheers if the rising number of sky-scraping monoliths in the capital city is your definition of development – notwithstanding whether the owner is an American, a European or a Middle Easterner!

DEVELOPMENT

But please do imagine the amount of mental and physical energy that young Kenyans of all tribes waste in the streets of Nairobi alone competing with one another on the basis – not of knowledge and skill – but only of their tribes for jobs for which they are not even trained.

That is the question for the offices which are, for the time being, called Ministry of Education and Ministry of Development.

The question they must urgently answer is: Are we really developing? If so, what is the social context of our development? In what direction are we developing? And for what purposes? How is our development and even growth to be measured, especially in terms of mental ability, of versatility and of skill? 

How can ours be called development when our national debt to certain age-old and notorious Western European, North American and Japanese predators increases by leaps and bounds every year – until a time must come when it will be impossible for us to repay that debt?

The universal “debt forgiveness” that our planners hope for is not an economic category.