How the State is attacking the family as an institution today

Are the youth led protests against the government justified? Is a question many people locally and abroad have grappled with for the last one year.

The young and not so young men and women that were tasked with the responsibility of sustaining pro government online propaganda have not helped one bit. The government bloggers and their masters framed the protests first as an “ethnic entitlement” issue. They then dismissed it as charade of content creators who were not interested in how their government is run and that after shooting content, the young people, ostensibly from rich backgrounds would just leave the streets. The government bloggers demonstrated that when it comes to burying one’s head in the sand, the ostrich has nothing on them.

As a consequence, an opportunity to genuinely respond to the feedback that the citizens were giving their representatives was lost. The government relying on the echo chamber generated by its on bloggers and chat bots felt invincible and hurtled dangerously down the path of destruction predicated on wastefulness, corruption and the usual politics of half measures. The hare would meet its match when the cabinet was eventually disbanded amidst the rising voices for accountability in government. In about a months’ time, it will be exactly 3 years since UDA came to power.

It’s a poorly kept secret that this administration, even with the support of their hitherto political adversaries, is plagued with a legitimacy crisis never witnessed this side of the tropics. How is it that those who shouted “Every Hustle matters” are today saying all the slogans I don’t want to amplify here? 

Let me declare that I am no politician and therefore can’t pretend to know the political intrigues and maneuvers. However, due to the work I do daily with young people, I know that they are a very disappointed lot. They know that the government is either unwilling or unable to meaningfully address itself to the question of unemployment.

The labour migration policy that the government has embraced as its silver bullet in regards to solving unemployment has become a laughing stock in many quarters. Many policy experts contend that momentary economic gain in terms of remittances would pale in comparison to the long term economic loss as we train workforce spending enormous resources then gladly sending them away to go build other economies.

We are tearing families apart as young couples are sometimes forced to head to different destinations in search of work. What is the difference between this government and pre-colonial chiefs who for a packet of sugar allowed slave traders to raid for slaves in their jurisdiction? We are outsourcing the dream of our young people claiming we are addressing unemployment. 

 We must remind Kenya Kwanza, that the order of nature is that family is the central organising unit in society. You break it, everything else collapses and nothing else will matter. The politics of half measures, of blame shifting of public spectacles called empowerment programmes will only get us so far. Their policy of labour migration, is the single most powerful attack against the institution of family and when its blown into smithereens, with it will go the community. 

When Kenyan Youth were made to sing “Dynasty mbaya” it was because how so many young people were increasingly falling behind and there was little evidence that we were reversing the trends that were turbo charging the unemployment. While the same trends have become worse in the last three years, a cloud of fear now also hangs on our collective mental sky. Domination through repression has become the new mantra.

As we burry our loved ones whose lives were cut short by the bullets of our security agencies, let us commit to disregard revolving doors so loved by the political class calculated to distract us from what matters.

- The writer is convener Inter Parties Youth Forum. kidimwaga@gmail.com