Lang’ata demo: Fake adults at it again!

What you need to know:

  • Our greed for wealth and social standing considers nothing sacred, nothing immoral, nothing offensive to everyone, which is why some people were wondering why the children were protesting when they were supposed to be in class!
  • But many of us have contributed to this mess by avoiding public facilities — schools, hospitals and even parks — because using them does not speak well of our social standing.

So we were outraged by the Monday incident at Lang’ata Road Primary School when police descended on pupils with tear gas?

We were shrill in our indignation, some of us even comparing the incident to the 1976 Soweto Uprising. Few suggested it confirmed our Constitution was a mere piece of paper. But denunciations aside, aren’t we all accomplices in the crime?

If we lower our disapproving voices and reflect on our role in the mess, we shall see our contribution to the brutalisation of those children in ways that our current self-serving indignation blinds us.

Most of us would grab public land for private gain anyway, given the chance and adequate political backing in a country where virtually everyone is trapped in a rat race to wealth.

We knew two weeks earlier that the land had been grabbed but there was no outrage. The noises we made were not necessarily because of the real issue, but that the protesting children who met the state’s repressive apparatus provoked collective shame and guilt in the adults who, in pursuit of self-preservation, had abdicated their social responsibility of speaking up for the children.

GREED FOR WEALTH

There is this bizarre preoccupation with social class among us such that what happened in Langa’ta was bound to happen. Our greed for wealth and social standing considers nothing sacred, nothing immoral, nothing offensive to everyone, which is why some people were wondering why the children were protesting when they were supposed to be in class!

Our preoccupation with private academies for our children is partly what made the ‘private developer’ to target public school land, correctly judging that the reaction of the public would be a few mumbles and then silence – only that for the ‘developer’, the police who came to secure the interests of one against many used tear gas on children.

If most of us decided to take our children to public schools and worked collectively to make them better facilitated, chances are the particular ‘private developer’ and many others would avoid school land for fear of reaction.

But many of us have contributed to this mess by avoiding public facilities — schools, hospitals and even parks — because using them does not speak well of our social standing.

The result is continued deterioration of the facilities and their vulnerability to the thieving ways of some propelled by obsession with primitive accumulation of material wealth.

Perhaps the police action on Monday against those children had a brighter side to it. It teaches us that constitutional provisions of free assembly and expression do not mean much to a complacent people; that all the hype about police reform is hot air; and that where adults become aloof to injustices, children can stand up to be counted.

Godwin Siundu teaches Literature at the University of Nairobi