Why we should not succumb to arm-twisting by ex-councillors

Although I have commented on it for upwards of 50 years, Kenya’s political class never ceases to astonish me.

It grows from bad to worse every minute that passes.

How is it possible for a country’s most educated class to be so completely devoid of feelings and thought for the plight of the mass, which it purports to lead?

In terms of emoluments, Kenya’s political class has no equal anywhere in the whole world.

Like water into a siphon, this seems to follow quite naturally from the fact that Kenya’s employees are among the world’s greediest.

In short, Kenya’s political class has no equal in terms of the manner in which it pursues lucrative filth.

PRODUCTS OF SCHOOL TEACHERS
It is thus a cinch that the government will succumb to a demand by a group of politicians – former members of local councils – that the taxpayer pay them a cool Sh18 billion in what, in a page-one report on Wednesday, the Nation called “retirement benefits”.

For our system bends over backwards to ingratiate the political class, though it produces nothing but consumes like caterpillars.

It will be all the more remarkable if the government succumbs because it will compare sharply with the government’s nearly simultaneous rejection of a demand by teachers for better pay.

Who can deny that teachers are a much more deserving sub-class than councillors?

On personnel, all our walks of life – including the political “profession” – depend vitally on teachers from the kindergarten to the postgraduate school.

As our respective president and deputy president, both Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto are imaginable only as products of school teachers.

DIVISION OF LABOUR
Yet, ever since I became a watcher of Kenya’s industrial division of labour, teachers have had to struggle desperately to make ends meet while their classmates who entered politics have developed paunches for stomachs almost from the word go.

How do we justify this agonising thing about Kenya’s division of labour?

Whereas our teachers are the whole source of our manpower and womanpower at all levels, both of production of goods and of impartment of knowledge and skill, Kenya’s political class appears singularly incapable of producing what the English Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called “... one work that wakes ...”

Our political sub-class does not take part in any form of production whatsoever. Members neither produce any merchandise nor originate any theoretical thoughts.

ECONOMIC LABOURER

All the way from physics and mathematics to morality and the marketing of “salvation” goods, Africa’s ruling class depends totally on Euro-America’s intelligentsia for everything.

Among Kenya’s intelligentsia, what pass as “ideas” are dominated by self-pursuit or, at best, how to persuade their whole tribes to vote them into office and to protect them as soon as they begin using office to milk their whole country dry.

And they are extraordinarily contemptuous of those who produce anything.

They are contemptuous, namely, of both the economic labourer (the peasant and industrial hands that feed them) and the intellectual labourer (the schoolteacher who made it possible for them to enter politics).

That is why Kenya’s whole establishment bribes the political class at every level but will not be moved a tad even by the most anguished cri de coeur from the classroom.

ARM-TWISTING ARGUMENTS

Members of the class appear capable only of words and deeds that play individuals against individuals, tribes against tribes and, gender against gender and, often, race against race.

A more informed system would know a lot better than to succumb to arm-twisting arguments from such a functionally less important social cog as political councillors, especially in comparison with the horrendously raw deal that official Kenya has given and continues to give to the much more productive cog – those who teach our children – ever since independence.

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