A picture of Kenya in twenty years

It’s an assignment. One of those you will wait until it is due the next day then you hurriedly type down your thoughts, save and head to the printer, a normal day of someone yearning to get the paper and get done with school. But not this one, however. It requires you to picture yourself in the next twenty years, assuming you plan to live right into the edge of life (old age) and die peacefully in your sleep. Also, you will have to picture how to change the world as an intellectual too assuming that there are things around you that need change too.

It is easier to picture about one’s life in the next twenty years. For me, I intend to have completed at least two PhDs, should have had a family housed in a home that no one checks in every month to demand rent, a car to ferry my family around as well as myself. Nothing much, but a simple life devoid of wars with the ecosystem.

But how about the society? Of course every right thinking member knows that the crucial element of the society, which is politics, is wrong and needs to be fixed as soon as possible. In the next twenty years it is more likely that we will still be voting against tribal lines as opposed to ideologies, still battling corruption as opposed to hunger and diseases…..so much. Even then, it is more likely that a high number of Kenyans shall have at least attained college education.

It is quite sad that learned people are lauding blatant abuse of the rule of law, even when they are lawyers who should know better. Having a conversation with a university student comes with great risk such as brain hemorrhage when it comes to important matters such as the direction of our country. Personally, an ideal country should be one that feeds its people, provide adequate and quality healthcare services to its people, equal and adequate opportunities for everyone, fidelity to the rule of law, justice and fairness, education and infrastructure. None of these things ever come out of a university student.

The country has slowly entrenched a system where laziness is glorified, theft cheered upon, lack common sense enshrined in peoples DNA. The leaders have been active proponents of these backward ideals. Once in power, it is almost certain that their IQ rapidly races to a single digit. Their utterances make one cringe with shame, questioning if one should actually be proud of their country or not.

The youth are the ones who should be at the forefront in changing the ideals, just as others before them did when championing for democracy. It’s a wonder that one studies critical thinking as a core unit, studying the arguments of Socrates without examining their own lives. Instead, they bury their heads in gambling websites and scream about ‘mtu wetu.’ Such a shame.

In the next twenty years, Kenya should not be grappling with the same issues that it has  since independence. The youth should be at the forefront in ensuring that it is better than they found it.  If you are twenty years old now, in the next twenty years you will be forty and probably with a kid, a teenager perhaps, and you may be wondering where to take them next. If you don’t prepare the world for them today by demanding the best from yourself, then your neighbor, then the government, then of course you will find yourself swimming in the murky waters that you prepared yourself.