Castro and Vero: Cementing Kenya's Plutocracy in Marriage

Raila Odinga's son Fidel Odhiambo Castro has just married Veronica Wangunyu, a beautiful lass related to the Kenyatta family. It was a source of excitement but equally of supressed 'aahs'. The question asked in whispers was, how could Agwambo's son marry from a family of his political nemesis the Kenyatta's and by extension the Kikuyu? Did I hear one mention Delilah? Well, such suspicions and grunts of disapporoval fail to recognise one thing; that tribal tensions in Kenya are more vertical than horizontal. The Kenyan political elite largely belong to the same class where the source of friction is not tribe but that very class. For Agwambo's son to marry from the Kenyatta family thus does not in any way point to the detribalisation of Kenyan social or political life among the Kenyan youth as Agwambo's statement seemed to suggest. The marriage simply undelined the nature of Kenya's pluctoracy now being expressed in various other institutions such as the family.

Kenyan schooling creating a caste system

The brouhaha meeting the release of the KCSE exams was as loud as it is traditional. Even more exciting was the news that the leading candidate wants to president! Good luck lad. But the general performance should raise questions about a range of issues most notably how access to schooling does not necessary mean much today. It appears that unless one is able to put his or her kid through the hallowed halls of the top national schools or the obscenely expensive private schools, there's no hope of joining university which to many may be the only viable access to higher education. Form four school leavers around the country are now forced into the boda boda business, a venture that often leads them to drug use and early graves. Kenya is gradually creating a caste system where born poor you die poor. The schooling system is certainly not improving, rather it is exarcabating the gulf in class. Universal primary education is important but a critical mass with this basic education cannot sustain an economy. This may appear to change but will in fact remain the same.

UN report points to systematic marginalisation of Nyanza

The UNDP's report revealing that life expectancy in some parts of Kenya is now only 40 years is most unsettling and doubly so coming at a time when the Kibaki government keeps vaunting the turn-around in the economy. In many ways this is a false economy. The report also puts into perspective the deliberate marginalisation of Western Kenya principally Nyanza. It is not for good reason that poverty levels in Nyanza are only matched by those in North Eastern Kenya. The region's marginalisation has been so systematic over the past two decades to the extent that it is now systemic. To be persecuted for a political belief when this belief actually hurts no one is most unfortunate. Our democracy is flawed, the economy flawed, the political system flawed... everything is so flawed there's urgent need for an overhaul of the very fabric that constitutes the Kenyan nation, otherwise to borrow the words of Benedict Anderson, Kenya will simply be an imagined nation that demands no allegience whatsoever, especially to those from Nyanza.