CORRECT ME IF I'M WRONG BUT, As I turn 43 this year, I have realised, as a man, no one cares about you. Not your wife. Not your family. Not your friends. Not your workmates. Nobody. People act like they care, but deep down, they don't. You are on your own. Always on your own.
The signs of a sovereign odious debt default are now very clear, even for those who have no brains, because a government that has borrowed everywhere, taxed everything, sold public assets, squeezed workers through deductions and now wants SACCO savings is no longer looking for development money, it is looking for survival money.
Banks built a comfortable debt circle with government, where lending to the state became easier, safer and more rewarding than taking risks with SMEs, traders, farmers, contractors, manufacturers and ordinary Kenyans trying to keep their biasharas alive.
That relationship slowly choked the real economy, because banks preferred government paper, Treasury kept borrowing, SMEs were starved of credit, small borrowers were punished, and Kenyans who could no longer breathe inside the banking system ran back to SACCOs.
SACCOs became the last refuge for people abandoned by banks, the place where teachers, police officers, nurses, boda riders, matatu people, farmers, mama mbogas and small traders could still save slowly, borrow with dignity and keep families moving.
Now the same government that helped banks turn debt into a feeding system is following Kenyans into SACCOs, looking at the savings people built from salaries, farming, biashara, side hustles and painful monthly deductions.
This is the last nail.
SACCO money is not idle Treasury money waiting to be touched, it is private sacrifice by ordinary Kenyans who saved for school fees, land, homes, hospital bills, emergencies, small businesses and survival in an economy already squeezed by taxes, loans and bad policy.
A government that cannot explain where borrowed billions went cannot be trusted with SACCO billions, especially when the same infrastructure language has already been used for years to hide wastage, inflated contracts, brokers, political friends and budget games.
This is how a country tells you quietly that lenders are tired, banks are already overfed on government debt, taxes are no longer enough, public assets have been lined up, and the last pool of money outside Treasury’s direct hands is now being targeted.
The money is finished, and now they are following Kenyans into the last safe corner they had left.
You know what shook me when I was Muslim?
The story of Hosea. God tells a prophet to marry a woman He knows will betray him.
She does. She runs to other men. She ends up enslaved, sold, used up, worthless to the world.
And God tells Hosea to go BUY HER BACK.
To pay money for his own wife who cheated on him, and love her again. Hosea 3.
I thought it was the most humiliating command in the Bible. Why would any man do that?
Then I realized I was the wife.
I gave my heart to everything but God. I chased other masters. I sold myself cheap. I made myself worthless.
And God looked at me, the betrayer, and didn’t say “you’re not worth it.”
He said, “Name the price. I’m buying her back.”
That’s the Gospel. God doesn’t wait for the unfaithful to come crawling back clean.
He pays to redeem them while they’re still dirty.
Islam told me to make myself worthy of God.
Hosea showed me a God who pays to redeem the unworthy.
The cross was Him naming the price.
Praise the Lord.
In *Billionaires' Bunker* (Netflix, Ep 6 "The Woman with Her Days Numbered"), **WND** = Woman with Numbered Days.
It's a woman whose relationship has a built-in expiration date. You might marry her, have kids, and treat it like forever — but deep down you know it will end badly. Spot her by boring talks, little humor, no common sense, and devotion to pointless things. The "magic of the finite" feels euphoric at first, but wear it out, then move on.
Drive through almost any corner of the English countryside and sooner or later you pass a ruin: a roofless abbey, a row of broken arches open to the weather, a few worked stones in a field where something vast once stood. We are so used to these skeletons that we file them under scenery. In truth each one is a crime scene, and the oldest warning we have about what the English state does when it decides its own people are there to be harvested.
The fashionable comparison this season is the Civil War: the 1640s, the king against his parliament, the long slide to the sword. The state-as-enemy-of-the-nation. I think it's the wrong century. To see our situation as it actually is, go back a hundred years earlier, to the 1530s, and to the largest seizure of wealth in English history before the modern age - the Dissolution of the Monasteries.
The monasteries were far more than churches. They were the welfare state of their day, among the many other pillars-of-society which they constituted. They ran the hospitals and fed the poor at the gate. They schooled the clever sons of nobodies, took in travellers, lent money, employed half the county, and held perhaps a fifth of the land in England in a kind of standing trust for the people around them. They were the accumulated institutional capital of the nation, built up across four centuries.
In barely four years, the state took the lot.
The way it was done is the whole point. First the audit: Thomas Cromwell sent his men to value every religious house in the land down to the candlesticks - the Valor Ecclesiasticus, a Domesday Book drawn up for plunder. Then the justification: the same men came back with lurid dossiers of monkish vice and idleness, much of it invented and all of it deeply useful, because a thing you mean to destroy must first be declared rotten. Then the disposal. The proceeds went nowhere near the poor who had depended on the place. The land was sold, fast and cheap, to the Crown's creditors and courtiers and the rising, grasping gentry - a new class of men bound to the regime by the very loot they were handed, a good many of whose descendants sit on the same acres now.
When the north rose against it, in the Pilgrimage of Grace, the rising was put down and its leaders hanged on the strength of a royal pardon that was never meant to be honoured.
The result, for ordinary people, was a disaster that took generations to undo. The hospitals shut. The poor relief evaporated. England filled with vagrants and beggars - "sturdy beggars", in fact, which the same government then set about whipping through the streets - because the institutions that had carried the poor had been cashed in for the king's wars and the courtiers' estates. It took the better part of a century, and the Elizabethan Poor Law, to rebuild a fraction of what those four years had wrecked.
This is the English disease in its purest form, and a man ought to know his own country's worst habit when he sees it come round again. The English state has never had much need of tanks or secret police. Its signature is subtler. It finds the institutions ordinary people rely on, declares them corrupt or inefficient or unaffordable, audits them, hollows them, and transfers their substance - the money, the land, the power, the security - to the class that runs the machine.
You have watched it done. The hospitals, the courts, the high streets, the post offices, the savings, the very safety of the streets - audited, downgraded, closed, sold, or left to rot, while the apparatus sitting on top of it all has swollen to £400 billion a year and answers to nobody you can name. The monks are long gone and the method is immortal.
The ruins in the field are a gravestone, but they are also evidence, and evidence is always useful. Once a people learns to recognise the method - the audit, the manufactured rot, the fire-sale to insiders, the whole business wrapped in the word "reform" - it stops working on them.
The English have rebuilt everything that was stripped from them before: the parish relief, the friendly societies, the great Victorian foundations, the hospitals and schools of the last century, every one of them raised by people who refused to accept that the floor under ordinary life was gone for good. We will do it again. The first step is to stop calling the men selling the country reformers, and to call them what Cromwell's men were: looters with a jolly good filing system.
"When the citizens of a Nation deem their most accomplished thieves as the most electable then they lose the right to complain when theft becomes their national creed." ~ Modibo Keita. Pan-Africanist leader and first President of Mali. (1915-1977)
Palestinian Islamic preacher: “Virgins of Paradise will have no menstruation, saliva, mucus, urine or excrement;
Muslim men will have the sexual power of 100 men. We will have several wives and slaves in Paradise.”
Disgusting. Why is it all about sex in the afterlife for them?