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[WhatIFF @bolisongo91294]

@amenya_nelson Yangu ndio hii buana. This should be a MUST read to every Kenyan.

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@MwangiBonnie If 100-1000 volunteers in every ward in Kiambu can volunteer and engage citizens with printed auditor report from today until elections, then we can have good leadership from MCA level to Governor . After which Kiambu can act as benchmark of how good leadership functions.

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@MwangiBonnie Since there is no budget for this, those who understand this message you have, have to sacrifice and volunteer for a daily civic education to citizens. Voluntary civic educators. Civic educators who will not expect payment. It has to be done from heart.

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@MwangiBonnie I repeat incoming governor intense civic education has to be done to our electorates to understand the reason they vote. Electorates do not know why they vote. It's only through intense one on one civic education that can save our counties.

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@BravinYuri This true prophet

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@Mabonga_254 sitaki kuandamana tena juu ya injustice na police brutality

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@Kimuzi_ nimechoka na bad governance bana. Hii kitu ya kulia for 5 years nimechoka man

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@djeduhmaks @UncleDhee they do nothing. they can't say any shit

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@cswekesa @WayeshAndrew @amenya_nelson Pia mimi

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@Thescoopter @BravinYuri Kumbe wewe hujui prophet Bravin. Nitakuja hapa in few weeks time to remind you buana.

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@skol_7s @BravinYuri Is he still a fool PUGA

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@dnjaga1 @BravinYuri How is it going for you buana Njenga?

[Farida Bemba Nabourema @Farida_N]

In my address titled "The Political Economy of Obedience," delivered last month at the Josef Korbel School of Global Affairs at the University of Denver, I identified five key mechanisms through which African populations have been trained into political compliance. I am sharing a summary here because they explain precisely what we are watching play out in real time every day on this continent.

The first is colonial education. The curriculum inherited from the French, the Brits or the Portugese administration was not designed to produce critical citizens. It was designed to produce a particular kind of political subject. one who understood authority as something to be respected rather than questioned, and who experienced his own political traditions as a source of shame rather than institutional possibility. As I said in Denver, the most effective political prisons are not made of concrete. They are made of curriculum. The Togolese school I attended taught us the genealogy of French kings with more precision than the history of the governance systems that predated French colonial presence on our territory.

The second is the economy of obedience itself. Authoritarian systems endure not primarily through permanent terror but because they structure the relationship between political compliance and material survival so that obedience becomes, for most people most of the time, the rational choice. Access to employment, scholarships, market licenses, import authorizations, health clinic access: none of it politically neutral, all of it conditioned on loyalty. People in these systems do not collaborate with power because they are morally deficient. They collaborate because the scaffolding of their daily lives has been designed to make non-collaboration economically catastrophic.

The third is the family as a site of control. In conditions of economic precarity, the individual who considers a dissident act must calculate not only her own risk but the risk she imposes on her parents, her siblings, her children, her cousins etc. I have watched people of intelligence and moral clarity retreat from political engagement not because they were afraid for themselves but because they could not justify the devastating exposure their activism would bring to their families. The authoritarian state does not need to threaten everyone. It only needs to ensure that the threat to one is visible and comprehensible to all.

The fourth is religion. In many parts of Africa, religious institutions have been deployed, not by their most honest practitioners but by their most politically convenient ones, to transmit a theology of earthly resignation and otherworldly reward that discourages political engagement. The pastoral instruction to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's sits very comfortably with the interests of Caesars who have no intention of rendering anything to anyone. Liberation theology, which in Latin America produced an extraordinary tradition of religiously grounded political resistance, has had a far more contested reception in much of African Christianity and Islam, partly because of the direct entanglement of many religious institutions with state power, which has made spiritual authority and political compliance structurally allied.

The fifth is media. In authoritarian African contexts, state and privately owned media aligned with power do not typically practice crude propaganda. They practice something more subtle and more durable: the selection of what is visible and what is invisible; the framing of social problems as natural phenomena rather than political choices; and the treatment of opposition voices as marginal or foreign-funded. The film industry participates in this discipline in its own way, through the systematic promotion of narratives that depict poverty and wealth as conditions of fate or personal failure, stories in which the distance between the poor and the rich has everything to do with luck, talent or divine favour and nothing to do with power, policy or the deliberate engineering of inequality.

The cumulative effect, over decades, is a population whose political imagination has been narrowed to the point where alternatives are genuinely difficult to conceive, not because the alternatives do not exist, but because the political ecosystem has ensured they remain invisible.

These are the operating manual of authoritarian systems on this continent. And authoritarianism today is not limited to regimes with a known dictator who has held power for decades. It extends equally to regimes that perform a change of leadership through placebo elections conducted every four to five years, producing a new face every eight to ten years while the same system of impunity, patronage and repression remains structurally intact.

I would argue that these are in fact the more dangerous form of authoritarianism because their citizens are deceived into believing they are living under a democracy when they are in reality governed by plutocrats. The citizen under an obvious dictatorship at least knows what he is fighting. The citizen under a rotating plutocracy has been convinced there is nothing to fight at all. He votes, he watches a new face take the oath, and he mistakes the performance of transition for the substance of change. He ends up with no voice, no justice, no agency, and worse, no drive to fight for his own dignity. For one can only fight for liberation after acknowledging one's condition of oppression.

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@tobrok2 Huyo ashaenda. Ni kama unataka kurudisha bibi mwenye ameamua kuoleka kwa mwanaume mwingine mwenye anaishi Runda na wewe unaishi pipeline. Sisi 8 million tutasimama na Maraga.

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@NelsonHavi That's why President should never campaign to have MPs. And we should ban zoning. This will ensure as many people contest as possible and have parliament that is chosen by people

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@Ademba_47 It's actually not about Matatu drivers. It's about you and me. Matatu can just add their fare. And it's you and me who will have to pay that amount. Hawawezi kuenda hasara wao. It's the people who will go at loss.

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@OkiyaOmtatah Ni kama kufungia kuku mahali alafu badala ya kuwafungulie wajitafutie chakula unawatupia tembe moja ya mahindi. Wanapigania kabisa. Njaa ikizidi unapiga sufuria wanakua distracted na kelele. Yaani unawafanyia sarakasi tu. Kuku hatimaye wengine wao watakufa na wakule each other.

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@FaithOdhiambo8 incoming Nairobi Women Rep. Nairobi deserves women with brains and you are overqualified .

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@mastasugu @BravinYuri uliwarn mtu in 2022 kumwambia hii njia ni mbaya. yeye akakuambia ni mzuri. huyu mtu ameenda na hii njia amepata kweli ni njia mbaya. 2024 sasa amerudi akakuambia you were right ile njia ya 2022 ni mbaya. wewe sasa unaanza kumwambia hapana ile njia ya 2022 ni njia poa.