ThunderBear

Tax / Governance / Aspiring columnist /Economic justice

[Ben Roberts 🇬🇧🇰🇪 @benrobertskenya]

AI fuelled co-ordinated mis-information. I recently wrote a blog about this practice of “Astroturfing” in African Internet Policy development. https://t.co/n7Ubaj87oX Now Anthropic/Claude have detected Astroturfing in Kenyan Political campaigning.

[Geoffrey Bigo @jeffb_2018]

This is exactly the Kenyan problem: we are easily distracted by stupid sideshows. Laikipia County, approximately 2.35 million acres, is controlled by whites. Half of Laikipia County is owned by assimilated whites who control 52% of the land, held by only by 36 ranching and conservationist families. The biggest rancher, Kuki Gullman, controlling Ol Ari Nyiro Ranch by hook or by crook and periodically kills local herders own 100,000-acres ranch which is bigger than half of Nairobi, which has 17 constituencies. She claims to have bought the land from a group of European absentee landlords, and Kenyans are here fighting fellow African hawkers who own just a wheelbarrow and bucket carrying Mandazi instead of fighting neo colonists.

[Tim Wafula @setanindeta]

Reject XENOPHOBIA in Kenya.

[Nelson Amenya @amenya_nelson]

If we want to kick out foreigners kuanzia pale Laikipia would be a good starting point ndio tujue mko serious otherwise this is just cheap populist nonsense meant to whip up vulnerable people’s emotions.

[Karani Mutonga @Karanimutonga]

He built an Ebola Hospital for sick imperialists but he wants you to kick out fellow Africans who are just filling a gap?

Burundians aren't taking anyone's job because those are not the jobs Kenyans had asked the government to create.

[Joe Kobuthi @jkobuthi]

Folks, wearing a Kaunda suit does not make you a Pan Africanist.

[James @MrJamesKe]

Some of you are too blind to notice the pattern. Isn’t it strange that Africans are being encouraged to chase other Africans from their countries, but not the whites? Not those who own huge tracts of African land? You forget so easily that most of your presidents are puppets of the West. The same divide-and-rule strategy that worked during the colonial period is still working on you in 2026, and you ought to be ashamed of yourselves.

[Nyandarua's Finest @SefuSahm]

I refuse to fight a man selling coffee and mandazi just to feed his family in Bunjumbura while Kenyan girls travel to Saudi Arabia to work as house managers.
#IStandWithBurundians

[Tess @Babygirlltes]

Not to sound dramatic, but I’m starting to believe there’s a foreign influence operation behind the rise in xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment across Africa because ehhh… something is not adding up

[Levi Munyeri @LeviMunyeri]

Kenyans do not become as mediocre as your government. An African cannot be a foreigner in Africa. Chasing a Burundian or Congolese Brother who sells coffee or clothes in the streets will not relieve you from poverty. Chasing the incompetent Ruto's government may.

[#LandIsNotProperty Mwalimu Wandia @wmnjoya]

They diseducate you, use the media to keep you misinformed and ignorant, block production, cover up the economic hole with debt, steal that money to pay goons, and then when society becomes inevitably becomes chaotic, they say that what we need is a dictator.

The colonial administrators behaved the same: they were toxic, anti-work, anti-production, anti-intellectual, chronically hostile to planning ahead (because that's "theory"), refusing to address problems until they were too chaotic to ignore, and using maximum violence to sort them out. They compensated for lack of discipline and work with violence.

[#LandIsNotProperty Mwalimu Wandia @wmnjoya]

I'm shocked.

I think Kenyans have to conceptually understand that the current government has nothing to make money from, except from our enslavement. There's no plan for production. They are making a gamble that we want university education so badly that we are willing to go into a lifetime of debt for it. In other words, the product on sale is our aspiration and desperation, not our education. And if we can't afford an education, we're not worthy of it, anyway. I cannot explain the deep cynicism and madharau in that policy, especially because Kenyans don't get it. We're so used to analyzing Kenyan politics in terms of competence and corruption, that we don't understand contempt, racism and the belief of Kenyas political and bureaucratic elite that education should be for a few because it's not for knowledge but for access to power.

This principle was established with CBC. Nobody panicked because they were so focused on the frivolous promises which have no educational value.

It's really distressing to see this, but I'm not surprised.

I hope there's a political platform that will campaign on removing it post August 2027.

[ThunderBear @KuriaGib]

@aomenya Accountants have a similar body in a certain country and all it does is nothing other than invent ways to siphon money... Fight this and avoid this nonsense

[ThunderBear @KuriaGib]

It's so weird when as black people who have been perpetually discriminated against actually even think of having a way of doing away with our political representation. This is sad, classicst and racist.

[NTV Kenya @ntvkenya]

Should every Kenyan’s vote carry the same weight?
Eric Latiff doesn’t think so!

Latiff proposes a Tier 1 and Tier 2 voting system, arguing that citizens who don’t pay taxes or have criminal records should count for half a vote.

Fair or undemocratic? #FixingTheNationNTV @NationFmKE @EricLatiff @MariamBishar @fellariswambui

[#LandIsNotProperty Mwalimu Wandia @wmnjoya]

I saw that yesterday's @NationAfrica had not only the headline, but an additional 14 or so pages on next year's elections. We are in campaign mode for one year! This isn't normal, and most of all, it's so unhealthy. We won't work, we won't think long term, and resources are going to go to goonism, spectacle and bullshit. And worse, this one-year hysteria will raise tensions and fevers, to supposedly be resolved by people ticking a paper and putting it in a box, and hoping that the same government which has caused this hysteria will also count the ballots honestly. Yah yah, I know people will monitor the ballot counting, but that's again, energy and resources committed to the same thing.

We're doing this because our economy is anti-production and hostile to work. Survival depends on extraction and then competing over who gets what is extracted. We need a new political economy, surely.

[#LandIsNotProperty Mwalimu Wandia @wmnjoya]

We need to abandon the "do for Kenyans" politics. We're not natives in need of salvation from wazungu or people with access to wazungu. Kenyans have the knowledge and the energy to work and build their country, but GoK still behaves like a colonial DO and paralyzes us with a tax each time we say ng'we. If Sifuna tells us the damage he's going to undo from the current govt, that's enough, in my view. We can do the rest. We're more competent than the current political machine, anyway. CBC pun not intended.

[wambui @wambuijoan2024]

Huko tiktok Nimeona merishaw school wanaenda tour singapore, kwani siku hizi lake mbogoria haichemshi maji?

[Kukie @Karey_mwari]

Well!! Well!! Let me remind you unequivocally you said 🤣🤣🤣

[George Njoroge @georgenjoroge_]

Hon. Duale,

I build information systems for a living, so let me speak to you not as a politician but as the technical man in the room because the defence you have mounted is legally tidy and technically hollow.

You have answered the wrong question.

The country did not ask whether the two per cent fee is legal.

Everyone can see it is gazetted.

The country asked whether it should exist and who was positioned to collect it before the ink dried.

“Parliament approved it” is not a rebuttal to that, it is a confession that the charge was written into law rather than won in a tender.

Let me put it in terms my clients understand.

When an organisation buys an ERP, it pays once to build it and a maintenance fee to keep it running.

It does not then pay a toll every time a clerk writes a record into a database it already owns.

You have built the health rail with public money and then legislated a turnstile on it and pegged the turnstile to two per cent of the value passing through.

That is not “a capped fee for the use of a system,” as you put it.

The KES 5,000 cap limits a single claim; it does nothing to the aggregate.

As enrolment grows and claim volumes rise, that revenue line grows with them, automatically, forever.

You have not priced a service.

You have indexed a private income to the size of the national health budget.

Call that what it is.

You defend the arrangement by noting the law “permits sub-contracting.”

When a man reaches for the sub-contract to justify the deal, he is protecting whoever sits beneath the consortium and earns the percentage.

You told us where to look.

Here is the technical truth beneath the legal language: when you write the revenue model a fixed percentage, a named “Data Exchange Component,” a specific architecture into a regulation, you have not run a procurement.

Any of us who has sat on the other side of a Microsoft or Oracle negotiation knows exactly what a vendor lock written into law looks like and this is it, only worse, because the customer here cannot walk away.

Every Kenyan is the captive user.

I will grant you the one thing you are right about.

UHC cannot run on paper, and digitisation is not the enemy I would be the last man to argue it.

But that is not the fight, and you know it.

The fight is whether a public health system, once built with public money, should carry a private, volume-linked toll written into the law itself, and whether the hand collecting it earned that place on merit or was simply named in advance.

You closed by saying every shilling under Taifa Care belongs to the Kenyan patient.

You wrote that one paragraph after explaining the two per cent that does not.

Yours, in candour,

Njoroge from Kingeero.

[#LandIsNotProperty Mwalimu Wandia @wmnjoya]

Now, Kenyans, this obsession with KCSE is what I was trying to explain is the problem with Kenyan education when we were swooning over CBC.

In my post, I talked of KCSE very specifically, and people assumed that I'm saying language doesnt matter in law. No. I was saying that KCSE should not be the only certification that matters. Right now, if I scored a C in English, even if I was to go and train as an English teacher in England, return here, and apply to be a teacher in TSC and or to join the legal profession, and maybe I'm even 35 years old, so I've been working with English for at least 17 years since high school, some of those years in England itself, I would not be allowed to do law or high school teaching, on the basis of my KCSE language grades.

I know someone who speaks Kiswahili very well. But she got a C in Kiswahili. She did B.Ed in Kiswahili, and TSC refused to employ her on the basis of her KCSE grade. She went to Tanzania, U of Dar no less, did a masters in Kiswahili. TSC still refused. They told her her only hope was to become a primary school teacher.

Right now, you people oohed and aaahed about music being taught in CBC. Do you know that we don't have enough music teachers? After music was removed as a compulsory subject in KCSE, very few students did Music up to form 4. Meaning that today, many people doing Music in university are doing so on certificates in Music from universities or ABRSM. They can be doing private teaching at the conservertoire, touring the world because of their music, but TSC will NOT employ them, because they didn't do music in KCSE. And there's a shortage of Music teachers.

So, when you people were shouting with @KICDKenya that the problem with 8.4.4 was exam obsession, I told you no. The problem is our institutions.

1) our institutions obsess with holding people to their grades when they were 17 years old, sometimes even 30 years after high school. I know of a PhD holder who was not employed as a lecturer because of his A level grade. In 2012, thereforeabouts. The man had even published post-PhD, was over 40 years old, but no.

2) what we need is the recognition of work/lived experience. But again, your precious Fred Matiangi even wanted to CANCEL degrees earned by people who entered university doing diplomas. Yet the top professors of the 70s, the ones we still quote today, started as S1 teachers. Ali Mazrui was one of them.

I said the solution to exam obsession was to ease the pressure of certification, but almost all Kenyans joined the bandwagon of saying the problem is the curriculum. And now, let me just remind you, CBC is worse that KCSE on that count alone. Children will be blocked from entering professions based on their pathways, not just their results.

The real problem of Kenya is our class snobbery. We think that people must follow a certain path, and must be punished for ever and ever for the grades they scored when they were 17. And then you self-righteously wonder why students burn dorms when mock exams are round the corner.

We are not British aristocrats. WE ARE NOT BRITISH ARISTOCRATS. We need to stop with this class, snobbery, pedigree nonsense in the work space. It is encouraging mediocrity, corruption and most of all, exclusion of people who would otherwise be gainfully employed.

And ban the CBC pathways. Pathways are evil.

#GatekeepingKE
#CBCisheretostay