Hanningtone Omollo

biochemist

[Hanningtone Omollo @omollo_hanny]

"The right most valued by all civilized men is the right to be left alone."
– Justice Louis Brandeis

[Hanningtone Omollo @omollo_hanny]

@AIRTEL_KE Unfortunately, I can't have this offer. My identity was stolen by one of your agents, now I cannot even register a line. You have also been unhelpful, from your agents in the shops, to emails, and non-response to your DM here on X!

[Hanningtone Omollo @omollo_hanny]

@AIRTEL_KE, why have you refused to solve my case of identity theft by one of your agents? You don't respond to DMs, offer generic responses to my emails, and your customer care agents have been of no help for 2 months now. Should I seek legal redress?

[#LandIsNotProperty Mwalimu Wandia @wmnjoya]

I completed my studies in 2007 and started teaching in university around 2008. From 2008 to 2015 thereabout, I remember wondering what had happened to Kenyan education. Everyone, including professors, was calling schooling useless and was running around media houses and corporations trying to turn universities into posh corporations. Students would tell us to our faces that we were teaching theory and not practical stuff, because they heard it said in the media. Then when you ask them to do the practical work like analysis of real life events, they couldn't.

That's why my first ever #MaishaKazini conversation with @TweetingPundit was about the language of uselessness that corporations had imprisoned education in. Since then, I've been saying that either we stop badmouthing knowledge as mere theory, or we simply shut down universities. Why have universities if we don't want them? We say all these terrible things and we don't realize that the children can hear us. And what they are hearing is that there's no point of learning anything. And then when they come out of universities, having fulfilled your prophecy, you blame us.

[Damaris Too @DamarisTOO1]

As Baba rests, one major thing rests with him, exposing us to who we truly were, all along.

Baba the Political scapegoat.

For all his political life, Baba was a political scapegoat for the country's tribalistic, mediocre and destructively emotional politics. Every election, most voters found every excuse to not vote for him and even celebrated when he lost whether by merit or foul play. Self-seeking politicians would fuel destructive propaganda riling voters against Baba to their advantage to secure sympathy votes.

Mothers and fathers would sow and water seeds of tribalism in their children, by passing on to them myths about Baba and why he shouldn't be elected. Religious fanatics and opportunistic faith leaders would wait for Baba to breathe, for them to say he was breathing as one rejected by God.

After elections, while in the honeymoon phase before the elected regime showed their true fangs, Baba would be branded the enemy for attempting to hold the elected regimes accountable from the onset. God forbid that Baba dared whistleblow an ill going on in a newly elected regime! His Maandamanos would be frowned at and demonized and he would be accused of sabotage and irrational and perennial rebellion.

Then once the elected regime showed it's fangs and was no longer a people's favourite, same voters would turn to Baba, to deliver them from their choice. They would want him to lead Maandamanos again, whistleblow and even push for impeachment where necessary. God forbid that Baba dared even for a second to work with their poor leadership choices! He would become the enemy promptly and would be punished harder than even the choice he was working with.Voters held everyone accountable, except themselves and they held Baba to even more stricter standards of accountability and perfection.

Now, the politics of voter unaccountability, end with Baba's resting. If you're a tribal voter you will have to do it with your chest, there is no Baba to churn vile tribal propaganda against. If you're an illiterate voter, there's no veil, you'll have to own your illiteracy. If you're a destructive emotional voter, there's no scapegoat. If you're an opportunistic faith leader auctioning your flock to the highest political bidder, you will have to do it with your chest, because there is no Baba to churn damning and divisive religious heresy against. We're now fully exposed.

The scapegoat has exited the stage.

No longer will the grand circumcision supremacists build their campaign agendas around Baba. No longer will the tribal lords build their tribal propaganda around Baba's relationship with his father. No longer will the arrogant illiterate voters, mask their poor choice as "Baba is no different from our preferred thief." No longer will the emotional voters justify their erratic ballot choices as voting to punish Baba. Everyone will have to be confidently vile now.

For the most of it, mentally and intellectually, Baba lived ahead of his time, while dealing with a people mentally and intellectually chained to decades in the past but didn't want to be told that they were backward and needed emancipation. And he was punished to his very last breathe for being a visionary, by the very same people he sought to emancipate!

This nation really wounded son of Jaramogi, took him for granted and felt so entitled to him, striking him, spiting him and sending him away empty handed, every time we had a chance to honour his sacrifices at the ballot. We treated him like a slave for the nation, while we behaved as senseless slave masters over him.

Rest, Baba. It is now done. The scapegoat has rested.

[Okiya Omtatah Okoiti @OkiyaOmtatah]

A sovereign Kenya must indeed control its destiny, and safeguarding our mineral resources is a key part of that. Here is how I plan to do so strictly within the framework of the Constitution of Kenya 2010 and the Mining Act 2016:
•I will enforce the Mining Act, 2016 fully, ensuring all stakeholders including foreign investors, comply with:
•Local content rules, requiring majority Kenyan ownership in mining companies or strong local participation.
•Environmental safety standards to protect communities and ecosystems.
•Revenue sharing with host communities to guarantee that those living near mining operations benefit directly.
•Mandatory value addition before export, which builds Kenyan industry and creates jobs.
•Critical minerals such as Rare Earths, Niobium (Mrima Hills, Kwale), Lithium (Kajiado, Kitui), Graphite (Isiolo, Samburu), and Copper/Manganese (Migori, Turkana, Machakos) will be declared strategic national assets. The State has a right of pre-emption on all strategic minerals raised in Kenya before they are sold, ensuring sovereign control over these important resources.
•I will ensure Government participation and oversight under the Act, leveraging Sections 48 and 49 emphasizing government and local equity participation respectively while enforcing strict compliance with reporting and transparency requirements under the law.
•This approach respects Kenya’s international obligations and investment climate by applying existing laws fairly and transparently, rather than sudden expropriations, thus safeguarding sovereignty without violating contracts or treaties.
By balancing enforcement of our mining laws, community benefits, environmental protection, and strategic oversight, Kenya will truly control its destiny and derive maximum benefit from its rich mineral resources.
#AskOkiyaOmtatah

[Okong' Okuna @XivTroy]

Please find attached below, for your reference 👇🏾

[Joshua Okayo @okayojoshua]

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE KING AND QUEEN OF THE NETHERLANDS: KING WILLEM-ALEXANDER & QUEEN MAXIMA FROM A KENYAN GEN Z

Dear Your Majesties,

I hear you are already here. You came. Unannounced. Unbothered. Audaciously. Oh, you came. Over 22,000 of us signed a petition against your visit, but you still came. After all, who are we? We are just Kenyans. Young, idle, poor, suffering Kenyans whose opinions do not matter at all. In fact, we are clueless about diplomacy and international relations. I know you are probably thinking to yourselves; “These Kenyans should know people.” Indeed we should know pee-poo. WELCOME TO KENYA. We love Kenya. I love Kenya.

I do not know exactly how old I am because my birth was never recorded in any hospital, a common practice back in the days since affording a hospital was, and still is, a considerably expensive practice reserved for the haves. You would make part of that group, I guess. If you were in Kenya. I happened to have casually dropped off my mother-Nyomollo’s womb along some bushy path in Uyoma on her way to amali (menial farm jobs done by most Kenyans to sustain a living with less than a US dollar a day), which other people from my locality refer to as otong’o. Those whom I am left to ask if they could be knowing my year of birth point me to the ‘children’ they saw me play with as a child, and they are convinced I must have been born in the same year they were born. Majority of such ‘agemates’ were born somewhere between 1998 and 1999. Therefore, if indeed I am not in my “another life” era, then I confirm that I am a Gen Z.

The first time I heard of a country called Netherlands was in 2006, when I started supporting Manchester United Football Club (MUFC). My elder brother, Steve, was a staunch fan of the team, and so I automatically emulated what my big bro was doing. I often got fascinated by the performance of this great goalkeeper. He is actually my world best goalkeeper of all time. I literally worshiped him then. Any match played without him was not a match. I would literally stop listening to Mzee Toldo, or Fred Arocho or any other commentator whom my brother had chosen to listen to on a particular day if Edwin van der Sar was not in the lineup. I would freak out and sense defeat from the first minute I would realise van der Sar was out of the pitch. I took time to learn a little about him, and one thing that has stayed clear in my head is that he was/is from the Netherlands.

[Hanningtone Omollo @omollo_hanny]

Repeat happy accidents https://t.co/Lwv624QpXC

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

That's because this dude doesn't know what education is.

He speaks of growing wheat, herding sheep, riding a horse, and so on, but in the era of these skills, this was the kind of education given to slaves.

Only a slave, a person who was owned as property, and used as a machine for a task, could be expected to do one task for his whole life.

A gentleman, or even a freeman of the lower classes, was not a machine for labor, but a person who could be expected to act in his own interests, and thus would need to do many different things throughout his life, depending on what served his goals at the time.

And he would need to be able to independently learn these tasks, rather than needing to be taught them in childhood.

Therefore if a boy was to formally educated, that might include some of gentleman's skills (riding, fighting with a sword, the management of finances), but his education was centered around what education really meant:

A fundamental grounding in how to live and thrive as an independent and free-willed person.

Thus, he was taught the seven liberal arts of classical antiquity:

- Arithmetic
- Geometry
- Music
- Astronomy
- Grammar
- Logic
- Rhetoric

These were not trade skills in the sense that they did not enable the performance of any particular trade or task, but that wasn't the point.

The point was that they taught the young gentleman how to think and learn.

By contrast, modern government schools were founded to train clerks and factory workers at public expense... a servant class with the specific skills necessary to be useful workers, but not the general education to be independent or question their betters?

Have you noticed which two of these arts are utterly absent from a modern government-school "education"?

That's right, logic and rhetoric. Logic is how to arrive at true conclusions from known facts. Rhetoric is how to persuade.

A servant educated in logic might notice that the things he is being told are false. A servant educated in rhetoric might notice the techniques that are being used to persuade him to act in the rulers' interests instead of his own.

If you conceive of your children's education as training in career skills, whether that be growing rice or programming a computer, you are preparing them to be slaves, not free men.

If you properly prepare them to be free men, what skills will be lucrative or useful twenty years from now is irrelevant, because they will be prepared to learn them.

In my opinion, the seven liberal arts of the modern world are:

- Logic: how to derive truth from known facts
- Statistics: how to understand the implications of data
- Rhetoric: how to persuade, and spot persuasion tactics
- Research: how to gather information on an unknown subject
- (Practical) Psychology: how to discern and understand the true motives of others
- Investment: how to manage and grow existing assets
- Agency: how to make decisions about what course to pursue, and proactively take action to pursue it.

Notice that you didn't learn any of these things in school, even if you went to a so-called "liberal arts" college. Instead, they taught you things about mitochondria and calculus and symbolism in Jon Steinbeck novels where a boy has a dog, and the dog dies.

That's because liberal arts, whether you define them as I have, or slightly differently, are the arts of the master, the arts that make one a master, and therefore not be taught in a school for slaves.

Worry less about which "career skills" AI will take over, and more about whether you are training to be, and training your kids to be, high-agency, perceptive, self-motivated people who can navigate an unknowable future with an adaptable mind.

[Isaac Saul @Ike_Saul]

People ask me all the time if I am "pro-Israel" because I am a Jew who has lived in Israel, and my answer is that being "pro-Israel" or being "pro-Palestine" or being a "Zionist" does not properly capture the nuance of thought most people do or should have about this issue. It certainly doesn't capture mine.

I have a lot to say. I’ve spent the last 72 hours writing, texting, and talking to Israelis, Jews, Muslims, and Palestinians. Much of my reaction is going to piss off people on "both sides," but I am exhausted and hurting and I do not think there is any way to discuss this situation without being radically honest about my views. So I'm going to try to say what I believe to be true the best I can.

Let me start with this: It could have been me.

That's a hard thought to shake when watching the videos out of Israel — the concert goers fleeing across an empty expanse, the hostages being paraded through the streets, the people shot in the head at bus stops or in their cars. I went to those parties in the desert, I rubbed shoulders with Israelis and Arabs and Jews and Muslims, I could have easily accepted an invitation to some concert near Sderot and gone without a care, only to be indiscriminately slaughtered. Or, perhaps worse, taken hostage and tortured.

I don’t believe Hamas is killing Israelis to liberate themselves, nor do I believe they are doing it to make peace. They're doing this because they represent the devil on the shoulder of every oppressed Palestinian who has lost someone in this conflict. They're doing it because they want vengeance. They are evening the score, and acting on the worst of our human impulses, to respond to blood with blood — an inclination that is easy to give in to after what their people have endured. It should not be hard to understand their logic — it is only hard to accept that humans are capable of being driven to this. Not defending Hamas is a very low bar to clear. Please clear it.

It’s not possible to recap the entire 5,000 year history of people fighting over this strip of land in one newsletter. There are plenty of easily accessible places you can learn about it if you want to (and, by the way, many of you should — far too many people speak on this issue with an obscene amount of ignorance, loads of arrogance, and a narrow historical lens focused on the last few decades). But I'll briefly highlight a few things that are important to me.

In my opinion, the Jewish people have a legitimate historical claim to the land of Israel. Jews had already been expelled and returned and expelled again a half dozen times before the rise of the Muslim and Arab rule of the Ottoman Empire. Of course it’s messy because we Jews and Arabs and Muslims are all cousins and descendents of the same Canaanites. But Arabs won the land centuries ago the same way Israel and Jews won it in the 20th century: Through conflict and war. The British defeated the Ottoman Empire and then came the Balfour Declaration, which amounted to the British granting the area to the Jewish people, a promise they’d later try to renege on — all before the wars that have defined the region since 1948.

That historical moment in the late 1940s was unique. After World War II, with many Arab and Muslim states already in existence, and after six million Jews were slaughtered, the global community felt it was important to grant the Jewish people a homeland. In a more logical or just world that homeland would have been in Europe as a kind of reparation for what the Nazis and others before them had done to the Jews, or perhaps in the Americas — like Alaska — or somewhere else. But the Jews wanted Israel, the British had taken to the Zionist movement, the British had conquered the Ottoman Empire which handed them control of the land, and America and Europe didn’t want the Jews. As a result, we got Israel.

The Arab states had already rejected a partitioned Israel repeatedly before World War II and rejected it again after the Holocaust and the end of the war. They did not want to give up even a little bit of their land to a bunch of Jewish interlopers who were granted it all of a sudden by British interlopers who had arrived a hundred years prior. Who could blame them? It had been centuries since Jews lived there in large numbers, and now they wanted to return in waves as secularized Europeans. Many of us would probably react the same way. So, just as humans have done forever, they fought. The many existing Arab states turned against the burgeoning new Jewish state. One side won and one side lost. This is the brutal and broken and violent world we live in, but it is what created the global world order we have now.

Are Israelis and British people "colonizers" because of this 20th century history? Sure. But that view flattens thousands of years of history and conflict, and the context of World War I and World War II. I don’t view Israelis and Brits as colonizers any more than the Assyrians or the Babylonians or the Romans or the Mongols or the Egyptians or the Ottomans who all battled over the same strip of land from as early as 800 years before Jesus’s time until now. The Jews who founded Israel just happened to have won the last big battle for it.

You can’t speak about this issue in a vacuum. You can't pretend that it wasn't just 60 years ago when Israel was surrounded on all sides by Arab states who wanted to wipe them off the face of the planet. Despite the balance of power shifting this century, that threat is still a reality. And you can't talk about that without remembering the only reason the Jews were in Israel in the first place was that they'd spent the previous centuries fleeing a bunch of Europeans who also wanted to wipe them off the face of the planet. And then Hitler showed up.

American partisans have a narrow view of this history, and an Americentric lens that is infuriating to witness. As Lee Fang perfectly put it, "Hamas would absolutely execute the ACAB lefties cheering on horrific violence against Israelis if they lived in Gaza & U.S. right-wingers blindly cheering on Israeli subjugation of Palestinians would rebel twice as violently if Americans were subjected to similar occupation."

And yet, many Americans only view modern Israel as the "powerful" one in this dynamic. Which is true — they obviously are. It isn't a fair fight and it hasn't been for decades because Israel's government is rich and resourceful, has the backing of the United States and most of Europe, and has an incredibly powerful military. At the same time, Israeli leadership has made technological and military advancements that have further tipped those scales — all while the Israeli government has helped create a resource-thin open air prison of two million Arabs in Gaza.

Conversely, Palestinians are devoid of any real unified leadership, and the Arab world is now divided on the issue of Palestine. Israel is unwilling to give the people in Gaza and the West Bank more than an inch of freedom to live. These are largely the refugees and descendents of the refugees of the 1948 and 1967 wars that Israel won. And you can't keep two million people in the condition that those in the Gaza strip live in and not expect events like this.

I'm sorry to say that while the blood on the ground is fresh. The Israelis who were killed in this attack largely have nothing to do with those conditions other than being born at a time when Israel and Jews have the upper hand in this conflict. Some of the victims weren’t even Israeli — they were just tourists. This is why we describe them as “innocent” and why Hamas has only reaffirmed that they are a brutal terror organization with this attack — an organization that I hope is quickly toppled, for the sake of both the Palestinian people and the Israelis. But as someone with a deep love for Israel, with friends in danger and people I know still missing, it breaks my heart to say it but I'm saying it again because it remains perhaps the most salient point of context in a tangled mess full of centuries of context:

You cannot keep two million people living in the conditions people in Gaza are living in and expect peace.

You can't. And you shouldn’t. Their environment is antithetical to the human condition. Violent rebellion is guaranteed. Guaranteed. As sure as the sun rising.

And the cycle of violence seems locked in to self-perpetuate, because both sides see a score to settle:

1) Israel has already responded with a vengeance, and they will continue to. Their desire for violence is not unlike Hamas’s — it’s just as much about blood for blood as any legitimate security measure. Israel will “have every right to respond with force." Toppling Hamas — a group, by the way, Israel erred in supporting — will now be the objective, and civilian death will be seen as necessary collateral damage. But Israel will also do a bunch of things they don't have a right to. They will flatten apartment buildings and kill civilians and children and many in the global community will probably cheer them on while they do it. They have already stopped the flow of water, electricity, and food to two million people, and killed dozens of civilians in their retaliatory bombings. We should never accept this, never lose sight that this horror is being inflicted on human beings. As the group B’Tselem said, “There is no justification for such crimes, whether they are committed as part of a struggle for freedom from oppression or cited as part of a war against terror.” I mourn for the innocents of Palestine just as I do for the innocents in Israel. As of late, many, many more have died on their side than Israel's. And many more Palestinians are likely to die in this spate of violence, too.

Unfortunately, most people in the West only pay attention to this story when Hamas or a Palestinian in Gaza or the West Bank commits an act of violence. Palestinian citizens die regularly at the hands of the Israeli military and their plight goes largely unnoticed until they respond with violence of their own. Israel had already killed an estimated 250 Palestinians, including 47 children, this year alone. And that is just in the West Bank.

2) Every single time Israel kills someone in the name of self-defense they create a handful of new radicalized extremists who will feel justified in wanting to take an Israeli life in retribution sometime in the future. Half of Gaza’s two million people are under the age of 19 — they know little besides Hamas rule (since 2006), Israeli occupation, blockades, and rockets falling from the sky. The suffering of these innocent children born into this reality is incomprehensible to me. They will suffer more now because of Hamas’s actions and Israel’s response, all through no fault of their own.

There is no way out of this pattern until one side exercises restraint or leaders on both sides find a new solution. Israelis will tell you that if Palestinians put their guns down then the war would end, but if Israel put their guns down they'd be wiped off the planet. I don't have a crystal ball and can’t tell you what is true. But what I am certain of is that every time Israel kills more innocents they engender more rage and hatred and recruit more Palestinians and Arabs to the cause against them. There is no disputing this.

So, why did this happen now?

I'm not sure how to answer that question except to say it was bound to happen eventually. It was a massive policy and intelligence failure and Netanyahu should pay the price politically — he is a failed leader. Iran probably helped organize the attack and the money freed up by the Biden administration's prisoner swap probably didn't help the situation, either. Israel's increasingly extremist government and settlers provoking Palestinians certainly didn't help. Nor has going to the Al-Aqsa mosque and desecrating it. Nor do blockades and bombings and indiscriminate subjugation of a whole people. Nor does refusing to talk to non-terrorist leaders in Palestine. Nor does illegally continuing to expand and steal what is left of Palestinian land, as many Jews and Israelis have been doing in the 21st century despite cries from the global community to stop. A violent response was predictable — in fact, plenty of people did predict it.

Israel is forever stuffing these people into tinier and tinier boxes with fewer and fewer resources. But if you want to blame Israeli leaders for continuing to expand and settle land that does not belong to them (as I do), then you should also spare some blame for Palestinian leaders for repeatedly not accepting a partitioned Israel during the 20th century that could have led to peace (as I do).

Please also remember this: Hamas is still an extremist group. The Palestinian people do not have a government or leaders who legitimately represent their interests, and it sure as hell isn't Hamas. Will some Palestinians cheer and clap at the dead, or spit on them as they are paraded through Gaza? Yes they will. And they have. Many will also mourn because they loathe Hamas and know this will only make things worse. This is no different than how some Americans cheer at the dead in every single war we've ever fought. It's no different than the Israelis who set up lawn chairs to watch their government bomb Palestine and cheer them on, too. This doesn't mean Palestinians or Israelis or Americans are evil — it means some of them are giving in to their violent impulses, and their zealous feelings of righteous vengeance.

Solutions, you ask? I can’t say I have any. If you came here for that, I’m sorry. The two-state solution looks dead to me. A three-state solution makes some sense but feels out of the view of all the people who matter and could make it happen. I wish a one-state solution felt realistic — a world of Israelis and Arabs and Muslims and Jews living side by side with equal rights, fully integrated and defused of their hate, is a version of Israel that I would adore. But it seems less and less realistic with every new act of violence.

Am I pro-Israel or pro-Palestine? I have no idea.

I'm pro-not-killing-civilians.

I'm pro-not-trapping-millions-of-people-in-open-air-prisons.

I'm pro-not-shooting-grandmas-in-the-back-of-the-head.

I'm pro-not-flattening-apartment-complexes.

I'm pro-not-raping-women-and-taking-hostages.

I'm pro-not-unjustly-imprisoning-people-without-due-process.

I'm pro-freedom and pro-peace and pro- all the things we never see in this conflict anymore.

Whatever this is, I want none of it.

[Okong' Okuna @XivTroy]

In the early 1960s, a small seminary was established in one of the prominent cities in Tanzania. It was intended to train pastors in both theological studies and basic technical skills, and specifically targeted individuals from economically disadvantaged communities in East and Central Africa.

Once an individual with potential had been identified through liaisons and scouts, the seminary would connect them to a sponsor abroad, who would, in turn, sponsor their learning journey. Thus, over 90% of the students on campus were on scholarship.

To prevent learning disruptions, the administration - a missionary organization - built over 100 housing units spread out over at least 100 acres. And these were not simple houses but 2 to 4-bedroom mansionettes to host the students and their families.

Other amenities included modern sporting fields for different sports: football, volleyball, basketball, and tennis. The best and largest library I have ever come across, and a well-paved road that ran all around the campus.

The seminary was self-sustaining. Students and their family members were hired to oversee different administrative and menial tasks for an income. Some went to the farms, others milked the cows, and some tended to the chickens.

All produce was sold internally - to students and tutors. You had eggs, a fully-stocked shop, farm produce, and milk at a fraction of the retail costs in the market. Neighboring communities also benefited immensely through employment and service accessibility. The seminary had a medical center as well as a kindergarten, which was open to them.

It was basically a heaven. All you had to do was come with your family, focus on learning, and also earn a guaranteed income while at it. If you excelled, the seminary would connect you to more sponsors, and that's how hundreds of students and their families found their way abroad.

By the 1990s and early 2000s, the institution boasted the most diversified population of students and staff in East and Central Africa. It was a cocktail of nationalities: from Sudanese to Ugandans, Kenyans to Mozambicans.

But that is also the period when the power wrangles started, and the Tanzanian government, together with native stakeholders, decided to expel the foreign adminsitrators. They figured they could run it better and colluded to prematurely chatter it into a full-fledged university offering secular subjects.

The original missionary administrators tried to reason with them. They said, while the idea was good, time was necessary for the seminary to fully transition into a university. The natives and their government would hear none of it. They said it was their country. They would not be told how to run their institutions.

So, off the missionaries went. Some would not even be allowed to pack their belongings. The police fetched them from the office, and took them straight to the airport. It was terrible. They had to organize transportation for their possession from Nairobi.

Next were the staff members from other African countries. The immigration department frustated the lot. Contracts were terminated prematurely, the court processes infiltrated, and work permits would not be renewed. Every and anything to expel the foreigners.

Thus, seminary became a university in 2005, and was soon thronged by native administrators and students. And all seemed okay as the university witnessed its first windfall in teh form of income generated from the tuition fees, but this was shortlived as soon cracks began to emerge.

First to go was sensibility as greed and ego took over. Every native wanted to lead and plunder the most. It was their turn to eat - where they had not planted. Soon, it was evident that the tuition fees could barely sustain the learning costs let alone the recurring maintenance costs.

To attract more students and present an image of modernity, the institution commisioned two storey buildings and established several branches across Tanzania. These too failed horrendously. Students went without water for weeks and many opted for external accomodation.

The self-sustaining economy was eroded as only a handful of the self-paying students were willing to partake in the unglamorous farming routines. They went shopping in the supermarkets in town, so the local shop wilted. And the produce economy wilted painfully as cows and chicken died from neglect.

By 2012, the institution was asking for government bailout. They tried to reach out to the former missionary administrators to no avail. Despite the government support, it was too late to save the sinking ship. And by 2019, the institution was completely deregistered. It had taken less than a decade for the natives to destroy what had been built in almost 50 years.

I remember when they expelled my father, a decorated theologian. I remember the cold, methodical rap on the door like it was yesterday. You would think it would be strangers, but alas! It was the same people he called friends and students the day before. It ate at him like worms, made a shell of the best man I ever knew.

We have a problem in Africa, and it is cultural: what we omit and what we commit. And we can dig our heads in the sand for as long as we wish to, but soon, we will have to face ourselves in the mirror. Our value system is eroded, and until we tell ourselves the truth, this story will repeat itself, until we have eaten everything to the ground.

You could have all the coups in the world; you could have elections every 6 months; it is all for naught if the mind is not cleansed. It's the same old mind in a different suit every time.

[Stella @clairdestella]

Check out this timeline leading up to the current state of Sudan 👀

[Claire Nasike Akello @MissNasike]

I spent my afternoon yesterday with wonderful people in a garden with a wide array of indigenous medicinal plants to Kenya.

Let me tell you Maina, these are the things big pharma does not want us to know. This is the knowledge we were robbed of by the Europeans.

[Hanningtone Omollo @omollo_hanny]

@austinbelcak @SaveNotion

[Ismail Ahmed @IsmailiAhmedR]

I went back to the hotel in Dubai where I met with my boss after I submitted a dossier containing evidence of widespread fraud and corruption in UNDP. His advice was I should withdraw allegations or else I would be blacklisted and never be able to work in remittance industry. 1/3

[Gichuki Kahome @kahome_steve]

In the short term, cutting on unnecessary expenses & increasing your savings, helps retain your purchasing power.

In the long term, only investing in assets that do well in times of high inflation will help.

These assets include equities, real estate and productive land.

[Christina @CWitvrouwen]

There's no reason to kill biggest,rarest wild animals to fund conservation when 10.000$ paid by trophy hunters to kill could be donated directly towards effective conservation solutions or support for struggling communities
Regenerative Safaris should replace TH @TrophyXpose

[Hanningtone Omollo @omollo_hanny]

"You would never choose to only use half your talent but when you dismiss useful ideas because you don't like someone, that's effectively what you're doing."

A Tiny Thought worth reading in the Sunday @farnamstreet Brain Food Newsletter

https://t.co/DvDmkq0XRy

[Leo Kemboi @LeoKemboi]

“The work that we do is a kind of mental torture.” Inside @facebookapp's African outsourced content moderation hub, where some workers toil for as little as $1.50 per hour @CsChelugui

https://t.co/TqKZlFupeK

[Rasna Warah @RasnaWarah]

My new book is out!!! Now available @NuriaStore Order your copy now. Book will be available on Amazon from 15 Feb.