This article is based on tweets of Dr Wandia Njoya (@wmnjoya), a lecturer at a local university.
It is about the newly signed KICD Act, which among other things continues to useher in irrelevant and unncessary addition to the Kenya Competency-Based Curriculum – CBC
It begins
In April 2015, students at Garissa university were minding their own student business, just being young and being students, because that is what we want young people to do. They had expressed worries about the hostility towards non-locals, but education kept them there.
On the morning of April 2 2015, they were attacked by terrorists. Within hours 147 were dead. But it’s not about the number. These are young people. The future of their parents. Love and nurturing had gone into them because that’s what we human beings do.
There was a response from the Recce squad that stopped the carnage, but later on, we found out that it would have been sooner had the police helicopter not been attending to more “important” matters. The important matters were the police chopper that was available, (I think the only one of the many that was working, considering billions wasted on dysfunctional choppers), was ferrying some slay queens from Mombasa to Nairobi after a weekend of sexual escapades. Click me to read more.
We have always known there is a problem with the intellectual orientation of the police, given the ease with which they kill young men for things as simple as being deaf or coming home from a football match.
READ: Boniface Mwangi’s on the intellectual orientation of Kenya police.
But instead of getting a fundamental intellectual reorientation of the police, what did we get? A makeover and catwalk rehearsals for Beijing Fashion Week, depicted by the new blue police uniform.
We also know that Garissa and neighboring counties have been subjected to systematic marginalization since before independence. KDF and the police have ravaged the people of those counties.
When such tragedies happen, over decades, the questions WE should ask ourselves is what should we be doing differently? And many things could be said. End marginalization. Improve education. Improve intelligence gathering and emergency response. Retrain the armed forces.
And so much more. That is what any HUMAN BEING does. Tragedies and human suffering demand we take the burden of fixing society so that we minimize the possibility of people dying for the stupidity of the ruling elite. But what does GoK do? It holds the victims responsible.
Schools are supposed to be a celebration of LIFE. We pour care and knowledge into our kids because that’s our job as adults. Kids are supposed to be broadening their minds and opening their hearts. When the opposite happens in schools, we owe the gods and our ancestors an answer.
But instead, CBC has removed knowledge from the curriculum, it aims to turn kids into mindless workers. Now with this law, the kids are being trained to expect to be killed, not to be loved and protected by all of us as their parents. This KICD amendment is evil.
And do not be enticed by the serpents in the garden that is education with questions about what Garissa students could have done, and what our kids can do to prevent themselves from being killed. DO NOT ANSWER THOSE HYPOTHETICAL QUESTIONS.
If you try to answer, you get locked in the evil logic and you will go down a path that will destroy your soul. We have an evil government if its primary question is not what we must do to enhance life, but what the potential victims of murder can do to protect themselves.
Ultimately, the work that Kenyans must do is soul restoration. We must go back to our humanity, ask ourselves what care and love look like, and what we must do to return it back. Do this instead of following the soap opera of politicians.
Let politicians, and their civil servant maids and butlers writing evil laws, drift in their imperial Titanic towards the iceberg of justice. Let them sink with their souls. Let’s not follow them.
The problem isn’t policy or inefficiency any more. It’s our inability to care and to know. So let us instead restore our souls. Let us read, love, tell our stories, and remind ourselves what it means to be human. LOVE is the revolution.
