Why won’t the ‘silent majority’ rise up and challenge status quo?

In a rousing speech in 1969, former US President Richard Nixon appeals to “the great majority of fellow Americans” to speak up and take charge of things.

This silent majority had stayed on the sidelines as vocal minorities protested against the protracted Vietnam war.

President Nixon believed that the silent majority sided with him but were too timid to get their voices out. Yet the Vietnam war was the single most defining issue for America at the time.

Why is it that in the Kenya of 2022, despite so much not going right - a mismanaged economy, unemployment, government inefficiency, patronage, bad politics, corruption, drought - Kenyans are not angry enough.

A majority of them are just silent seemingly happy to get by in life.

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The silent majority, a huge proportion of the population who know and want what is right for them, are seemingly unmoved.

They just haven’t gotten the guts to demand what is right for them. In most cases, these are people for whom the Azimio/Kenya Kwanza dichotomy doesn’t apply.

Because of the timid, silent majority, our politics have failed to offer new solutions to our problems nor transcend the gory history of the past.

Take the case of the missing fuel: Apart from complaints and shrugs from motorists and commuters, the majority of Kenyans have been silent, helpless and waiting on someone else to do something about it.

I bet the fuel crisis wouldn’t have gone on for long elsewhere. The lack of selflessness, the lack of enthusiasm to act in the interest of the group, could be attributed to a short-term view of things: The impulse is to live only, for now, today; the temptation to plunder for the comfort of the individual is high while the incentive to invent and save for tomorrow’s convenience is utterly low.

And it is not just that the silent are weak in the face of authority; that they can’t protest against rising taxation and dropping standards of living.

Like the Hollow Men in TS Eliot’s poem, their “dried voices” have been “meaningless.” “As wind in dry grass/Or rats’ feet over broken glass…/Paralysed force, gesture without motion.”

The silent majority have remained silent as public hospitals and public schools got ruined by bad policies. Just because they had options, they let the standards drop.

Now we can hear their groans. Private education is not cheap and (God forbid) a terminal disease wipes out all their life savings.

Living near a police station no longer guarantees safety. To have peace of mind, you hire a private guard. Want a constant supply of water? Drill a borehole.

They have remained silent as public transport was taken up by cartels. The silent majority has stayed back as those who represent the worst in us have stepped forward to lead us. They expect miracles from this lot.

They have stayed silent as the Executive (the administrative State and bureaucracy) has bullied and captured the Legislature (which then makes bad, selfish laws) and attempted to run down and delegitimise the Judiciary.

And now, the government is going after what was working before- the private sector. Just to be clear, the private sector is different from the enterprise.

Most Kenyan enterprise is largely opportunistic and exploitative; it tries to make up for where the government is failing. And because it is unregulated, it ends up harming the people it is trying to help.

Hence why they too, have remained silent (deluded that the margins would look good forever) when they ought to have spoken up against gross injustices because it impacts the bottom line as well.

And so for how long will the majority be overpowered by the noisy minority? Imagining a new Kenya will be possible only when the power of the people – the silent majority- rises over the power of the politicians and the ruling elite.

By not speaking up, or getting agitated, the silent majority have become enablers in their own misery thus entrenching misrule.

“The 1992 crop of Young Turks such as Raila Odinga, Kiraitu Murungi, Anyang’ Nyong’o, James Orengo, Paul Muite and Charity Ngilu” argues Charles Hornsby in his seminal book, Kenya: A History Since Independence, “are now elderly, fully socialised Kenyan politicians. Their experience of 15 years of ethnic tension, violence and money politics has not left them, idealised democrats.” He could have been talking about the whole Kenyan political architecture.

There has been minimal shift despite the aggressive “redistributive and growth-oriented policies” of the last two decades. Ours largely remains a “patron-client politics” where the end justifies the means. And therein lies the problem; the forest has changed, but the monkeys have remained the same.

 Mr Kipkemboi is Partnerships and Special Projects Editor, Standard Group