Newspaper headlines explain rot in Kenya

The leading news item in a recent online issue of a Kenyan newspaper was about the ‘alarm’ felt by the authorities due to a massive increase in the trafficking and use of marijuana in the country, including by children.

The next news item was a report celebrating the capture of Mungiki suspects in Nyandarua, followed by one reporting the rape and murder of a 73-year-old woman in Murang’a.

Not to be outdone in the bad-news stakes, the fourth item on the same web page was about the Kenya Revenue Authority impounding contraband sugar, while the fifth was about a Tharaka-Nithi procurement officer denied bail in a bribery case in which he’s the principal suspect.

Rounding up the news reports was one about a pathologist who is in court facing charges of having stolen the heart of a deceased person while performing an autopsy. This was the second such charge for the same pathologist.

There wasn’t much relief from the bad news elsewhere: in one of the other dailies on that same day, the lead item was about an opposition bigwig attacking the Deputy President’s 2022 ambitions, followed by a report about a bricklayer who had two six-inch nails driven into his head when he went to demand his dues.

These ‘cheerful’ reports were rounded up by two others: One detailing the plight of homeowners whose houses have been condemned as having been built on riparian land – how did the house plans get approved, one asks – and the final report, which detailed yet another government corruption scandal, this time at the Ministry of Health.

It turns out that the quoted price for 37 CT scanners that the ministry is acquiring – Sh227 million each – is grossly inflated. A quick search on the Internet shows that the things go for about Sh45 million each at the most.

This is the state of Kenya today. Behind the headline stories of beastly fathers defiling their daughters for three years, sugar contaminated with poisonous chemicals, hundreds of litres of killer home brews found by police, thousands of people dying every year on the roads and so on – behind these headlines is the reality of a failing, if not failed, society.

The government has failed as a governing entity. It’s now little more than a collection of competing thieves each trying to grab as much as they can before someone else grabs it.

The State as an entity is failing. It’s not quite as far gone as the government, but the Kenyan State doesn’t control any territory more than 150km either way of the Mombasa-Malaba road.

To the north, that territory is run by Al Shabaab and their fellow terrorists, who kill Kenyan authorities for fun in almost same fashion -- improvised explosives Devices buried on roads -- every now and then. To the south, it’s left to its devices, dominated by wild animals and tribal militias.

With the government a failure and the state failing, there doesn’t seem to be much for the average Kenyan to look forward to.

Maybe we expected too much of this ‘dot com’ governing pair and their assortment of thieving handlers, friends, fellow politicians and alleged “rivals” that have now taken to collusions greased by ‘handcheques’.

There’s now not much to see in the country, and even less to do. Those that can are voting with their feet, those that can’t are resigned to a Hobbesian existence in which you steal what you can, kill whomever you disagree with, and let nature take its course.

Whoever is last to leave the country, please turn off the lights!