The Middle Class vanished And Today Two Very Different Classes (One Affluent, The Other In The Gutter) Live Side By Side. How Long Can The Peace Hold?
This article was written in 2006 but is more relevant just now than it has ever been.
The Day starts in two very different ways for two Kenyans living within barely 100 metres of each other.
For Derrick living in a comfortable Golf course house that his parents own, he must wake up in the wee hours to read for his upcoming O level exams. He prefers to read with soft music playing in the background and that means switching on the CD player. It is cold outside but the solid 3-bedroomed maisonette and the heavy dressing gown that his uncle sent from London keep the 17 year old fairly warm.
Barely 100 metres away over a high wall that divides the Golf course estate and the Kibera slums yet another O level candidate, 18-year old Gloria is far from being warm. And neither does she have the privilege of a warm dressing gown although in the tiny corrugated iron sheet room that she calls home, she definitely needs it a lot more than Derrick does in his parents warm house. The fact that Gloria has gotten this far in her education is a miracle. It is barely 5 am but her mother got up to go to the popular wholesale vegetable market, Marikiti at least an hour earlier, catching the special matatu that carries early morning traders to the market. She fetches vegetables and other groceries to sell at her small kiosk at Golf Course Estate and sometimes door to door when business is bad.
Gloria’s concentration is interrupted by the noisy lovemaking going on right next door. There is really no privacy in the houses separated by a re-cycled corrugated iron sheet that has seen better days. For a moment she wonders whether their neighbor, Ipite ever worries about Aids. The man who works as a shop assistant somewhere on River Road seems to have only one mission in life to bed anything in skirts. Only the previous week he had made a pass at her…
This is the boiling pot that is Kenya, with only two distinct classes. Namely the have-everything’s and the have-nothing’s. represented here by Derrick and Gloria both Form four candidates living two very different lives barely within 100 metres of each other.
It is normal to have poor people in society anywhere in the world, but the sad thing here is that Derrick’s parents are wealthy from corruption. The same corruption that keeps Gloria’s mother poor and quickly suffocates any chances of her getting out of the Kibera slums and living a better life in spite of the fact that she works so hard.
The poverty in Kenya is politically-generated and corruption-generated.
Derrick will probably be making very opinionated comments in this blog in a few years about the future of Kenya, after a solid university education somewhere, if not locally then abroad. Gloria will most likely never get to hear about this blog in her life time. A computer is still something of a mystery (let alone the Internet) to her since her secondary school cannot afford a computer lab like Derricks’s expensive private school. The exam she is about to sit is a do or die situation for her. But then even if she were to do well, the obstacles standing between her and a university education are colossal. Her vegetable-selling single-mother will certainly not be able to afford any university education. Her only chance will be to do well enough to make it into one of the local public universities.
The irony of it all is that if by some strange twist of fate the two Kenyans end up in a situation where they are chasing the same job then Gloria does not stand a chance in hell or anywhere else. Her single mother being a-nobody and corruption not withstanding. And then if it gets any further than that, most employers in Kenya these days do not consider anybody without a university degree. Even cleaners and night guards are graduates these days. The odds are stacked heavily against Gloria ever getting a university education.
Reading through newspaper headlines these days, one gets a feeling that something will have to give soon. There are just too many frustrated people in this country who have never heard half a chance in their lives.
In a recent newspaper there was a news report about running battles between hawkers on the streets f Nairobi and City Council Askaris that left one female askari badly injured. In the same newspaper there were reports about squatters who had defied an order to move even after their house and property were destroyed.
That is the boiling pot that is Kenya. How long will the peace hold if the current government is re-elected and life continues as usual?
Other Interesting Articles In This Blog:
Biography reveals Kenyan military secrets.
Why tribalism is so silly.
Why The Daily Nation Is Such A Potent Political Weapon.
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Well written!But it would have been much more poignant if the setting was loresho and the nearby soweto slum but I do agree that the class gulf is growing and even some people we thought were middle class are falling off.
ReplyDeleteIf the middle class begins to reduce we will have a revolution on our hands sooner rather than later.....