The cruelty of our civil service is a logic that was built by Lord Cromer, grandfather to Sir Evelyne Baring, the governor of Kenya who oversaw the Mau Mau concentration camps during the 1950s.

The sadism of the civil service and bureaucracy in Kenya has a long history.

Lord Cromer is considered the guru of civil service bureaucracy. He was so instrumental that even the Americans took lessons from him.

LC indirectly argued that civil servants must have no compassion or connection to the people who live where they are sent.
LC said that London must be the center of empire and must dictate how the empire runs. However, civil servants sent to far areas of the world would adopt the "defect" of seeing issues in their local context and forgetting London's interests.
The other thing LC instituted was profile of the hollow, colorless and inhuman bureaucrat. Because the British empire was the appointed incarnation of the Roman Empire, civil servants had to forget their own humanity and lay it at the service of empire.
Another cruelty LC introduced was secrecy and silence. Civil servants were never to reveal their real intentions. They were to avoid being noticed, and they were to avoid putting anything in writing. They were to operate under the radar as much as they could.
Our people have a word for this madness.

Uchawi.

That's what witchcraft is. It's about trying to influence things from under the radar without human agency being seen.
The greatest implementation of this witchcraft in Kenya was the emergency period of the 1950s. We still know very little about the British side of things because many records were destroyed as the British were leaving.

It is difficult to find stuff on Sir Baring himself.
If you understand this logic, you see why the civil service is so cruel and corrupt. They never say anything. They hide their actions behind laws, regulations and so called benchmarking. They tell us whatever they know we want to hear.

Above all? They avoid mentioning names.
For example, in this story of the corruption and cruelty of denying teachers their pension, you will notice that no names of @TSC_KE officials are mentioned. You get names of victims, but never the names of the officers bullying the teachers. https://t.co/tSLCWZL849
CBC was the same thing. @KICDKenya got away with destroying education by avoiding personal responsibility for decisions. For instance, I kept asking: "who decided that CBC was the adequate response to our education needs and why?"

That question has never been answered.
Another curious thing I noticed in the early years of CBC was that the @EduMinKenya bureaucrats would say that my problem was that I was attacking KICD officials. Who would I have attacked, when none of them bore responsibility for CBC?
But what they were really saying is that I was rejecting secrecy. I was saying that the decision to have CBC should be public and the person who made it should have owned and explained it. For civil servants, being seen IS an attack, because they are supposed to be invisible.
But this is not about punishing in retrospect. You see, if you expect take responsibility for a decision you make, you have to cover all the bases, make sure you know enough, consult all that you can, before you make a decision. That process that wasn't done for CBC.
I'm digressing.

The British government taught its comprador elite the bad habit of doing things in secrecy. Money disappears, teachers and cops are transferred, but nothing on the letter mentions WHY. We are not told the signatories. Just the stories of suffering Kenyans.
How else has the British empire and its royal family lasted this long? By avoiding responsibility and visibility. That's why Charles could talk in Barbados about slavery but not how his country and family profited from it.
https://t.co/y5iX5yAR7J
In Kenya, we have a language for this evasion. We say "let's not personalize or politicize issues."

Like the British, we have a language of passive aggression that ensures that anything that comes close to mentioning beneficiaries or agents of oppression cannot be talked about.
So @TSC_KE is not going to say a word about the teacher transfers. They will ride us out, wait for us to get tired of talking to a brick wall, and just keep terrorizing teachers. CBC was the same. They are government, they use OUR resources to ride the waves and tire us out.
The thing is, the problem never goes away. And the longer they are silent, the more rot we see. So I don't care, whether they ignore me, abuse me or block me. Justice, as Martin Luther King said, is a long arch. It's more patient than the most zombified bureaucrats in GoK.
What keeps me going is knowing that I'm human, but they have suppressed their humanity. I found about Lord Cromer because I wanted to understand whey they are the way they are. That means I'm human enough to recognize that Anglo-bureaucracy is from human beings, not from God.
We will prevail. Magoha, Nancy Macharia and the rest of the Jogoo House crew may ignore us, but their names are already in history for what they've done to education. Our kids will recall what they did. They will not talk about education as faceless, like today's academics do.

More from #LandIsNotProperty Mwalimu Wandia

I have said all I have to say on #BBIreport, which is:

1. It's a waste of Kenyan's time and precious intellect to spend it on the tantrums of malignant narcissists. We should be working where our talent and skills call us to, but we're doing damage control and #bullshitjobs.


We have to have a country where Ndii's talent is used for our economy, not on campaigning to protect Kenya from Muigai's latest tantrums. Or where doctors are employed and working, not doing locums or being jobless while Cuban doctors get cars. #bbireport


2. The political class is useless. It has no talent or skills, and it cant work. It is always looking for ways to make Kenyans work and performing rituals of power and relevance that kill enough of us to truamatize the rest of us. That's all #BBIreport is.

3. Our youth are are either underemployed or in #bullshitjobs, or being told to be entrepreneurs, only for KRA to invent new taxes and GoK to invent laws to protect cartels. #BBIreport attributes youth's problems to ethnicity and says solution is power sharing by the dynasties.

4. I don't think I can say anything more about #BBIreport than I've already said. The BBI-stans have no argument, and have been resorting to force, emotional blackmail and ultimatums. They have the force of the state but I have what they crave and will never give: my acceptance.
I will use this thread to explain the concept of "administrative bloat."

Administrative bloat is the employing of so many managers and supervisors, paying them excess salaries, while the people who do the actual work don't get employed or paid.

That is the government of Kenya.


Since the time of GoK's mother the colonial government, and its grandmother the British East Africa company, the role of the state is to control workers, control our work and its produce, and send it up the foodchain through chiefs, paramount chiefs all the way to London.

One of the cultural lies these parasistes have sold to us is that the only work that can be exploited is where there is a tangible product like tea or coffee. No. These exploit EVERYTHING, EVERYTHING. Health, education, faith, religion...EVERTYHING.

Elites are parasites. They can't work, won't work. How do they live, then? From taking away the work that we do. They use the state (especially weapons) to threaten us, and they get bureaucrats and managers to distract workers and push the loot up the gravy train.

That is why the less the elites work, the more bureaucrats the employ to protect them from direct contact with us "peasants." That's the function of civil servants. To steal our work on behalf of the elite, while conning us that we're working out of national duty.

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