By Rose Akoth
Laikipia University
Life is unpredictable. When you are alive and well, you never know what tomorrow holds, whether it will be sorrow or horror. Sometimes you can live your entire life without ever hearing anyone speak positively about you. People will ignore your efforts, your struggle, and your good heart. It is only when you die that they will start saying good things about you. This shows how we live with people with shrunken hearts, people who only think of breaking others, not creating. People with ambiguous ambitions that cannot help even one person, let alone the whole nation.
Kenya is a nation of many people and many cultures, but without a common direction, without a common vision, and without a clear plan for the future. We claim to be one country, but in reality, we are divided into many small ethnic kingdoms.
Take marriage for example. In our African society, it is considered a must that everyone should have a wife or a husband. Is marriage really a must? Is it the only measure of success? In many villages today, some people are humiliated, disrespected, and called names simply because they are not married and do not have children. A man or a woman can be educated, hardworking, and respectful, but if they are not married, they are seen as a failure. We have been taught that the only purpose of marriage is to come together and have children. This is what our culture believes, and our elders say nothing can change it. But we must ask ourselves, who started these cultures and what were their real intentions?
The same culture has led to tribalism, which is the best explanation for why Kenya is falling. If not for tribal crises and cultural divisions, we could be having one strong and united Kenyan culture. Instead, we have more cultural divisions than anywhere else in the whole world. During elections, we do not vote for ideas or development, we vote for our tribe. That is why Kenya, a country that could have been far in terms of development, remains behind.
Furthermore, religion, which should save us, has also become a business. Everyone today wants to come up with a new design of a church that can attract many customers, as they call Christians. The pulpit has become a marketplace. The youth are jobless, depressed, and hopeless, yet they are being told to give the little they have as seed money. Our leaders are busy stealing public funds while the common mwananchi is left to pray for a miracle that will never come.
If we want to save this falling Kenya, we must change our mindset completely. We must stop judging people by whether they are married or not, which tribe they come from, or which church they attend. Let us build one culture: The Kenyan culture of hard work, unity, honesty, and love for one another. Kenya will not fall if we, the young people, decide to stand and fix it.
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