ENTRY OF AI INTO LEARNING PLACED US BETWEEN SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

Robert Wesonga

You do not have to be a cynic to doubt who has written this. Not even a Thomas, or a jealous person who goes green with envy when they see glitter from some place that is not theirs. Because, by the time you are done reading this article, you should be able to imagine that it has been written by Artificial Intelligence (AI). In its entirety. For that is how far along we have come, since the arrival of AI, and its attendant machine learning.

We are now happy to cheer AI, and marvel that soon we will be able to graduate with AI assisted accolades. In which case, you wonder, whether it will be AI or human beings graduating. In retrospect, it should not take a cynic to know that AI has made teaching and learning efficient; it has bettered on the functionality of search engines like Google, or information repositories such as Wikipedia. AI is driving the teaching and learning agenda, faster than the legendary Concorde could ever fly from London to New York.  

Recently, while having innocent banter with friends, some naughty fellow mentioned that soon, human beings will be able to leave the task of conceiving and bearing children to Artificial Intelligence. It was all funny, until one of us mentioned how this situation was going to put all men out of work. What followed was a debate about how the most unimaginable of stuff now happens – courtesy of technology and innovation.

Before we try to get serious, a little opening up on Scylla and Charybdis will put us into the loop. A story in the Greek mythology is told of two sea monsters separated by a narrow seaway: Scylla and Charybdis. Scylla, a six-headed monster, was always waiting by a cliff, to pounce onto sailors and eat them. On the other hand, Charybdis was the massive whirlpool that swallowed entire ships three times in a day. When returning home from the War of Troy, Odysseus, a mythological Greek hero, must find out how to navigate this sea dilemma; he must choose how to navigate his ship between the two monsters up to Ithaca. It is obvious that faced with the AI conundrum, like Odysseus, we must find means to navigate the AI dilemma, and get home safe and dry.

The beauty with AI is that it has made learning easier – even brought it home. Whereas we had to read through volumes of information from search engines like google, and information repositories such as Wikipedia, AI allows you to ask for exactly what we want to read. If you are a student, you can then even ask AI to frame it the way your teacher or professor likes seeing it. The only problem with this that we have to ask who really did the task: AI or the student? In all these online interaction, you do not even have to be polite! For AI does not care about sensibilities, and the aspect of courtesy and the humane when answering what you have asked.

AI enhances accessibility to learning, is flexible and offers personalized learning experiences. It can facilitate differentiated learning whereby learners with various or special needs are accommodated and served far much better than the traditional school would. 

For teachers, they do not have to spent man-hours (or is it donkey hours?) doing the laborious – and sometimes loathsome task of looking for content in books, and organizing it. AI will even prepare for them how to deliver the content to an often disinterested generation, which the luxuries of technology have turned learners into.  If you are a lazy teacher, a little stroll to an ever eager Gemini, ChatGPT or Deepseek is all you need so you can ask them to do your bidding, as you scroll through betting odds on your phone, or read the latest football gossip. In short, AI is so generous, that it gives us an opportunity descend into the flabbiness that comes with comforts.

Of course such teachers and lecturers will argue that using AI is better than the ‘yellow notes’ of the erstwhile professors, but they do not shudder to imagine how in a couple of years, they will be 20 years dead academically. An academic who surrenders fully to AI without painstaking, rigorous research is a masquerade who merely serves the interests of the big-tech companies in dreaming up solutions to drive the world into potential laziness.

However, if used creatively, AI will assist teachers can come up with relevant test items, mark assignments, and grade them objectively for instant feedback to the learners. Besides, teachers can use AI to track and predict what their learners’ future learning interests and career prospects are.

I will go back to the learners in explaining what we must fear about AI. The world over, we now have students whose entire semester’s lesson notes cannot fill the one side of a matchbox turning up to take examinations, while fully relying on AI to make up for their laziness and irresponsibility. Before Elon Musk and Gates make good their threat to replace doctors and teachers with AI, we must check against AI ruining the integrity of the global workforce. Unmitigated use of AI portends that the world will one day operate at the behest of big tech companies and Information Technology bigwigs.  

All said and done, it is obvious that we cannot avoid AI, lest we get trampled upon by the tides of time, and by those that will continue to use it. Like Odysseus in Homer’s classics, The Iliad and The Odyssey, we must choose between sailing too close to Scylla, and losing six sailors, or veering too close to Charybdis, and risk capsizing the entire ship – with all the life and treasures in it. Avoiding one danger certainly means falling into another – we have to choose the lesser. Prudence, then, will demand that we find means, policies and structures that will enable us to use AI positively, and ethically.

Note:   You may now believe that this article has been written by a human being. 100%. For AI will not be happy to say the things I have said above about itself – or will it?

 

Robert Wesonga is a freethinker who writes his own things

PRESIDENT DECORATES DEVELOPMENT TO WESTERN KENYA IN DARK ART

By Robert Wesonga

This week, the state's most significant personality arrived in Western Kenya. He had come to the land of Mulembe to deliver development goodies. In a typically Kenyan way. For some reason, this most respected state personality chose to package the development in a most peculiar fashion. The promise of roads and stadia and factories and things, needed to be embroidered in an entertaining package of insults hurled, epithets exchanged, and body-shaming traded.

Some say that he went so low; that going on rampage against people he has worked with and knows more than we do, he had descended to the very doldrums of dark arts that characterize our political duels. I do not agree with those who think like that. In any case, he was not going anywhere, even low. In some cases, it is impossible for an artist to go so low in entertaining his audience.

While in some places development narrative is delivered in terms of billions and hundreds of millions, in Western Kenya, it was delivered in descriptions of body parts. We now know who has a big head, swollen stomach, misshapen body parts and oblong head. We even know who slept with who; who murdered who, and who dumped dead bodies in River Yala – apparently all under watch of very senior people – and we also know who they were.

There goes the anatomy of development in the region. First, it comes ferried in hordes of tax-funded motorcades and helicopters. All the way from Nairobi. It comes in a form accompanied by descriptions of physical deformities of other people. In the big, oblong and misshapen heads of other leaders. While in some places development goes narrated in kilometres of bitumen roads, dams, factories and things, here, the size and shape of heads of political opponents precedes the project.

Again, development travelled to Western Kenya with rumours, gossip and innuendo. The chief state personality proved that we can all get so low in handing out low-level tabloid rumours, gossip and uppercuts of insults and other epithets.

The senior most state personality was perhaps not told why the schools in Western Kenya are so severely understaffed, nor have fewer classrooms compared to schools in other places. Or maybe he was more concerned with the realisation that one of his political opponents did not have a house. Oh, sorry, that he was living in a borrowed house. And that that was not all: this political opponent, a joker he said, was also staying with a borrowed wife. That was a lot of content from Nairobi, enough to entertain and shock us for a lifetime.

Our executive almost bragged that he is not fat like his opponents. This suggested that he has grown thin trying to develop the Western region of the country. It show that the hard work of uplifting the level of the region had made him to un-fat, the cut down size. Seeing that his opponents were not enjoying the luxury of such hard work in taking Busia, Bungoma, Trans Nzoia and Kakamega right into Singapore, he advised them to go to the gym and cut down the size of their bellies, heads, and streamline the shape of heads.

He is sure that if they go to the gym, choose the treadmill, and ran on it with the speed with rumour mill was running and delivering juicy news to Western Kenya. He is sure the gym will improve their bodies. With the improvement, the state of Butula-Nambale-Adungosi road - the only dusty or muddy road in a pre-Singapore Kenya that connects three major sub counties.

In dishing out development to my county, the president was also generous with information. He said that he knows many things: that while he occupied the second highest office, one of his opponents, a minister for interior, killed and dumped innocent people in River Yala! That while he sat in the second highest seat, he was aware that another of his opponents made a young girl pregnant and later killed her. The president did not initiate any proceedings to make these people pay for these heinous misdeeds. He packaged them and delivered to an audience waiting to understand just why Mumias Sugar and Webuye Panpaper Mills have never fully returned from admittance in hospital.

Some people think that having a great leader who arrives in your backyard loaded with rumours of his opponents' sleeping talents, or escapades with women, or dossiers of his so-called enemies murder credentials, is a bad thing. It is not. Some reckon that for a president to arrive and dish out insults and descriptions of people's bodies, is as low as the lowest-rated gutter newspaper, or online tabloid. It is not. You see, having alighted from the Vision 2030 train and boarded a ship to Singapore, we shall need entrainment along the way as we sail to our new Utopia. What better person to lead the entertainment squadron than the president himself? Bill must surely fit the bill, seeing how easily he blends a crude sense of humour, dark comedy, bitterness, good English and some ordinary Kiswahili punchlines to produce art of a most tragicomic aspect.

In all of these, the silver lining exists. Once the Busia Stadium is complete, we shall invite the fighting bigwigs to a fistfight with each other in it. For there will be more dignity in that, than there is in the foulmouthed tirade, and body shaming that we saw being traded. 

 

Robert Wesonga is a freethinker 

who writes his own things

BEYOND NOAH'S ARK: WHEN FLOODWATERS SPEAK TO POWER

 Robert Wesonga

In the history of humankind’s belief systems, oral culture and literary productions, there have emerged several flood narratives of a religious aspect. These famed catastrophic floods have been instigated by supreme deities to destroy civilizations as an act of divine restoration, and retribution – following ages of wrongdoing by humankind. In a mythical twist of irony, the flood catastrophes have been meant to reset to the world to a new golden age, rid of sin and corruption.

The Epic of Gilgamesh remains the oldest flood narrative, dating as far back as 2100BC, which is over 4,000 years ago. In the Bible, the book of Genesis, a story is told of a killer flood and Noah’s Ark; the Epic of Gilgamesh – set in modern day Iraq – narrates a flood from which Utnapishtim, the protagonist and God’s loyalist, and his followers are saved; the Sumerian Mythology has the Eridu Genesis flood narrative and the redemption of Ziusudrad, and the Flood Myth in the Brahmana among the Hindu adherents.

These narratives share a hauntingly consistent anatomy. Across every culture, three motifs endure: first, a corrupt majority, those who refuse to listen to a Noah and whose transgressions invite divine wipe out; second, a solitary protagonist—faithful to the Creator or Noah or Brahman—tasked by deity to build a boat, an ark, for the willing. Ultimately, each story culminates in a reset of the universe, offering a clean horizon to those who chose the ark. In stark contrast, those who reject the call to board the ark are vanquished, never to witness the new sunrise breaking over the peaks of Mount Ararat.

In these ancient echoes, the water is never just water. It is a spiritual broom, a liquid reckoning sent to scrub the earth of the dirt of human folly. A few days ago, as the brown, swirling arteries of Nairobi burst their banks, and the city dwellers found themselves trapped in a terrifyingly literal re-enactment of the religious flood myths. But as the plastic bottles compete for space alongside the ruins of mabati-roofed homes, we must ask: Is this merely a meteorological failure, or is it a physical manifestation of a deeper, more destructive rot within our body politik?

For decades, the city of Nairobi has functioned as the grand stage of stagnant promises. When the rains come, they do not merely fall; they accuse. They expose the skeletal remains of a city planned for the few but inhabited by the millions. The water rushes into the living rooms of the poor not because the clouds are cruel, but because the trenches and gutters of our governance are clogged with the silt of grand corruption and the debris of indifference.

There is a profound epistemology to a flood—a way of knowing that only disaster can provide. It reveals the topography of inequality with brutal precision. The flood does not need a map to find the marginalized; it simply follows the path of least resistance, which in Nairobi, leads easily to the doors of those the state has forgotten. While the elite watch the downpour from the safety of high-walled "Edens" on the hills, the residents of the valley watch their lives dissolve into the mud. In the flood, the poor are forced into a terrible visibility—clinging to rooftops, their meagre belongings floating away like discarded memories.

This is the weight of a long-muffled national groan. For years, the cries of the displaced, the hunger of the northern herder, and the sighs of the unemployed have been drowned by the loud music of political rallies and the roar of V8 engines. We have built a society where wealth is the lifejacket, and poverty, the anchor that literally grounds many. But flood waters, in their blind, democratic fury, remind us that sometimes a broken system eventually threatens everyone. No amount of opulence can keep one’s soul dry when the very foundation of the state is built on the shifting sands of deceit. For even cars were washed away; bungalows invaded by raging waters; and manicured lawns submerged.

Why, then, should we speak of a political flood? Because our current system is a clogged gutter, overflowing with the effluent of sentimental tales. We have reached a point where leadership is no longer earned through wisdom or service, but through the goodness of one's cheeks or the thickness of one’s envelope.

The flood moment in Kenya, as tragic as it may seem, is an existential necessity. As long as our political system remains choked with the grime of impunity, only a political flood can reset the clock. We have cultivated a culture where we mock the better alternative simply because their bank accounts lack the excessive opulence we have been conditioned to worship. We have turned our elections into auctions, then act surprised when the purchasers treat the counties and constituencies we have sold them as their private purses.

Consider the voter in Busia, who can no longer distinguish which lie to disbelieve because the lie is the main political currency in circulation. Consider the herder in the bandit-ridden wilds of Baringo, who looks on helplessly as both drought and bandit snatch a fortune they have built for years; think of a free willed Kenyan in Kakamega who fails to see the difference between a rogue police officer who hurls a teargas canister at a peaceful people, and the gun-wielding bandits of the wild. When the boundaries between law and lawlessness, between service and theft, become this blurred, the social contract is not just torn—it is submerged.

The political flood we need is not one of blood, but of accountability. It is a flood of civic consciousness that washes away the diminished character of our leadership and leaves behind a fertile soil where integrity can finally take root. The Gen Z protest of 2024 gives us hope that the terrifying but redemptive flood is always an option. We must stop voting with our stomachs—driven by the temporary satisfaction of a handout—and start voting with our heads, looking at the long horizon of our children's future.

In the ancient myths, the flood was followed by a rainbow—a covenant of peace. But that peace was only possible because the world had been reset. In Kenya, we are still clinging to the old, rotting timber of tribalism and cronyism, hoping the storm will pass without us having to change.

As we look toward 2027, the clouds are gathering once more. We see them – and they are not few. They are already practicing their smiles and refining their narratives so that they can buy another five years of inaction. We must choose our Noah wisely, the one with the goodly ark that will carry us yonder – to Mountain Ararat, to witness a new dawn.

The flood moment is nigh. The gutters are full to bursting. The sky is a heavy, and ominously laden with black clouds. Whether we witness a new dawn or remain a footnote in a tragic history depends a lot on our courage to face the truth when we stand before the ballot box. We must decide if we want a country that nurtures life or a country that merely counts its victims as they float by – in the floods that we have caused to happen.

Robert Wesonga is a freethinker 

who writes his own things 

HOW LUHYAS CAN MAKE THEIR KING: REFLECTIONS FROM EMURUA DIKIRR

By Robert Wesonga

[Part Two]

In my previous musings published here last week, I stated that it was the first in a three-part series of my argument: WHY THE LUHYA NATION MUST NOW FIND A 'TRIBAL' KING. I promised to write parts two and three under the same title, but on the evening of 28^th February, something profound intervened—a force too potent to ignore. This force demands that we pause, reflect, and that we wrestle wisdom from the very jaws of tragedy – as it were.

And so today, on this page, we must still argue as candidly as only a people starved of political identity can—with the humility that befits our limited knowing, yet with the honesty that commands us to speak. For many homelands that have sought to rise from the peripheries of neglect—as the Luhya of Western Kenya must—have walked this taxing, often controversial path. Seneca the Younger reminds us: "It is true greatness to have in one the frailty of a man, and the security of a god." And so it is with communities: we must own our frailty even as we stretch toward the security that only unity can bestow.

The exceedingly profound happening that I allude to at the start is the same sad occurrence that has occasioned a slight twist to the title, but the subject of the engagement remains the same. On the evening of Saturday, 28th February 2026, the day ended as badly as any day could end. On social media, and indeed mainstream media, news started trickling in of a helicopter accident in Nandi County. Worse, there were reports that all the occupants of the helicopter were feared dead. When details of the helicopter involved and its manifest emerged, it was not difficult for the public to piece together that among the fallen was a national figure, the MP for Emurua Dikirr, Johanna Ngeno.

What followed was a torrent of grief that washed across the nation, but like all floods, it had its source, its epicentre. Geographically, that epicentre was Emurua Dikirr constituency, a place whose name now imposes itself into the national consciousness alongside the memory of its fallen son. Spiritually, the epicentre belonged amongst the Kipsigis people. In mourning the departed, his community was making a statement that transcended the routine condolences of political protocol. The people of Emurua Dikirr, the Kipsigis nation, were declaring that even though he was a national leader, they owned him first; that the bond between them and him was more spiritual than political. It was the kind of ownership that precedes elections and outlasts terms, the kind that cannot be legislated or debated in Parliament, but is felt in the marrow of a people's collective bone.

In the days that followed, I watched with the keen eye of a student of power as the Kipsigis community gathered themselves around this loss. They did not scatter in confusion or retreat into individual grief. They consolidated. They spoke with one voice. They reminded the nation that Johanna Ngeno was theirs, and in claiming him in death, they were also claiming the space he had occupied in their lives. There is a profound lesson here for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. Aristotle once observed that man is by nature a political animal, but he might have added that man is also by nature a tribal animal—not in the negative sense that the word 'tribe' has come to carry in our modern discourse, but in the sense that we belong first to those who belong to us.

Most importantly, it was clear the late Ngeno had died with a part of the Kipsigis people. You see, in this life we live, some things you choose, but others choose you; some people you choose, but others choose you. For the late Ngeno and the Kipsigis, it was different. Both the man and his people had chosen each other. It was a marriage of destiny, not of convenience. And in that mutual choosing, there is a power that no constitution can confer and no election can mandate.

Even in such times of adversity, the Luhya nation—a people who have struggled and still struggle at getting a definitive leader since Masinde Muliro and Wamalwa Kijana after him—must surely learn some lessons. World over, there comes a time in the history of societies when members realise that even though they may have several leaders and opinion shapers, they stand to benefit by gravitating and consolidating their support behind one of them. For the Luhya, such efforts have often been thwarted by either naysayers, or by those who posture as nationalists especially when they acquire a morbid appetite for self-gain. We have become masters of fragmentation, experts in division, virtuosos of pulling down our own before they can rise high enough to pull us up.

Believing in the charity which begins at home does not stop a community from pursuing a national agenda. It means, on the contrary, that by galvanising the potential of one from our backyard, we give them the best chance of getting to the top, and help in thwarting the ever-strengthening perception that there are communities that will make up voters, and others that enjoy the birthright of being leaders. This perception has evolved into a kind of political theology in our nation—that some are born to lead, others born to follow; some are born to rule, others born to vote. And we, the Luhya, have too often submitted to this theology, nodding along as if our marginalisation were divinely ordained rather than politically constructed.

We need to own our leader in ways that go beyond the transactional politics of election seasons. Ownership of a leader means something deeper than turning out to vote every five years and then retreating into political hibernation. It means holding that leader accountable not just to the nation, but to the community that birthed them. It means creating the kind of spiritual bond that the Kipsigis had with Ngeno—the kind that survives helicopter crashes and outlasts mortal existence. It means understanding that when we send one of our own to the national stage, we are not diminishing our community but extending it, projecting our collective voice into chambers where it might otherwise never be heard.

Whereas it is politically correct for leaders from any community to project a nationalist image, it is incumbent upon the communities behind these leaders that give them gravitas to own them, and if need be, project positive ethnicity by claiming them as their own. People from other communities will not accept our leaders unless they see that we have no doubts regarding their greatness. There is a paradox here that we must grasp: the more confidently we claim our own, the more readily others will accept them. National acceptance flows from communal confidence, not from communal erasure. You cannot be a gift to the nation if you are not first a treasure to your own people.

The late Johanna Ngeno understood this instinctively, as his people understood it. In his rise, they saw their own rise. In his voice, they heard their own concerns articulated. In his presence in Parliament, they felt themselves present. And now in his death, they are not diminished but somehow enlarged, because they have demonstrated to the nation what it means to be a community that knows how to own its own. The Kipsigis have taught us that political power is not just about numbers at the ballot box, but about presence in the national consciousness—and presence is achieved not by hiding your identity but by projecting it with confidence and pride.

Perhaps later, we, the Luhya, shall look back and say that with a masterpiece of good thought and strategy, we were able to solidify our power, and make count the numerical advantage that we so often brandish to no good effect. For we are not a small people—we are nearly seven million strong, a nation within a nation, a sleeping giant that has slumbered too long while others have danced. The time for waking is now. The lessons are before us, written not in books but in the blood of a fallen leader from a community that knew how to claim him. Let us learn, at last, how to make our king.

 

Wesonga is a freethinker, and writer of his own things.

There will be Part Three...

WHY THE LUHYA NATION MUST NOW FIND A 'TRIBAL' KING

By Robert Wesonga

[Part One]

Let me begin with the immortal words of the late Philip Ochieng, that towering giant of Kenyan journalism whose mind cut through nonsense like a panga through overgrown bush—along the sugarcane thoroughfares of Nambale. I shall not quote him verbatim—the dead deserve better than lazy verbatim—but I will capture his essence: He once wrote, "When you present yourself before the state to apply for an identity card, they will demand several particulars. But there is something particularly particular about the particulars they will ask. That particular thing is your tribe."

Ochieng, in his infinite wisdom, was not celebrating tribalism. He was stating a fact so obvious that only the intellectually dishonest pretend not to see it. The Kenyan state, for all its pretensions to nationhood, has always wanted to know where you come from, who your people are, which linguistic cluster you call home. They do not ask this out of anthropological curiosity. They ask because in Kenya, tribe is currency. Tribe is destiny. Tribe is the silent arithmetic that often determines who eats and who watches others eat.

Let me paint you three snapshots, as vivid as an August sunrise over Kakamega Forest:

Snapshot One: It is February 2026. The President has nominated Francis Ole Meja as Chairperson of the Public Service Commission. Within hours, Members of Parliament from the Maa community gather before television cameras, their faces arranged in expressions of gratitude. They thank the President for remembering the Maasai. They speak of being considered, of being included, of finally getting a seat at the high table. Nobody accuses them of tribalism. Nobody lectures them about nationalism. They are simply doing what every community in Kenya does—watching out for their own.

Snapshot Two: For decades, Luo Nyanza has stood resolutely behind Raila Odinga through presidential elections lost, through marches in the battle-ridden streets of Nairobi and Kisumu; through nights in the cold insults and horrendous epithets. They have been called names—radicals, rebels, perennial outsiders. But when the Gen Z demonstrations shook the foundations of the state, and Ruto needed to steady his ship, who did he turn to? He turned to Raila. And suddenly, appointments began flowing towards Luo Nyanza. Roads started being tarmacked. Factories proposed, bridges started being built. Economic goods, as if by magic, found their way to the shores of Lake Victoria. There has been no lecture on tribalism, only the quiet rationalising of what we all know to be true.

Snapshot Three: Cast your mind back to the pre-election pact that brought Mudavadi and Wetang'ula into the governing fold. The promise, whispered in corridors and sealed with handshakes, was thirty percent. Thirty percent of appointments. Thirty percent of development. Thirty percent of the national cake, baked fresh for the Luhya people. The less said about how that promise has been honoured, the better. The less said about what has actually trickled down from Nairobi to Busia, Kakamega, or Bungoma, the kinder I will be.

Now, I am not here to cast stones. Every community plays the game as it is structured. The Kalenjins have consolidated around Ruto with a discipline that would make a Prussian general weep with admiration. The Kikuyus, for all their little squabbles, know how to rally around a flag—be it Kibaki, Uhuru or Gachagua—when the moment demands it. The Kisiis have found their champion in Matiang'i. And the Luo, though still reeling from the sad reality of a Raila-shaped vacuum, stand a better chance of finding a new voice than we do—if we do not wake from our slumber soon enough.

What happened to the spirit that rallied the Abaluhya around Masinde Muliro? Around Wamalwa Kijana? We lazily accept the accolade of being the second-largest ethnic community in this nation, but do little to make our numerical potential count in the national arithmetic.

I will tell you what we have done. We have fought among ourselves. We have undermined each other. We have competed, with an enthusiasm that would be admirable if directed elsewhere, to prove who can cosy up most convincingly to whoever happens to be in power at the moment. We have produced leaders who rush to State House not to demand anything for their people, but to demonstrate how little they will ask for, how reasonable they can be, how different they are from those "tribalists" from other communities.

And while we have been busy being reasonable, while we have been busy proving our nationalist credentials, while we have been busy playing the gentlemen and ladies of Kenyan politics, other communities have been eating our lunch. They have been taking what rightfully belongs to us, not through malice, but through the simple logic of political organisation. They understand something that we have refused to understand: that in the marketplace of Kenyan politics, if you do not demand, you will be ignored. If you do not assert, you will be forgotten. If you do not consolidate, you will be divided and conquered.

The great Chinua Achebe, drawing on the folk wisdom of his people, told us that until the lion learns to write, then the story of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. For too long, the Luhya have allowed others to write our story. We have allowed ourselves to be depicted as passive, as content with crumbs, as a community that does not mind being taken for granted. It is time for us to pick up the pen. It is time for us to tell our own story.

And the first chapter of that story must begin with the recognition that we need a voice. A single voice. A voice that can sit at the negotiating table and say, without apology or embarrassment: "This is what the Luhya people require. These are the appointments that must go to our sons and daughters. These are the roads that must be built in our counties. These are the schools that must be upgraded in our villages."

For years, we have watched Mudavadi and Wetang'ula—two men of considerable ability, men who could have been titans—choose the path of acquiescence. They have played the gentlemen while others scramble for things under their very noses. They have negotiated by stating what they will not ask for, by demonstrating how reasonable they can be. And what has reasonableness brought us? What has gentlemanly conduct delivered from the house on the hill?

It is time for a different approach. It is time for a Luhya kingpin who understands that politics is not a tea party.

At this moment in our history, that leader appears to be none other than Edwin Sifuna. I say this not as a partisan, but as an observer of political reality. Watch him in the well of Parliament: his tongue is a blade, his mind a fortress. When he rises to speak, even his adversaries listen—not because they agree, but because they know they will be challenged. He has shown, in the trenches of Nairobi politics, the courage to stand alone, to vote against his own side when principle demands it, to refuse the seductive whisper of expediency. While others chase favours, he has remained consistent—a rare commodity in a marketplace of political prostitutes. He possesses something rare in Luhya leadership: the willingness to confront, to demand, to stand firm even when it is not convenient. He understands that power respects only those who are willing to fight for it.

But let me be clear. I am not proposing that we retreat into ethnic cocoons and abandon the dream of a united Kenya. I am not suggesting that we become tribalists in the negative sense of that word. I am simply recognising reality. In Kenya, as it is presently constituted, communities that organise themselves politically get ahead. Communities that fragment, that fight among themselves, that produce leaders who compete to demonstrate how little they want—these communities get left behind.

The Luo have shown us the way. Through decades of opposition, through years in the political wilderness, they never abandoned their champion. And now, they are reaping the rewards of that fidelity. Not all of them are benefiting, to be sure. But enough are benefiting to make a difference. Enough are benefiting to show that the strategy works.

The Kalenjins have shown us the way. They rallied around Ruto when he was nothing, when he was dismissed as a junior minister, when everyone said he would never make it. And now they occupy the highest offices in the land. I say ‘they’ knowing that there is the risk of faulty overgeneralisation, but realising what it means.

It is time for the Luhya to learn these lessons. It is time for us to put aside our internal differences, to stop competing to see who can be the most reasonable, to stop proving that we are different from those "tribalists." We are not different. We are human beings who love our children, who want our communities to thrive, who deserve our fair share of the national cake.

And to get that fair share, we need a voice. A single voice. A voice that says: "We are here. We matter. We will not be ignored."

If that makes us tribalists in the eyes of those who have been eating our share all along, so be it. I would rather be called a tribalist with roads in my county than a nationalist with nothing but speeches to show for it.

The time for political correctness is over. The time for gentlemen's agreements that benefit only the other side is over. The time for the Luhya to take their rightful place at the high table is now.

Robert Wesonga is a freethinker and writer of his own things.

There will be Part Two and Part Three...

 

A TALE OF TWO TEACHERS’ UNIONS, TSC AND THE KENYAN TEACHER

Let us begin this way – by way of two pieces of speculation. The first, perhaps the most obvious one, is that Teachers Service Commission (TSC) CEO, Nancy Macharia is way more qualified for the job than I am. That is why she is the CEO of TSC, and I am not. So, while I may from time to time find space to make noise in the newspapers, she does not – not because she cannot write; but because she spends her time making the big decisions that have got grave ramifications to the teaching and learning public. One of those decisions is this week’s announcement of Teacher Professional Development Programme (TPD).

Speculation number two: anyone in this country, with an IQ about double digits, will most certainly agree that head of KUPPET (Kenya Union of Post Primary Teachers) and the head of KNUT (Kenya National Union of Teachers) have interests of teachers at heart, than I would be expected to have. After all, teachers entrusted them with responsibility to vouch for their welfare. They voted for them in their thousands.

This love for their members must have been evident when Misori of KUPPET and Oyuu of KNUT, went to assist the TSC announce a very important matter: the need to retrain teachers and issue them with licenses. It must have been because of this love that earlier in the year, the two unions signed a Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) that had zero financial increment. They however lovingly bargained for more paternity leave. They now assume that teachers will now very easily retrieve money from the increased paternity leave, and use it to pay for retraining.

After many months of defending the Competence Based Curriculum (CBC) saying that teachers have been well trained, it took the sunshine of 22^nd September, 2021 for the TSC to admit that indeed teachers shall need retraining for five years, at their own cost, to be able to make CBC a success. Forget that Kenyan teachers have been so attractive to foreign nations, who have come for them to go and teach their children. Forget that the Ministry of Education (MoE) has severally said that teachers do not need lengthy training to deliver CBC. What you should remember is that a few universities have been selected (or is it (hand)picked?) to offer the retraining.

By her own admission during the announcement for the TPD programme, CEO Macharia observed that teachers will be given an opportunity to attend the retraining in their localities. It must therefore be taken as purely accidental that all the institutions picked for this programme are in the Nairobi Metropolitan area. It must also be treated as a matter of pure hindsight that of the four: Mount Kenya University, Riara University, Kenyatta University and Kenya Institute of Management, there is only one public university. We must not stoop too low to questioning this arrangement, but we must wonder how cheaper it might have been for teachers at the Coast, North Eastern and Western to attend the said programme in their regions.

The MoE, TSC and some voices in the general public have supported the idea of retraining and periodic of licensing teachers. They have compared teaching to Law, and have wondered why teachers should not have additional training like lawyers do when they attend the Kenya School of Law (KSL) for example. What they forget is that in the Kenya School of Law, lawyers learn issues of methodology; which thing trainee teachers are trained on at university and teacher training colleges, before they compound the training by going on teaching practice.

In teacher training institutions, the programmes are designed in such a way that the methodology training, which lawyers undergo at the Kenya School of Law is undertaken by teacher trainees in the course of their studies and training in teacher training institutions within three or four years before graduation. At the Kenya School of Law, for example, lawyers are taken through Advocate Training Programme (ATP) where they are engaged on the nitty gritties of methodology such as: how to dress, how to stand before a judge, make opening remarks, concluding remarks, draw judgments, and gather information from judgments read.

At the end of one year, these lawyers proceed on a six month practicum, which they call pupillage. Here, they work under an established advocate (pupil master) with the trainees as pupils. This is a replica of what happens during teacher training. Before teacher trainees proceed on to one term’s practicum – called Teaching Practice – they will have been taught how to present themselves before class, how to dress, draw lesson plans, schemes of work, make introductory remarks, build up the lesson and make concluding remarks. It is therefore lazy (for lack of a better word) for anyone one to say that extra training after graduation is needed to make teachers more proficient as lawyers after a diploma at Kenya School of Law.

The quality of the Kenyan teacher may not be in dire straits, contrary to what the Union officials and TSC sought to portray when announcing the upcoming reforms. We have Kenyan teachers working abroad, and they are not retrained for years upon going there. Recently, there was a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant (FLTA) for which Kenyan teachers were being sought to go and teach English and Kiswahili in America. This would not be the case, if the USA knew that they were trooping ill-trained teachers to go and teach American children.

We have had this country sign agreements to have Kenyan teachers go to Seychelles and Rwanda. Even if improving the quality of teacher training was the issue, the matter of lengthy and punitive training period needed looking into. For even, on the issue of cost, the cost goes higher when you consider issues such as transport and accommodation for the length of the retraining. Besides, it is impossible to forget that this very TSC, under this very CEO, came up with reforms that frustrated many teachers and stopped them from going for further studies during holidays.

As for KNUT and KUPPET, it is all strategic to be diplomatic with the TSC after former Secretary General of KNUT Wilson Sossion was frustrated out of office in the manner he was. However, the brutal reality is that unionism should be the antithesis of the employer’s demands and directives. A union should be sceptical of the employer’s whims, and wary, in the same way ice is to heat.

Even if KUPPET and KNUT had to be diplomatic and play ball in a calculated way, it would have been better to negotiate on who is to fund the retraining. For as you all know, it is impossible for teachers to pay for it using the increased paternity leave that the two unions won for them – for paternity leave is the only thing they achieved in the otherwise zero CBA they calmly signed.

LETTER TO THE BLESSED

Jenerali seemed to pause in his tracks. He tilted his head to the left and to the right. He was checking if his shoes had the glitter he desired. Beni had found him under a roadside tree trying the best he could to achieve that glitter. He had stood by, appearing to be uninterested, but in real sense he was looking at the man brush his shoes from the corner of his eye. There was something extremely careful, even meticulous about the way the man handled his brush, and in the way he made well-thought strokes on the leather surface. To a keen eye, this was an act communication between a man and his shoes. The man, realizing Beni was cagily looking at him, had said in what sounded like flamboyant Kiswahili, albeit strained by a hint of Samburu accent:

“Don’t be surprised. I was once a soldier. A General. You can call me Jenerali in Kiswahili.”

            “Good. I am Beni.”

            “That is a curios name. Short for Benson or Bernard?”

            “Just Beni.”

“Sounds like a name of a small boy. I will call you Benard. So Bernard, you also going to the rally?

“Yes.”

“You will hear me tell them,” he said rising and beginning to follow Beni.

That last statement, Beni chose to ignore as common sense had taught him. For all he cared, the man was free to call himself Jenerali, or any other fancier title, but he was not going to take him for a ride and turn him into an audience for his hallucinations. He nevertheless did not mind walking with his new found companion towards the gate of Kenyatta Stadium-Maralal. As such, Beni did not bother what he was going to tell, and who was ‘them’.

People were streaming into the stadium in their numbers – at least by the standards of Maralal. Women Groups donned in the traditional Samburu attire were no doubt the greatest attraction. The clean-shaven women had their blue shukas going under their arms and tied by a knot at the back of their necks. On their shoulders was draped a yellow shuka. On the front part of their shukas, below their waists, were patterns of beads sewn into the blue fabric. And the hem of this attire reached just above their ankles to reveal metallic anklets they were wearing. Around their necks was layer upon layer of beads, prominent among the layers was the upper one, which beautifully relayed the colours of the national flag. Slightly up, above the layers of beads, on the neck could be seen freshly applied red ochre. Beni made a mental note of the shiny application of ochre and decided to treat it as an unnecessary exaggeration.

As they were walking on, Jenerali unbuttoned his military-coloured jacket. Whoever had designed and made the fake jacket had done a good job at it. Beni glanced and noticed that beneath the jacket was a white T-shirt with three words: TREE IS LIFE.

“Let us go and stand somewhere in front, just below the podium,” said Jenerali putting on sunglasses and a khaki hat.

“I don’t like that place,” Beni replied, “I will get somewhere to stand within the crowd.”

With that statement, Beni got his relief. The man strutted off after patting Beni on the shoulder. It was good he was going his way, Beni thought. The man was starting to be so comfortable with him. It was not within his whims to entertain strangers who got off to a start to be too sure he would listen to them. He stood and looked at the man disappear in the maze of an excited crowd.

He took a detour and headed for the side of the stadium that had goalposts. He weaved his way through the crowd, all through getting fascinated by the love for chewing especially among females: if one was not chewing something, she was observing the next person do it, or was playing with the gum in her mouth by blowing it into a big transparent ball before willfully bursting it with an irritating sound.

Beni put his arm around the goalpost and stared at the sky. Clouds were hurrying up above from the gorgeous greenness of the Kirisia Forest westwards, perhaps to the abandon dryness of the Laikipia plains and beyond. They were clouds varying of sizes and varying pregnancy of texture. And Beni seemed to notice that once they detached themselves from the safety of the forest, they appeared to hasten their movement. Maybe they wanted to get to accommodating atmosphere. Perhaps above Marmanet Forest or the Mau Complex or Kakamega Forest; or maybe anywhere else human beings had been desirous enough the spare trees. Beni wished that in their travels, these clouds would reach his home somewhere in Busia. This made him miss home. At this moment too, albeit briefly, Beni thought about the three words on Jenerali’s T-shirt. The gentleman, if ever he was gentle, had a point.  

**                    **                    **                    **

Time had passed and people had done what they do at political rallies before the arrival of main guests. All this while, Beni had been lost in his thoughts. Thoughts about home and the genuine generosity of his people; memories of childhood games in the grazing fields; reminiscences of their boyhood escapades with the village girls who came to collect firewood in the grazing fields. He had been occupied thus until the announcement was heard that a college student was going to do a poem. The student called it: Letter to the Blessed: Till Death Do Us Part. He was suddenly jolted to attention and listened.

Letter to the Blessed: Till Death Do Us Part.          

And those days –

Us, boys and girls, and innocence

Shared space and circumstance

Sometimes fortune and fame would pop in

I mean, dreams of fortune and fame.

           

Our mothers went to the market

And fathers talked land, football and politics

While ours language stayed with the ordinary:

Homework, punishment, boyfriends and girlfriends

And the stopping of “maziwa ya watoto wa Nyayo”

           

Such was our bliss in ignorance

The bliss of ignorance; well-meaning ignorance,

Shut out sheer shoving and shifting of worldviews

Held in the adult world.

                       

In church on a Sunday School day

The white-robed pastor held sway

“Thou shalt not covet”

While I admired the very pastor’s daughter

She was beautiful and smiled gaily

At our clandestine evening meetings daily

Till one such evening,

Pastor found us at a dark corner.

That was innocence.

Nay, ignorance.

Or both innocence and ignorance

Both without a plea in mitigation.

           

That was long before Anglo-leasing arrived

After Goldenberg the way had paved

           

Now here as adults:

We commune with Taxation and Inflation

Bills, rent, water, fees must now be paid

Hunger, Lack and Desperation have built at home

And the shrewd hand of the Political Cunningster,

Decides who dies last.

           

Hunger, Lack and Desperation are my new partners

Forever we shall dwell here,

Till death, do us part.

            ………………………….. TO BE CONTINUED.