By Ndung’u Wainaina
Contextualizing Mutahi Ngunyi’s indefensible arrogance and contempt.
It was reported that Mutahi Ngunyi was paid Kshs. 38 M for ‘work’ he did on NationalYouth Service. I have put ‘work’ in quotes.
Consistently for the last one week Mutahi Ngunyi has arrogantly and contemptuously dismissed, collectively, Luo community as ‘Poverty Stricken’.
Those who know Jomo Kenyatta well know how he went around the country in a similar manner like Ngunyi abusing genuine freedom fighters, unlike him, for refusing to ‘get something for themselves’.
Ngunyi is advancing the same narrative Jomo Kenyatta began of industrious, hardworking working people and the lazy, poor people.
The terrific economist David Ndii writing in Saturday Nation of April 10, 2015 had this to say:
“First, we have a national elite composed predominantly of people with no other skills other than finding opportunities to profit from the State. As North observes, fortunes in the United States are made in industry, not in Washington.Â
I have heard some of our oligarchs compare themselves with the 19th and early 20th century American robber barons. Nonsense. Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Rockefeller and all the other so called robber barons were phenomenal industrialists.
They built railroads, steel plants, oil refineries and more. None of them was in government. Their notoriety was ruthlessness in business, not plundering the public purse.
Our oligarchy, by contrast, has not build anything of substance. It is, as Fanon observed, “not engaged in production, nor in invention, nor building, nor labour†but rather in “activities of the intermediary typeâ€. Every so often, we get a glimpse of its fragility, such as the sudden demise of Mugoya, once the mightiest construction company in East
Africa, and the more recent expose and subsequent implosion of CMC. There are few African “old money†fortunes in this country that would survive the end of graft and State patronage.
Second, we have a public service where the only things that get done are those that further private interests, in plain language, the ones where people are eatingâ€.
From this Ndii’s article, you can locate the source of contemptuous and abusive language of Mutahi Ngunyi. It reflects the deep thinking and mentality of the people he works for and on behalf of. It is the consequence of capturing and manipulating state for personal gain and the arrogance effect of vomiting and abusing others.
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