Silent Betrayal: How Kenya’s Middle Class Is Enabling The Destruction Of Our Nation

The greatest tragedy in Kenya today is not merely the pervasive corruption, the mismanagement of resources, or the fact that we have become a society led by liars, thieves, and charlatans. No, the tragedy runs deeper, into the very bones of our society, where the silence of the middle class and the so-called good people has become the most repugnant enabler of the rot that stinks up our national fabric.

The proverb goes, “The man who sees evil and does nothing is as guilty as the one who commits it.” In Kenya, our middle-class wears blindfolds of comfort and shrugs off responsibility, all the while watching their society sink deeper into an abyss of filth.

We have become a nation that forgets to demand what is ours. The middle class, burdened with high taxes, opts for private schools for their children, paying an arm and a leg while public schools, once the bedrock of societal advancement, rot in neglect. The silence of the middle class on the decay of public education is telling; they have failed to recognize that the fall of the common man’s institutions will ultimately drag them into the mud as well. Kenya’s once-promising future of research, innovation, and technological advancement has withered, all because the educated elite are too comfortable with their private luxuries to demand better for the nation.

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In health, the silence echoes louder. We have public healthcare institutions that exist only in name, but no one in the middle class raises a voice in protest. They prefer to take loans, fundraise in WhatsApp groups, and beg when a medical emergency strikes, rather than fix the system meant to serve them. The ancient wisdom rings true: “A man who builds his house upon sand will see it washed away by the rain.” The middle class builds their healthcare on the unstable sands of private hospitals, oblivious to the impending tsunami of poverty that looms with every illness.

Kenya’s roads are paved not with opportunity, but with potholes large enough to swallow entire vehicles. The daily fatalities on our roads are met with a deafening silence from those who should know better. Instead of holding the government accountable for the billions they siphon through fuel levies, the middle class prefers to buy larger cars to glide over the cracks. It is the tragicomic animal farm where some Kenyans, having grown fat and lazy, believe their SUVs will protect them from the inevitable collapse of public infrastructure. “The road to hell,” they say, “is paved with good intentions.” Or in Kenya’s case, it’s not paved at all.

Unemployment festers like an open wound, a wound that bleeds potential every day. Kenya has one of the most literate populations on the continent, yet we export our youth as modern slaves, as maids and manual laborers. Instead of demanding better governance, the middle class watches in silent acceptance, praying that their own children are spared this fate. They fail to realize that the housemaid who leaves today is the engineer who will never build tomorrow. “A fool’s paradise is built on the misfortune of others,” and the middle class sits comfortably in their fool’s paradise, pretending the misery of the majority won’t one day be theirs.

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Insecurity brews in the slums, fed by inequality and poverty. Instead of demanding police reforms and investment in security, the middle class builds higher walls, installs more security cameras, and prays that the hungry masses stay on the other side. But hunger knows no boundaries, and one day, when the ugali and sukuma wiki run out, the walls will fall. The hungry poor will not be stopped by electric fences. “You cannot lock out the sun, the rain, or a man with nothing to lose,” an old African saying reminds us. Yet, the middle class pretends otherwise.

Our agriculture, once the pride of this nation, has been reduced to dust by policies crafted by thieves we elected. We import everything, even the food we should be growing ourselves. The middle class does not protest this destruction of our farming heritage; instead, they gleefully buy imported food that often comes with a side of cancer risks. They seem blind to the ancient wisdom: “A nation that cannot feed itself is a nation enslaved.” But perhaps enslavement is a fate the middle class is willing to accept, as long as they have their imported goods to feast on in the meantime.

How did we get here? How did we, as a people, allow ourselves to be led by wolves while the sheep stayed silent? The answer lies in the silent complicity of the middle class, those who should know better but do nothing. They are the very embodiment of the evil they claim to abhor. The ancient proverb says, “When the righteous keep silent, the wicked flourish.” In Kenya, the wicked are not only flourishing; they are thriving, dining on the very bones of a nation too paralyzed by fear and ignorance to stand up and fight.

George Orwell’s Animal Farm might as well have been written about Kenya. The pigs have taken over the farmhouse, and the other animals, too busy with their day-to-day survival, have let them. The pigs speak in grand, empty words, promising progress, prosperity, and change, but all they deliver is more of the same: corruption, incompetence, and arrogance. The animals don’t rebel because they’ve been conditioned to accept that this is just the way things are. And so the cycle continues, with the pigs fattening themselves at the expense of everyone else.

But unlike Animal Farm, Kenya’s tragedy is not written in fiction. Our pigs sit in parliament, in cabinet offices, in the very institutions that were meant to protect the public. The middle class, instead of rebelling against this betrayal, has chosen to be the silent enablers, content with their small comforts, ignoring the fact that those comforts are slowly being eroded by the rot they refuse to confront.

Perhaps the greatest irony of all is that the middle class, those who pride themselves on their education, their critical thinking, and their supposed morality, are the ones who have enabled this rot. “A man who is not part of the solution is part of the problem,” the saying goes. The middle class of Kenya is not just part of the problem; they are the problem. They have allowed themselves to be lulled into complacency, blinded by their consumerism, their need for status, and their unwillingness to engage in the messy, uncomfortable work of political accountability.

The silence of the good people is not neutral. It is a loud, deafening complicity in the face of evil. It allows the thieves and liars to continue their plunder, unchecked and unchallenged. “The silence of a wise man in the face of injustice is more damaging than the loudest noise of the ignorant,” an old saying goes. The wise men and women of Kenya, the middle class, have chosen the path of silence, and in doing so, they have chosen the path of destruction.

We may choose to ignore politics, but politics will not ignore us. It will creep into our lives like a thief in the night, robbing us of our dignity, our rights, and our future. The middle class must wake up to the reality that their silence is no longer an option. The rot in our society is too deep, too pervasive, and it will not be fixed by inaction. If we are to reclaim our country, it must start with a collective voice that demands better, not just for ourselves, but for the generations that follow.

This is the challenge that lies before us. To remain silent is to accept the death of Kenya. To speak up is to reclaim her soul. The choice is ours.

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