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.
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.
Read Also: Dealer Ruto, No One Invited You: Kenyans Send Their Middle Finger to the UNGA79
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 wh