Your Country Is NOT Going To The Dogs!
25th February 2010, in Rants (26 Comments)
Editor’s Note: We stole this second piece from Njoki Ngumi, who’s now out in the countryside doing her medical internship for the Government of Kenya. Do spare a moment to think about all the young people who’ve dedicated their energy to joining the medical profession in Kenya – it’s a tough job, and we’re very lucky that people still opt to do it despite all the crap they have to put up with.
Your Country Is NOT Going To The Dogs!
by Dr. Njoki Ngumi
“I pledge my loyalty to the President and Nation of Kenya,
My readiness and duty to defend the flag of our Republic,
My life, strength and service in the task of nation building,
In the living spirit embodied in our National motto ‘Harambee’,
and perpetuated in the Nyayo philosophy of Peace, Love and Unity.”
- Kenyan Loyalty Pledge, apparently still recited in primary schools countrywide to this day
I’ll be honest. I recently Googled “how to become a Swiss citizen”. I did. I won’t lie, I’m shallow. I can speak basic French, and I want to be a milkmaid in some tiny farm on the Alps and learn how to yodel. I feel that the Swiss must be so neutral about everything that even racism is too much effort for them.
Why did I do that, you might ask? Why Switzerland? Why abscond from “Magical Kenya” (who else hates that ad and thinks we’d be better represented by a remix of “Niko na Safaricom” and “Tusker Milele”?)?
Why? I hate the news. In newspapers, on TV. I want to kick the TV’s or tune them permanently to Afro-Sinema so I can laugh at something that’s actually funny. I hate the blind, naïve hope that things have to get better. I hate the wish that everything would just burn, that every member of a certain generation would die and then we could start again from a clean slate.
I hate that random moment, because it reminds me that even if I won yodeling competitions on the Alpine farm and somehow convinced cows to yield 20 liters daily, there’s probably no other place my soul will ever feel completely at home. I would actually be restless for this crap-mountain that has the nerve to call itself a country; something like – forgive the politically incorrect analogy – those battered wives going back to the drunken husband with their black eye still smarting, and cleaning up his vomit and his soiled pants and cooking his favorite dinner afterward.
Yuck.
I hate that my feelings for this country might qualify me to be schizophrenic.
And then I met you.
I met a guy who finished school 3 years before I did, and is now a medical superintendent at a tiny place called Endebes. I didn’t even know where that was (it’s near Kitale, apparently). I was talking to him about it, and he said something poignant. “People need us. They do.” This guy could have a brilliant, money-paved, somewhere-over-the-rainbow future ahead of him if he’d go back to school – yet there he is, in god-forsaken tiny town.
I was taught a class by a nutritionist recently – a brilliant guy, who’d do excellently in private practice because he has amazing people skills and expresses himself VERY well, and KNOWS what he’s talking about (doctors are usually difficult people to impress with knowledge, yet this guy managed to have a room of almost 40 hanging on his every word for more than an hour). He chooses to work with the government, counseling people with HIV/AIDS on good food choices. In Molo.
I have a friend who got a posting that was difficult for all of us to accept. But she went anyway, and will hold her head up high living alone for a year in a town that smells of sulphure, eight hours away from everything she has ever called home. She’ll become more effing brilliant than she ever was, and people will have to wear shades while looking at her.
I know another woman fighting tooth and nail as we speak to keep Kenya’s only repertory theatre open, despite having to fight bloody civil wars with always-busy, ass-wipe people. She gives herself daily to developing it even though she could be easily earning way more as the brilliant lawyer she is. It exhausts her, but she still gets up and polishes her sword.
I could go on.
But all of you have taught me something deep and lasting. I can see – even if it’s by a dim flame – that Kenya is not just disgusting roads, bad mobile service providers that won’t let us send texts for free, prosperity-gospel preachers, ‘internationally-certified’ pseudo-universities giving poor quality education, HATEFUL POLITICIANS WHO FIGHT FOR THE NEWS CAMERAS AND PLAY GOLF TOGETHER ON WEEKENDS, narrow-minded mothers-in-law who frown upon marrying someone from another tribe, hospitals where they steal government supplies and sell them back to patients, KPLC publishing a power-rationing schedule then not sticking to it and the epidemic of married men and women with ‘mpango wa kando’.
Kenya is people. Individuals with a voice that can become a collective cry for change. Kenya is you. Kenya is me. Kenya is hating it, but getting up and saying you’ll try, grabbing your shovel to start the clean-up of the Crap Mountain, like all the inspiring people above have done and continue to do.
Being Kenyan is – even if you look like a criminal on your ID photo, and you have every reason to want to be one (and would probably succeed doing it) – deciding every day not to be a criminal.
Kenya is not absolutes. We can’t trash all politicians. All NGO’s. All public institutions. But if can see a way in the dense forest of yuck, and the only way through it is with a slasher, and we know our hands will get blistered and will hurt, and we know it will take forever, we still say we’ll give it a try. At least.
Instead of sit back and complain.
The alternative is to become the first black Swiss milkmaid with a Bachelor’s degree which makes her worse than useless to cows. 
.
You guys, all you fracture-splinting, wonderful patriots…your Kenya is NOT going to the dogs. You will wrest it out of their iron-jaw clasps, even if you bleed doing it. Thank you for your panoramic vision.
Your Kenya is NOT going to the dogs.
And, by Providence…neither is mine.
26 Comments
February 25, 2010 3:57 pm
Wangũi
Wow, well said Njoki, me likes.
February 25, 2010 10:41 pm
Bill K K
Excellent Piece!!!
February 28, 2010 3:14 pm
Peter (@@petermburu)
This is so well-written. Truthful and full of punch! I love that it’s just… Oozing with HOPE and the miracle of possibility. The power of humanism. Let’s all find it. For Kenya. #SpreadTheLove
February 28, 2010 3:35 pm
Baba Mzungu (@babamzungu)
As an outsider, to me, Kenya is the friendliest people I have ever had the fortune to meet, in a country that is magnificent – despite the politics.
when I am in Kenya, I spend most of my time upcountry, where the youth cannot sit in front of the TV, where they have to go to cyber cafés if they want to use the Internet, where a mobile phone the size of a house brick is a valued possession, and where most have never had any electrical consumer goods – or electricity.
They make their own amusement, when they have the time, after tending crops and livestock, having done their homework if they are lucky enough to still attend school.
Kenya is a country of hard-working, willing, cheerful people, young and old.
If only the politicians could replicate the qualities of the people they lord it over.
March 1, 2010 10:15 am
James Otieno (@JaUholo)
Wow, i dont know what to say………i’ve had the same thots running thru my head…finally someone has put it out there for the rest of us who may be too crestfallen to hope. Thankyou BIGtime.
March 1, 2010 10:42 pm
Lisa
Njoki for president!!!!!! I mean if Fizzle Quincy Dogg thinks he has a good chance of being prime minister, what’s stopping our campaign for Njoki?! Seriously though, I’m inspired. Not inspired for this moment, not inspired for this week but I’m ready to commit myself to standing up for Kenya. Wow. Njoki, God bless you!
March 2, 2010 12:00 am
John njogu
Not only well said,but fully said..Cheers,you have some functional kenyan eyes.
March 3, 2010 10:26 pm
Lucille Kahara (@lkahara)
Njoki you’re a STAR! And as much as I’m seen as an alien in my own country, I’m still fighting for a brighter tomorrow in this Kenya of ours
March 4, 2010 12:46 am
Sam
Very nice dr kul! I feel ur passion and intense emotion.. I feel ur burning conviction! U really should do this more often – write for the masses!
March 4, 2010 7:21 pm
Asif Khan (@@asayf)
This website is actually doing a great job of getting people to talk about issues that we Kenyans face. Currently we are happy with whatever we get, we are happy with following politicians blindly, never even questioning them once about their policies.
THEIR IS NO DISCUSSION AMONGST ‘TOMORROWS LEADERS’. We have simply learnt to adapt a lifestyle where keeping quiet is the easier way out. And isn’t that what we have learnt all our lives – finding the easier way out? We will keep quiet regardless of what goes around us.
Look at our classrooms. Don’t you wonder why it is the same handful of people who always engage in class discussions, if there are any! Is it that these people have no opinion? Is it that they don’t want to speak? Is it that they have no knowledge about what’s being talked about? These MAY be the reasons, but you know what these people are doing? They are simply taking the easy way out. I don’t blame them. That’s what they’ve been taught all their lives. All they have to do to be successful is to pass the exams, get good grades, and get a good ‘job’(!).
That’s the reason this website is a good platform for topical discussions. I had a presentation the other day, and I mentioned this website, and out of the 100 or so people present NONE had heard of this website (or maybe they were just keeping quiet!). Now they do.
March 5, 2010 9:25 am
The Team (@kuweniserious)
Thanks for spreading the word, Asif.
We’re trying to encourage Daktari Ngumi to do
this more often, so thank you all for your comments.
March 5, 2010 4:56 pm
Hassan Sachedina (@uhifadhi)
This is an inspiring piece. Even if it does feel like trying to move Mt. Kenya with a spoon, everyone born here, or with some connection to Kenya, can help to make it a better place, person by person, spoonful by spoonful.
March 5, 2010 7:53 pm
cosmas curtis
afew years ago i had the same thought but one day there this frieind of mine who cried to me during the post ele ction violence [lives in kiambio] when will we the poor live to the stds of people in RUNDA ,when i went to that place i felt like criying when i saw a little child crawling with wound all over him lookin at his innocent eye s i see despair that i could not handle it for me i had plan my future and to tell the truth kenya was not in tha future but at that moment i changed and decided just becoz of that little boy i would stand and fill that gap that nobody seemed to care about so for that boy i m goin to fight for change in KENYA.
March 9, 2010 5:08 pm
Tom
So so true. If only…
March 9, 2010 5:41 pm
Nancy
Love it
March 24, 2010 8:27 am
Atieno (@@Krystina_Cecina)
I am grabbing my shovel, right this minute. I have so many things to comment about your article, the most outstanding being that, this – your article, KuweniSerious – has hit a nerve (struck a chord- whatever the idiom). I will log off and search hard to find those little ways I can make Kenya better.
March 31, 2010 4:32 pm
Wambui Mwangi
Thank you. What fierce, gorgeous, liberating writing–I felt taller just reading it.
I also thought that all these wonderful people you know are rewarded already: they all know you.
WM
April 23, 2010 2:41 pm
Amy
Njoki you’re a STAR! And as much as I’m seen as an alien in my own country, I’m still fighting for a brighter tomorrow in this Kenya of ours
May 16, 2010 3:28 pm
Lilly Stein
You have and have made a point. I am convinced Kenya shall not go to the dogs. Let us see what drama unfolds after the referendum on the draft constitution.
June 9, 2010 8:18 am
Teddy
You should get a column in a national newspaper….you said it all
July 5, 2010 1:33 pm
Weslie (@Twitter ID)
Awesome. And if every single one of us takes a spoon, our crap mountain will become quite the molehill in only a short span of time. Thanks for taking out the first scoop.
July 5, 2010 1:34 pm
Miriam M. (@muthonim)
Someone should seriously tell me why the media is perenially fixated on the so called ‘leaders’.
Why won’t they simply turn away from them and walk away from their lies?
Why do they dedicate 15 minutes of prime time news DAILY to share footage of liars spreading lies? Are they too dumb to tell that the ‘leaders’ feed on the attention they give them? Or are they too deeply lodged in private pockets to give up this publicity?
They are the second worst dissapointment. After the so called leaders.
MM.
July 8, 2010 10:41 am
benson (@bensonnjonjo)
Great piece!
July 21, 2010 11:36 am
stevo
Yeah and I’m grabbing my shovel to start the clean-up of the Crap Mountain come August, like all the inspiring people will do. For Kenya I’ll have my obituary written a million times over…and yes i’ll grab my shovel to clean it up a million times over….
July 23, 2010 4:03 pm
brian (@@kipropest)
Wow. You got the literary skills girl. You could do a J.K Rowling. Anyway captivating piece, I couldn’t stop reading, thanks for igniting my dying embers of hope.
August 3, 2010 10:40 am
Edel Kung’u
By the time I was halfway through the article I had tears in my eyes. For me the politicians have not failed us as much as the media has. Who wants to work hard the whole day and then spend half the news bulletins listening to BS. Can’t the media have the guts to give the politicians a blackout. Watado what?
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