Guka, if I think of Laikipia, I’ll go mad. 100000 acres farm land gets sold abroad for $100 million and government doesn’t get any corporate tax. I don’t support violence lakini sometimes I understand those Pokot for being pissed. Settlers are allowed to form an armed security group in the name of fighting poaching and cattle rustling only to restrict people movement around their farms. Kwani what is the GSU, KWS rangers and Army for? President Uhuru did well in renegotiating the new military bases agreement with brits but I still feel it didn’t go far enough. Lakini uzuri more land leases are expiring. Of you think I’m emotional try tell that to Pokots who rush to a scene of a shoot up while the rest ran. Eventually they have to change and incorporate localization. It will start with paying higher land cess to counties. Employing more Kenyans on the management of the farms. Giving them good housing not manyatta and starting joint farms with locals. It can’t remain a white only affair in the heart of the country. Like you mentioned repeatedly. Hakuna an African owning large land properties in London. UK doesn’t grow tea! Leiwa conservancy get paid millions by KWS for animal protection and rearing programs that KWS is only one mandated to do. They fly in million dollar tourists for private holidays but we get nothing? Is Laikipia free really.
I did not expect this kind of stupid shit from you. For a start, Germany has been apologising to Jews since 1945. Many have been compensated and in Germany itself Holocaust denial is a crime. Their art and other asssets have been returned. Those that were involved in the genocide ARE STILL BEING HUNTED DOWN AND PROSECUTED. What about the crimes the British committed in Kenya? To this day the British gavament denies them. Our people have not been compensated. No aopologies have been issued. When a few people won compensation the British gavament rigged the system and gave out peanuts. Lands which were confiscated at the barrel of a gun still remain in their hands.
For one to compare how the Germans have treated the Jews since 1945 with the way the British and other colonialists have treated Africans is downright stupid - there is no comparison.
Currently, there is a debate about returning looted art objects to their places of origin. A disingenuos argument used is, if we (the Europeans) have to return looted African artefacts, wouldn’t that even have to apply to the looted Elgin Marbles of 2,000 years ago? Same shit you have regurgitated here about the Romans.
EXCEPT that we are not talking about 2,000 years ago but a generation or two ago. In apartheid SA Blacks were being disposessed of their lands as recently as the 1970s. I was alive then. In Ethiopia, a king’s crown was looted just 150years ago. It sits in a British museum, why? The grandchildren of that family are still alive today.
This crappy revisionist thinking is what colonialists and their local apologists used when they took our land; they argued that the land was empty and belonged to no one (can I claim Ngong Forest, its empty and therefore belongs to no one?).
Moving on must be grounded on justice and reparations, not shitty thinking.
The crown of the queen is made of looted minerals from India. Do you think they will apologize and return them? Guka don’t be too emotional :oops:. You should be stone face and pacify yourself. I’m only glad our parents made sure we don’t forget our history. I teach my kids the same. You will not find me taking selfies in those tea estates. There are places at the border line where its lush bush and people don’t go there even for firewood. That’s where bodies people were slaughtered and thrown at the river. That river had crocodiles then as the whole place was more like an animal park. They almost killed an entire generation of adults just to make sure there no adults to fight anymore. Kenya had over 1 million elephants. They were more than people. They were hunted on a industrial scale up to 1980’s by the same white people.
Today I want to have an honest discussion with you and this is my point of departure…I agree that a person’s property should be given back to him but I question the modality…they are many cases where Africans in the 21st century have taken land back forcefully only for them to waste it. Why?
a) The current economic environment does’nt
favour commercial agriculture at least not at
the level one wants. So you end up growing
food for your own tummy and extra to help
meet your other basic needs;
b) Corruption and policy controls have destroyed
agriculture as an economic activity;
c) Lack of skills that can lead to adding value to
agricultural produce;
What then happens, we shall take back the land only to realise we can’t get anything meaningful out of it. By that time our brothers and sisters have lost the jobs they held when those firms were under the mzungus…so what next? We sell to the public servants who have managed to loot mercilessly and the Kenyattas,Moi’s and Odingas who later either get a chinese firm to build useless apartments on arable land or bring back the mzungus and start again a tea factory, coffee factory name it. By the time this cycle reaches here, unemployment rate will have doubled within such a community.
@FieldMarshal CouchP…although at times I insult you, today I wish to make a humble request, please get Lee Kwan’s book and read it. He knew he couldn’t throw out the British that fast because he needed them for:
a) Protection against China and later Malaysia;
b) His people to get access to British schools;
c) His military to get a chance to be trained by the
British;
d) His people to work with the British so as to ape
their work ethic but not social mannerisms
He went to the extent of beseeching America, Japan and Australia to come to Singapore to set up firms and while doing this he focused on what Kagame has focused on, making Singapore clean and organized.
What did Africans do? We studied the whiteman’s language and mannerisms; forgot where we came from; became snotty to our illiterate brothers; felt we were too sharp to be led, yet we were taking over a government system too sophisticated for our inexperienced selves. Africa is littered with people with opinions similar to yours and @spear such people are nowadays called demagogues. Kwameh Nkurumah, Mobutu, Idi Amin, Nyerere, Jommo…leaders who led their people down a very dark avenue so as to rape and Rob them blind.
We need to reduce the rhetoric and emotional debates and really think things through.
I am not an ‘uncle tom’ my own family suffered alot of pain in 1952 when a group of men were locked in a hut and burnt alive by the mau may among them were by grandfathers…my maternal grandfather fed the mau mau by walking to the forest through Nanyuki…families were separated etc.
If we cannot with our education and desire to do good reason out then we shall always be a step away from becoming another Zimbabwe.
Angalia this senile old man.
The point is that, these guys have looked beyond that past and moved forward. For us to keep saying “Ohhh the British did this and that” is counter productive. And if you are waiting for an apology or massive reparations, it will never come.
My point in mentioning the Romans was to point out the fact that the british HAVE NEVER ASKED FOR REPARATIONS from them nor have they insisted on an apology. Nor have they gone to their museums to look for any looted british artifacts. They probably would never have become an empire if they were hung up on these points.
The issue with Apartheid SA was an internal problem that just happened to have the race component. The whites there were not acting on the behest of the brits. In 2007 PEV the same thing happened here except this time there was no race component. Only one tribe against another on the most part. Same as in 1994 Rwanda genocide. So that doesnt have much relevance here.
And for you to dwell on trinkets like the Ethiopian kings crown instead of trying to see the nitty gritty of how to solve our issues is a disservice to Africans.
My demented friend. I argued here that we need to find a logical way to reposess land from the remnants of the Brits here and you here you are insinuating that I am of the opinion that they be left alone. And not just land, we need to have most of the economy in African hands… from big business to land. I am not concerned with an Ethiopian kings crown sitting in a london museum since the 1850s.
As I said, dream on. The world will never be truly fair and those with the power to back up their words rule. Without being powerful on the world stage, what you have said here are just empty words.
“The world is a dangerous place and I will do everything my my power to insure that Russia is among the first nations in the world”.
Vladimir Putin
“The great questions of the day will not be answered through speeches and political resolutions, but by Blood and Iron”.
Otto Von Bismarck.
Bottom line is, and always will be, for us to have any say in this world, we need to empower ourselves and we can start by slowly but surely taking over the hundreds of thousands of acres owned by the former brits and trying to indigenize our businesses from small to big business.
So my friend, go on looking for apologies and reparations. It will never happen.
OK, I will be less emotional and try to answer you. Calling people here ‘stupid’ or ‘baboons’ is my calling card, nothing personal. And now to the issues you have raised.
It is crazy for you to allege that it is automatic that any reclaimed lands will be turned into smal unproductive plots by Kenyans. Have you take a drive around Limuru and other parts of Kiambu. There are still a lot of large tea estates there.
Are there estates that have been turned into plots? Yes. Why? Because the coffee and tea was not paying itself back. Why? Because when leaving the mzungu had conspired with the Jomo gavament to continue enslaving the African. You could not market your own produce or even uproot coffee and tea bushes to plant something else. Basically you were a slave to a cartel of British tea/auctioneers in Mombasa who specialised in selling coffee and tea from African farms at the prices they wanted, just like before independence.
By the time liberalisation came, people were so fed up with the two that they wanted to uproot them. Hence the plots.
I want to argue that if the coffe and tea sectors were free of British control, they would drive this country into a second world status. South Korea specialises in electronics and has become rich. We are one of the world’s leading producers of coffee, tea and horticultural products so why are we poor? BECAUSE THE MARKETTING OF THESE PRODUCTS ARE NOT IN OUR HANDS. For the longest time our own laws forbade us - Kenyans - from milling our own coffee and packing our tea. Today, we still allow the British cartels at Msa to dictate prices of our prime products.
As for Singapore and Lee, times have changed my brother. First I take great exception when you term people like Nkrumah and Nyerere corrupt. It shows that you don’t have a basic appreciation of African history, or that you have brought into the false Mzungu narative that Africa is poor because of its corrupt leaders.
As I have always pointed out, comparing countries like Kenya to Asian tigers like Singapore and South Korea is myopic. These are largely homogenous nations that had a prior economic civilisation before colonisation. Further, their populations did not explode the way ours has. Lastly, their people were largely more educated than ours say in 1963.
What I would like to borrow from the likes of Lee are the indigenous development models that they followed. In Africa, we tend to follow the WB and IMF prescriptions, which tend to make us slaves to the West. Our so-called media doesn’t help by raising a clamour against the Chinese, who have HELPED AFRICAN ECONOMIES GROW BY AN AVERAGE 5% SINCE 2000.
Kagame is making great progress largely because he has followed the Lee model by using such indigenous programmes such as the Gacaca courts to deal with the challenge of genocide, and also by refusing to follow Western prescriptions on governance.
My argument is that as long as Kenya tries to develop within the confines of a colonial construct (large tracts of land owned by foreigners, marketing of key produce in the hands of the British etc etc) we will continue to be at the bottom of the barrel.
Our gavament always like telling us that our horticulture sector has made say about $1.5 billion last year. The same produce, our produce, makes the Dutch 10 times that. Why do we allow this crap?
Asante.
Guka, I shared this with MK and he was shocked. In relations to his Coffee bill that shuts down coffee auction in favour of branded, packed, made in Kenya coffee to be sold directly abroad. The coffee grower gets 1 pence (cent) for the coffee. The roaster gets 8 times more. The coffee shop makes 25 times more. Modern economic slavery.
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Now you understand why Ghana and Ivory coast jointly decided to hoard its cocoa beans this season. They are not being sold. They will sale only 10% so that companies recover costs. Chocolate industry is a $100 billion industry built on their cocoa but they only make $1.5 billion annually. Time to change the system.
Very lucid points. However, I wish to clarify that Kwameh was not corrupt just economically inept. He would for example open a factory in Thika whilst the raw material was in Kilifi yet not infrastructure was in place hence making locally produced commodities too expensive. I raised his issue primarily due to the wrong economic policies Africans have followed of which you have articulated very well.
We could’ve been homogenous at least with respect to our socio-economic aspect were it not for the Jommo government perpetuating divisive politics. As the adage goes, ‘nothing goes wrong, things just start of wrongly’.
To refer to Singapore is not to ape all they have done but to sensitive ourselves to possibilities that are devoid of emotions.
I cannot further argue anything else you have raised as I am also a firm believer of not only the africanization of our governance systems but also of our economic systems at least the way Tom Mboya envisioned it.
We don’t allow this ‘crap’ as you refer to it happen because we elect leaders whom we know not what lies in their hearts. To borrow from Epictetus, it is within my control to vote for a leader whom I believe is sober, but it is not within my control to determine how he/she behaves when the acquire power.
Sir, you are a remarkable man. Pity you have consistently refused us to join forces…
:D:D:D In due time, you will understand. Doing a major project and overworking currently.
You always have excuses bro…