Stefan Riuki

Students of historical empires realized the communications medium was the empire. Organizing the inscription, transportation, indexing and storage of its communications, and designating who was authorized to read and write them, constituted the empire.-Julian Assange #Kenyaisus

In my address titled "The Political Economy of Obedience," delivered last month at the Josef Korbel School of Global Affairs at the University of Denver, I identified five key mechanisms through which African populations have been trained into political compliance. I am sharing a summary here because they explain precisely what we are watching play out in real time every day on this continent. The first is colonial education. The curriculum inherited from the French, the Brits or the Portugese administration was not designed to produce critical citizens. It was designed to produce a particular kind of political subject. one who understood authority as something to be respected rather than questioned, and who experienced his own political traditions as a source of shame rather than institutional possibility. As I said in Denver, the most effective political prisons are not made of concrete. They are made of curriculum. The Togolese school I attended taught us the genealogy of French kings with more precision than the history of the governance systems that predated French colonial presence on our territory. The second is the economy of obedience itself. Authoritarian systems endure not primarily through permanent terror but because they structure the relationship between political compliance and material survival so that obedience becomes, for most people most of the time, the rational choice. Access to employment, scholarships, market licenses, import authorizations, health clinic access: none of it politically neutral, all of it conditioned on loyalty. People in these systems do not collaborate with power because they are morally deficient. They collaborate because the scaffolding of their daily lives has been designed to make non-collaboration economically catastrophic. The third is the family as a site of control. In conditions of economic precarity, the individual who considers a dissident act must calculate not only her own risk but the risk she imposes on her parents, her siblings, her children, her cousins etc. I have watched people of intelligence and moral clarity retreat from political engagement not because they were afraid for themselves but because they could not justify the devastating exposure their activism would bring to their families. The authoritarian state does not need to threaten everyone. It only needs to ensure that the threat to one is visible and comprehensible to all. The fourth is religion. In many parts of Africa, religious institutions have been deployed, not by their most honest practitioners but by their most politically convenient ones, to transmit a theology of earthly resignation and otherworldly reward that discourages political engagement. The pastoral instruction to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's sits very comfortably with the interests of Caesars who have no intention of rendering anything to anyone. Liberation theology, which in Latin America produced an extraordinary tradition of religiously grounded political resistance, has had a far more contested reception in much of African Christianity and Islam, partly because of the direct entanglement of many religious institutions with state power, which has made spiritual authority and political compliance structurally allied. The fifth is media. In authoritarian African contexts, state and privately owned media aligned with power do not typically practice crude propaganda. They practice something more subtle and more durable: the selection of what is visible and what is invisible; the framing of social problems as natural phenomena rather than political choices; and the treatment of opposition voices as marginal or foreign-funded. The film industry participates in this discipline in its own way, through the systematic promotion of narratives that depict poverty and wealth as conditions of fate or personal failure, stories in which the distance between the poor and the rich has everything to do with luck, talent or divine favour and nothing to do with power, policy or the deliberate engineering of inequality. The cumulative effect, over decades, is a population whose political imagination has been narrowed to the point where alternatives are genuinely difficult to conceive, not because the alternatives do not exist, but because the political ecosystem has ensured they remain invisible. These are the operating manual of authoritarian systems on this continent. And authoritarianism today is not limited to regimes with a known dictator who has held power for decades. It extends equally to regimes that perform a change of leadership through placebo elections conducted every four to five years, producing a new face every eight to ten years while the same system of impunity, patronage and repression remains structurally intact. I would argue that these are in fact the more dangerous form of authoritarianism because their citizens are deceived into believing they are living under a democracy when they are in reality governed by plutocrats. The citizen under an obvious dictatorship at least knows what he is fighting. The citizen under a rotating plutocracy has been convinced there is nothing to fight at all. He votes, he watches a new face take the oath, and he mistakes the performance of transition for the substance of change. He ends up with no voice, no justice, no agency, and worse, no drive to fight for his own dignity. For one can only fight for liberation after acknowledging one's condition of oppression.

@MsMakeri @Safaricom_Care @Cofek_Kenya, something most dangerous is afoot across all avenues of the Kenyan society, putting everybody in danger...

@theoriginalcode @Safaricom_Care I want in

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being neurodivergent is having the vision of a ceo, the emotional depth of a poet, and the executive dysfunction of a raccoon.

Humans are meant to bond. Not, use each other as chess pieces.

There is nothing more powerful than well-informed optimism. It has to be well-informed though. The "everything will be fine" type of optimism may also be somewhat useful, but it's not as useful as the "Hmm, what if we tried x?" kind.

If a lobby can buy an election, it's not a democracy, period. And if an evil lobby can buy an election, it's far worse than any form of autocracy. Let that sink in.

@AlhajiKe O tempora! O mores!

Everyone is living on defense mode buana. Genuine connection ni kama ziliisha 1972.

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@mayaamolo Ruin me...

Michiko core

@RufasKe @thisispinguini As someone who watches Bloomberg everyday...nimeisha bro...😅😅😅

@thisispinguini Unaskiza Bloomberg daily mtaelewana aje Na msee hushinda Kwa Citizen TV na Ghetto radio?

Na mbona mtu akiingia deep into trading anaanzanga kuloose interest ya kukaa na watu

Most Africans are polyglots. We speak multiple languages but due to colonialism we have allowed our languages to be referred to as “dialects” and we don’t even count them in the languages we speak. For most Africans, being bilingual means speaking English and French.

If nobody opens the door for this generation, we will build our own rooms. PANGEA ’26

Semper ad meliora “Always towards better things”

adulting is basically arriving at the same truths as your father, but from first principles.

@amarifields_ Building VenMail.io

i had a dream that underrepresented founders get the access and capital they deserve no matter where they are we’re building that at founders hub if you’re raising, comment what you’re building and we’ll invite you

@ouma_neko Man, it be your own...😅

Went with my mum to Ugunja Manna Supermarket thinking I was smooth with the cashier only for my own mother to expose me publicly 😭🤣 “Mwache kudanganya huyo msichana, ameoa Kikuyu mwenye ni mkali sana!” The cashier laughed, I froze, and my mother walked away proudly like she had just protected national security 😂

@ouma_neko May the Lord's light shine upon her. God's will is done.

Today on my way to Sidindi market, I witnessed something that has shaken me deeply. I had stopped briefly to greet a neighbour when an elderly woman approached him and humbly asked if he could give her any work to do, even if it was just weeding a small section of his farm so she could earn something to buy food. The neighbour looked at her sadly and told her she was too weak to work. He said her body looked frail, her legs could barely support her, and she needed rest more than labour. He even told her she should be at home as her children or grandchildren take care of her at her age. But the painful truth is this woman has no children. No grandchildren. No husband. No one. The man reached into his pocket and gave her Ksh 50. She bent slowly in gratitude, thanked him respectfully, and walked away struggling. I tried to continue with my journey, but something inside me refused. I stopped greeting the neighbour midway and followed her. She led me to her small home near Kutana and I promised her I would return later in the day. Today I kept that promise. And that is when the full reality hit me. Her name is Mary Ongar. Her number is 0700393695. I found her living alone in a collapsing house. Her legs are badly bent and deformed, her body weak, and every movement she makes is painful to watch. Yet despite everything, she still smiled and thanked God for life. When I asked her who takes care of her, she quietly answered: “Jesus is my husband.” Those words broke me completely. Wonderful people, this is the reality many villagers are facing silently. People are not refusing to help because they are heartless. Everyone is struggling. Hunger, poverty and hopelessness have become normal in many homes. Meanwhile leaders are busy in Nairobi trading insults, propaganda and endless politics while forgotten Kenyans like Mary suffer alone without food, proper shelter, roads, healthcare or dignity. Mary is not asking for millions. She only asked for a small chance to survive: A sack of omena. A crate of onions. A small business she can manage to feed herself. That is all. I am pleading with every compassionate Kenyan: Please let us stand with Mary Ongar. Ksh 10. Ksh 20. Ksh 50. Ksh 100. Anything small can help. Her number is: 0700393695 Please do not ignore her. Sometimes humanity is measured by whether we stop when others are suffering. Let us remind this old woman that she is not alone.

@ChineseEmbKenya An avocadoes...

@ChineseEmbKenya As a tea, coffee, Macadamia nuts farmer, these three offer a massive opportunity when well-structured...

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