Thinking is the light.

It has been pointed out that not enough Kenyans read enough. Many of us make simplistic connections between events without asking what their true meanings are. We are satisfied with the simplest answer, the one that does not tax our intellect or arouse our curiosity. It is how the resignation of the Director-General of the National Intelligence Service is not greeted with curiosity from the people, the peoples' representatives or the intelligentsia. It is why there is no rational discussion of why the spouses of the head of government and his deputy receive a salary from the national treasury when they do not hod high office, or any kind of office, in the government. It is why governors and their executives, and members of county assemblies and their "assistants" can afford to go on all-expenses paid junkets to the Holy Land while doctors and nurses have to wait for five months for their salaries.

Our degree of curiosity is never aroused when our government bandies about several confusing figures while attempting to justify police-state actions. There is no rationale for the creation of multiple electronic databases of Kenyan nationals when one will suffice. We have allowed specious and self-serving explanations by government officials of murders and assassinations to go unchallenged. We continue to stand mute every time billions of shillings are embezzled and rather than the rolling of heads, what we get are wretched declarations of clear consciences.

The British colonists left us exactly where they wanted us: reading the bible with ever increasing fervour while our government, our leaders and our "friends" gouged us for every cent we had, even if it meant lending us the money so that they could gouge us some more. Churches, denominations, sects, cults and every shade of Christian thought and strain is to be found in Kenya. It matters not that the book they purport to teach from is the same, they ll have wildly differing emphasis on the bible's teachings and scandalously differing interpretations of key passages. It is the only book that Kenyans read avidly but never bother to understand. It wouldn't surprise me that the same applies in the other religions practiced in Kenya; wacha mchungaji afanye kazi ya bwana! Meanwhile our nation and its soul have been sold for a handful of magic beans.

Take titanium, for example. The jobs that mountain of titanium promised to deliver have not materialised. The good people of Kwale County continue to live in abject poverty and squalor. They are not holding their breaths that the promises associated with the mountain of rare earth will be kept either. Josphat Nanok of Turkana is no one's fool and he knows if he doesn't seize the initiative today, Turkana's oil and yet-to-be-seen lake of underground water will become the playthings of movers-and-shakers in Nairobi and his people will see not a cent of it. Sadly for Governor Nanok, the Turkana intelligentsia he should be relying on to help him outmaneuver the sneaky Nairobians are enthusiastically bending over with their pants around their legs for the Nairobians. They would rather get paid a pttance for the chance to be rogered in Nairobi than go home and help their county and their people make billions. It is easy to get shafted when one does no think about it.

If we were, as a nation, fighting this intellectual lethargy, there would always be a light at the end of the tunnel. And it would not be the headlight of an onrushing train. But where even professors of philosophy have given up their right to think, except when they are trying to bed their latest object of their amorous attentions, what others might see as a light at the end of the tunnel is actually the candle slowly fizzling out. One day that light will be no more and if we thought the past fifty years were bad, the next fifty will be a classic reminder that without reading and thinking all that awaits for a people are the burnt out shells of cities and towns, and the marauding ultra-religious hordes out to enforce their ever-crazier ideas about chastity and purity.