If you think that the entire population of young people in Kenya - The Youth - has been demonised by Anyang' Nyong'o in his anti-NYS tirade or by John Githongo in his anti-NYS-as-Interahamwe tirade, please raise your hand? I mean you, Ms Thorne and you too, Ms Waitherero.
The National Youth Service was established by he enactment of the National Youth Service Act in 1963. The functions of the NYS are set out in section 16 of the Act—
The functions of the Service shall be the training of young citizens to serve the nation, and the employment of its members in tasks of national importance and otherwise in the service of the nation.
Its motto in this current wave of transformation is "True to self, true to country." I am a firm believer in the NYS. I did not go through the NYS; by the time I was being spat out of my high school with a less than creditworthy grade, the NYS had been hollowed out by Nyayoist kleptocracy. But I have relatives who passed through its training and they are a credit to the institution, captains of industry in their own right. I may have been a child, but the swindle perpetrated by the Nyayo Bus Corporation remains a vivid reminder of what Nyayoism could do - and seems poised to do in the Twenty-first Century.
Mr Githongo is being very casual with his language. Kenya is not Rwanda and the scale of the violence of 2007/2008 pales in significance to what happened in Rwanda in July 1994. This is the language of incitement that is being levelled at the abrasive Moses Kuria with such middle-class feeling. While Mr Githongo has gone overboard with his hyperbole, he and Mr Nyong'o are right to question why the NYS is being lavished with so much money, why it's intake is being expanded so much and why it has become necessary to emphasise its paramilitary training.
Few seem to appreciate the significance of this emphasis. It has always been part of the NYS programme, but more people remember the NYS for the trades training it provided to pre-university students. Now, even with the slum-upgrading programmes (which seem to be carried out in opposition strongholds alone) the emphasis is on paramilitary training. Of more twenty thousand young people. Annually. Up from a peak of four thousand recruits annually.
When Chris Murungaru and his successor John Michuki lavished training and equipment on the Administration Police, few saw anything extraordinarily sinister about it. The APs would sill be the same corrupt askaris the people were used to dealing with. No one foresaw the manner in which the APs would be deployed and employed in the massive rigging that took place during the 2007 general election. Once bitten, twice shy and Mr Nyong'o and Mr Githongo are right to wonder whether this largesse that is being lavished on a massively expanded NYS is in preparation for similar electoral perfidy in the next general election.
The role of the APs in the 2007/2008 crisis was largely because of the secrecy that revolved around the financial dealings of the service. It is this same secrecy that seems to swirl around the NYS and the recent attempts to uncover its financial dealings have resulted in obfuscation, spin-doctoring and accusations of political witch-hunting. Meanwhile, the NYS keeps recruiting 20,000 young people, trains them in, among many other things, paramilitary skills, spends billions in secret and generally behaves like a ministerial army. Why wouldn't Mr Githongo see it as a militia? Why wouldn't Mr Nyong'o worry about the overweening secrecy in its affairs?
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