Every once in a while, someone with little to no business about it tells me how to do my job. They ("they" are people with a bit of power and, perhaps, a bit of seniority, but very little technical ability, if any) look over my shoulders as my fingers flit, with nimbleness and confidence, over my very expensive mechanical keyboard, and attempt to tell me what to draft (and much, much worse, how to think about a legislative sentence). Those kinds of attempts are made only once by these sorts of people and they never darken my door again. One even had the temerity to try and pull of an appeal to authority fallacy on me. Anyway, this is not about my challenges dealing with the professionally feeble-minded in my profession but about the "Kenya National Dress", a national government cultural boondoggle that has consumed tens of millions of dollars for dogs' years with nothing to show about it.
The Government has tried on many occasions to impose on the Kenyan peoples a national dress. It has failed. The Government has made these failed attempts because its instinct to control every aspect of the Kenyan peoples' lives, especially their cultural lives, has endured from the moment a white man set foot on the shores of Nam Lolwe and decreed that the bare-breasted women of the Kavirondo should cover up because he felt some type of way. Rather than educate himself on the culture and lives of the peoples he encountered, mzungu imposed on the "native" peoples his culture and enforced his cultural norms with a combination of biblical interpretation and coercively violent police power. The Government has carried on this tradition without batting an eyelid, explaining the obsession with a "national dress". So long as the effort for a national sartorial identity is driven by the Government, the effort will fail abjectly.
The several state-sponsored institutions of high learning employ cultural scholars of no mean repute who have documented so much of the Kenyan peoples' cultural histories. Even in the grasp of an overweening government that sought to police how they could write what they wrote, these men and women have published truly ground-breaking work on what the peoples of the land that eventually became Kenya spoke, did, ate and dressed in, and why. Bethwell Ogot's truly magisterial "A History of the Luo-Speaking Peoples of East Africa" is indicative of the gifts our historians are capable of bestowing on us if the government kept its grubby controlling fingers out of the kitchen.
Government ministers, and the mandarins they command in their ministries, are not scholars, though these days the corridors of the national and county executives are festooned with men and women brandishing PhDs (both real and honorary) like weapons. But these people are not employed in the government because they are scholars; they are employed in the government because they are (or are capable of being) able administrators. Their output is not composed of scholarly works but rules, regulations, policies and a mysterious document called a budget. So it beggars belief that government ministers (and their minions) think they have the cultural intelligence to supervise the development of a "national dress" that will unify the over fifty cultural traditions that are to be found in the borders of the Republic of Kenya. This kind of arrogance is why many Kenyans have lost faith in the senior-most ranks of the public service, and more and more Kenyans are treating the entire public service like a nuisance at best and an invasive cancer at worst.
The government, this Government, exists to control the people it is supposed to serve. It has long-struggled to cede control to the people despite the bold declaration in Article 1 clause (1) of the Constitution that states that All sovereign power belongs to the people of Kenya. And so, tens of millions of dollars more will continue to be wasted as ministers and ministry wankers look high and low for inspiration to create, finally, the Kenya National Dress and parade it in all the runways of the world. That kind of arrogance beggars belief. In the face of thirty years of abject failure, these people are still forging on in search of an elusive, unattainable dream. To paraphrase Henry II, will no one rid us of this pestilential and wasteful white elephant?
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