This archive report was first published on 9 October 2019.
Kenya's economic warriors, the hustlers, are a resilient lot. They hawk clothes at night outside supermarkets, and every piece of item from car reflectors to kitchen accessories in the midday heat. They walk to work and home, making an honest living from the sweat of their brow.
However, their lives are not without challenges. They face unfavourable working conditions, including crowded, noisy, hot, dusty, and rainy conditions. Some suggest that with time, they get used to these conditions and barely notice the inconvenience.
Regulators and authorities often do not factor them in planning, and they are chased from city centres, seen as a nuisance. They rarely get the privileges accorded to foreign investors, including tax breaks. In developed countries, great effort is taken to make life easier for hustlers, with amenities similar to those of the affluent, from parks to subsidised housing.
But in developing countries like Kenya, it's a different story. Power wielders and key economic players value the hustlers only for their consumption and voting power. After that, they are on their own, with chamas and relatives taking over.
The most powerful weapon against hustlers is price. They are excluded from best facilities, products, or services because they can't afford them. With time, they blame themselves for not being able to afford these things, unaware that the laws of economics are often tampered with by regulations, rules, and culture, which are subjective.
Education and religion, two great modulators of our lives, are often against hustlers. Education calls for obedience, following rules without asking where the rules or regulations came from. Religion does the same. Much later in life, we find that the rules and regulations are not very objective and are often out to perpetuate the status quo.
Hustlers often discover that keeping rules and regulations is not rewarded. It simply makes it easier to be exploited. That is what Karl Marx tried to change. His experiment lasted for about 70 years, ending with the Cold War in early 1990s.
Without any countervailing force to capitalism, hustlers' lives will continue becoming harder. Their only weapon has been the vote. But voting can be manipulated to perpetuate the status quo. Without means to influence their destiny, hustlers become like 'bags of potatoes', to quote Karl Marx.
Some argue that with time, hustlers exit the hard life by shifting to less taxing work after making money or aging. But they have already suffered. Who will save the hustlers from their hard life? Or should we accept suffering as the norm?
Published on October 9, 2019 by XN Iraki.
