This was Jomo's plan for independence: to reduce Kenya to a shop with him as the shopkeeper.
So what he and his Mount Kenya cronies did was to set themselves up as gatekeepers. Any foreigner who wanted to trade in Kenya had to pay to Jomo or his cronies. There was even a cabinet minister named Mr. Ten Percent, because he demanded 10% of any foreign investment. Mafia-style.
But this wasn't just mere corruption in dark corners. It was written into the law.
Jomo et al wrote laws that boards of every foreign company in Kenya had to have Africans in it. And eventually foreign companies were required to have African MDs. And of course they basically came from the same region. They did the same thing Idi Amin did to Asians, but unlike Amin who used brute force, they used the law. They used the law on foreign ownership to dispossess Kenyan Asians of their businesses, and left the remaining to pay tributes to the feudal lord from Gatundu.
So that's how Uthamakistan accumulated capital. Not through hard work. Through the law. And of course through tenders.
So when Muigai is selling off all our public assets and privatizing our social services, he's doing what he's father did. He's managing the shop. Or better still, he's managing the plantation. These days, massah doesn't just want our water, minerals and wildlife. He also wants our social services. And Muigai says "yes massah," whips us into order using the police and KICD, arms private guards, privatizes NYS and the prison system, and then puts 10,000 obstacles, baptized "regulation," to prevent us from running our own medical practices, schools and other social services. All this is to make sure that foreign capital gets Kenyans to provide cheap labor, and out of the money foreign capital makes, he gets 10%.
For at least 500 years, we've seen this model of African politics. African chiefs sold their own people to slavery in the Americas. African chiefs were armed by colonialists and fought neighboring Africans on behalf of colonialists. Africans were home guards oppressing their own people for colonialists. Muigai comes from a centuries-long heritage. He is not the first.
And for all intents and purposes, Kenya doesn't have a president. We have a shop-keeper-in-chief, whatever Muigai is, he's not a president.