P° + E + (PLH) = (A + S) : AN EQUATION TO RESOLVE THE YOUTH, EDUCATION AND PEACE QUESTION IN KENYA?

I think of reggae music as among the single largest arts and cultural contributors to peace and stability in Kenya. With the poverty levels especially in our slums and rural areas, were it not for reggae music teaching peace, love, and harmony, the growing ‘underdevelopment’ would have led to more than just street protests and demonstrations out of the growing frustrations by the young people led by puppet leadership, and only employed as part of the conveyor belt delivering only votes, not ideas nor their spirits.

But then again, reggae teaches ‘Get Up, Stand Up for your rights’, so perhaps we begin to question their education, examine whether it teaches them their rights, attempts to teach them how to create safeguards around those rights, or how they can develop further perspectives around those rights; sensitive to our diversities and interpretation of rights. Your guess is as good as mine as to the answer.

The current government and systems seem to have been set up to preserve the status quo where citizens are as educated as to the expectations of the government and not designed to fully exploit the human potential. Education doesn’t develop all the mental faculties but only those useful to its maintenance, characteristics such as fear, reserved, money-minded, language-imprisoned, choice-limitations, and anything but freedom. So then, if we are what we are only told we are, do we know ourselves outside of those perspectives? Are we aware of the power within, or of the miracles we can do every day, or the wonders we can create each hour at will, or the heavenly attributes we all have, or of how ‘WOKE’ we can become? Why wouldn’t this knowledge be taught and mainstreamed in formal education programming?

This if well done, can serve to end all forms and dynamics of poverty in the world, and create truly equal societies in all indices and metrics.

People living in poverty have so much soul and radiant energy that if released could change the course of the planet, to everyone’s benefit. No one comes to this world with the aim of ‘defeating another’, I ask to what end? Yet we are only passers-by on earth. Why would full-grown human beings fight for a place at the bus stop or in the case of flights- the airport or in the case of a fuel station- at the pump, when everyone’s needs are guaranteed to be met to get to their destinations? Above that, what would a nation build nuclear bombs?

To use at the bus stop or airport or pump, when we call all peacefully meet our needs and leave for our destination? This is Ludicrous! And to add, it is done using the ‘best’ of our scientists, and talents in qualitative and quantitative analyses and takes the equivalent in the incomes of millions of people. Even if we try and joke around it, it is not a funny joke. If it is a joke, then it would be like the whole of human potential and concentration focusing on glitter on the smallest toe-nail, instead of building large mirrors to see and admire the gold crowns, beautifully designed on their heads.

This is the same case with the preoccupation with wealth, which leads to corruption and destroys first before eventually terminating the dreams, hopes, and lives of many of the saints amongst ourselves. We must first face up, stop staring at the glitter (in the real sense the flashy lifestyles and luxuries we grow up wanting to retire into), and begin the process of creating a mirror to see ourselves and our gloriousness, godliness, and gorgeousness. The formal education program should be replaced with a model that allows you to truly know yourself and Know Your World.

Practically, and at the immediate opportunity, let us ensure that the public participation process for the Education Reforms by the 42-Member Presidential Taskforce on Education Reforms and led by Professor Raphael Munavu carries the nature of the political campaigns in addition to the town hall format and boardroom discussions that have already taken place leading to the recommendations of the initial report that is submitted to the President. This if strictly observed will produce an education model that will cater to all human needs and could be a phenomenon to the human race too.

The Slum, Eastlands, and rural youth must be consulted and engaged productively as a start. For majority have a lot of peace, love, and harmony lessons to teach the rest of the population, however, they are never really heard. They are radiant in energy, spirited, gifted, and talented. They have the solutions to our most pressing national concerns and perennial problems including that of corruption, however, their voices are stifled by government and media houses, save for the occasions when some of them are funny and entertaining with a recent example of the Jamhuri Day National Celebrations at Nyayo National Stadium where they are to be seen and not heard not one was given the podium to speak yet they filled the field singing, dancing, and running. The doctors, engineers, diplomats, historians, philosophers, and teachers among them are completely ignored.

This is ‘the other half that is not on the table’ to paraphrase President Obama while on his trip to Kenya in a speech delivered at the Kasarani Indoor Gymnasium, 2015. The educated ones have already had their say such that they even have time to repeat themselves on all media houses, are we still wondering what it is they will say that we do not know already? nothing technical really, especially from the political elite. The un-conditioning of the knowledge of ourselves and societies requires a completely different approach, in the manner in which the difference between low-dried hair and natural dreadlocks look to the eye. The difference is what we have never heard. Let all public participation exercises starting with the ongoing consultations on education reforms, and going forward in legislative frameworks, ensure that elements of Public Participation include productive engagements with the poorest in our societies per the global index (those living within and below a dollar a day).

Let us first end poverty in all forms, and let us guarantee the right to spiritual education at all levels and freedom from poverty in the constitution. Let us engage on how to have within the formal education program lessons on how to attain the highest attainable self-awareness and spirituality of man including the qualitative and quantitative elements of analysis. This process will lead to a measure of Peace, Love, and Harmony (PLH) with the result being the attainment of the full human potential through the highest possible self-awareness and spirituality.

Let us then start having their (from Slums, Low-Income Estates including in Eastlands and Rural towns) voices on media houses daily commenting on all National Issues just as the over-repeated political commentators and elites, let us ask them how to end poverty for they are the experts and know it more than most of those who claim to solve it from their comments, and also how to reform the education system, for a start.

The Kenya’s Equation:

P° + E + (PLH) = (A + S)

KEY

P°- Poverty

E- Education

P- Peace

L- Love

H- Harmony

A – Awareness

S- Spirituality

At a personal level, to attain self-awareness and the highest spirituality, we need not carry any baggage in the form of guilt and/or regret of our actions on anyone. Seek forgiveness amongst each other. If you know there is someone who got hurt by your acts of commission or omission, call them/text them/meet with them and ask for forgiveness. If you are not sure, send a text message to those in your contact list that you regularly engage in and are known to you, asking ‘Have I ever wronged you?’.

Let us heal each other for in healing, no class, social status, gender, sexual orientation, or legal status matters. All Souls are Equal. Heal each other’s souls so that the Public Participation can at the very least, have men and women who are ‘burden-free’ and will act with their conscious, led by their guts, not stomachs.