By Billy Mijungu
When it comes to kids, that is where citizens draw the line.
By the time Echoes of War was conceptualized and performed, right before Directors of Education, Chiefs, Assistant County Commissioners, Deputy County Commissioners, County Commissioners, and Regional Commissioners, where was NIS?
This was not oversight. It was deliberate. It signals something deeper, that state actors themselves may be rebelling from within. Has our intelligence system become too narrow or too rigid for its time? In the information age, why are we punching below our weight?
Political think tanks cannot simply morph into statecraft think tanks. There is a defined path to governance, and Kenya Kwanza has paid the price dearly for failing to walk it. Their response to Butere Girls was disproportionate to say the least.
Sacking the Board of Management or even the school principal cannot extinguish the embers of a fire still simmering. And truth be told, they may have had no clue about the play in the first place.
It is time to rethink how the Government is funded at the grassroots, currently starved of resources, crippled by poor leadership, and in many cases, totally absent. The National Government is no longer truly national in its grassroots reach. It has grown centralized, operating almost exclusively from headquarters, and this will cost the country dearly.
Bureaucracy is in chaos. Pesa haifiki chini. This spans nearly every ministry. For over a decade now, the National Government Administration and NGAOs have had minimal impact, thanks to funding locked at headquarters. Field offices can barely function.
State departments suffer the same fate. Their grassroots presence is barely scratched. Take the State Department for Youth. It barely has a budget to support youth officers. And the result is a glaring disconnect with young people, which became the springboard for the Gen Z revolution of June 25, a movement that has sustained itself to this day.
Today any crowd is as powerful and organized as a Gen Z crowd, and they have become the loudest messengers of the RutoMustGo wave that keeps shaking the foundations of government.
So the question Kenyans must ask about the Echoes of War debacle is this: where was the National Intelligence Service? And where, really, was the government?
As long as AIE holders lack the funds to run core operations, whether police, NIS, NGAOs, or ministries, the cracks will only grow deeper and the shame more persistent.
Now the Butere Girls play has received National attention. Inspired Script writing, inspired rebellion and as usual remobilised Geb z’s who fight is proving decisive and sustainable. What can Kenya Kwanza do ?
We are truly living in the shackles of doom, and Echoes of War laid that bare.
