Billy Mijungu
There is a well known political allegory in which Hitler uses a chicken to explain manipulation. He cruelly plucks the chicken over time, leaving it weak and desperate. At the end, he offers a few grains of food. The chicken follows him. His lesson is simple: exploit people for most of your term, then offer small relief at the end, and they will forget the suffering and return.
That allegory now mirrors Kenya’s political reality.
For the last three years, Kenyans have endured sustained economic pressure. Payslip deductions exceed 40 percent, eroding disposable income. Education has become increasingly expensive while delivery remains chaotic. Healthcare is compromised, TaifaCare has stalled, and the cost of living, particularly food, has risen beyond the reach of many households. These were the issues that required urgent intervention in a period of hardship. Instead, citizens were asked to endure in silence.
Government priorities have failed to match lived realities. Housing has been promoted as a social solution yet structured as a commercial venture, inaccessible to low income Kenyans. Roads and rail projects dominate public messaging, large scale, capital intensive developments that may be impressive but do little to ease daily survival pressures. Development that does not reduce household stress is not relief, it is abstraction.
Kenya may look like a construction site, but concrete does not feed families. Asphalt does not lower school fees. Steel does not pay hospital bills. Growth that bypasses the kitchen table is growth without dignity.
Most damaging of all is the normalization of corruption. Daily headlines speak of billions lost to graft and nepotism. These revelations no longer shock, yet they deepen public anger. It is an open contradiction to demand sacrifice from citizens while public resources are squandered with impunity.
The question therefore remains unavoidable. After three years of economic strain, policy misalignment, and institutional arrogance, how are Kenyans expected to forget and rally behind the slogan Tutam? Symbolic gestures and last minute concessions cannot erase lived suffering.
Political memory may be short, but hunger, debt, and hardship are not. You can only pluck a chicken for so long before it either collapses or refuses to follow grains thrown at it, so far the grains of NYOTA, Continous bribery in political meetings alike.
