Keeping large sums of money parked in banks so that foreign entities can extract profit from it is not merely a poor investment decision; for the aging “old money” fossils of Nairobi it has become a direct risk to life. The generation of Boomers and Generation X has been pathetic in the way it approaches succession, and the pressures that have been building for two decades are now reaching the point where they can no longer be contained.
The case of the late Dorita Lasinder Macharia illustrates the pattern. She spent the day of her death being driven around by her son, a man who by every appearance is well past fifty, shows no sign of steady employment, and had settled into the default posture of waiting for the eventual passing of the parent so that the assets could finally change hands.
This is the domestic face of the late-stage capitalism that Uhuru Kenyatta imposed on the Kenyan market through deliberate de-industrialisation. When he shut down the Kenya Petroleum Refineries Limited out of sheer malice, the country was forced to import refined fuel from the UAE and four thousand direct jobs disappeared overnight. That single decision was only one entry in a longer list.
The same old-money circles that had worshipped and adored Uhuru throughout his catastrophic and demonic presidency, watched the white-collar and industrial base collapse, then expressed surprise when their own adult children, armed with degrees and master’s certificates, found themselves living at home with no income that could sustain an independent life.
The parents, thick with the conviction that their earlier political choices carried no consequences, never accepted responsibility. They retreated into church services and social groupings where they continued to insist that their own flawed wisdom remained the correct blueprint for modern life, thereby postponing every uncomfortable conversation about money, work and mortality.
The result is a visible crisis in succession. Assets that were accumulated over decades are now more likely to enrich lawyers and the judiciary than the children who were meant to inherit them. Planning one’s affairs is treated as an optional and almost offensive exercise because these parents refuse to believe they will die, even while their own political choices – supporting the theft of health allocations, inviting the same thieves to church harambees, grabbing public playgrounds that could have served as walking space, and diverting money meant for pedestrian walkways – have shortened the average life expectancy of their class.
The markets and public goods that might have extended their years were dismantled by the very policies they endorsed, and the consequences have returned in the form of adult children who have no independent economic base.
This is not an exercise in mourning Dorita Lasinder Macharia. It is a procedural demand for justice and for the basic right to life, but it is also a precautionary warning to parents who have manufactured the present crisis. By refusing any structured redistribution of assets while still alive, by emasculating their children and reducing them to errand boys who drive them to church and chama meetings, and by then bad-mouthing those same children to friends, they have created a household atmosphere in which the pressure is already breaking the glass. The centre can no longer hold.
These generations lived their lives refusing any hand-up to the younger cohorts. When proposals for legitimate work were offered, they acted as barriers, cock-blockers and saboteurs; when services were delivered, their arrogance produced non-payment.
The same pattern of refusal now defines the cocaine snorting, demonic son of a bitch called Uhuru Kenyatta: twenty years in politics without a single younger figure he built or mentored, yet he still expects the deference due to a tribal kingpin. Rigathi Gachagua likewise cannot point to a single young person he elevated, and still the Boomers, Generation X and millennials propose to foist him forward as a community spokesman.
The people who built this arrangement are lost, and that is why some of them are now being killed by their own children and grandchildren. No one outside those generations is prepared to offer sympathy for a crisis they spent decades constructing.
