Hey Kenyans, Is This The Solution To The Perennial Problem of Stripping Women? One Kenyan Shares Their Thoughts

Today, again, we saw another incident of a woman being stripped, laid down and facing the beastly acts of matatu touts in a matatu seats. Oh God! It was horrible. It is still hitting my mind. It was horrendous. I pity her.

But today, one Kenyan, a lady to be precise, has come up with a very insightful article that looks at the root cause of all these sins in our republic.

Here is the article:

“Do not blame strippers and the nude: They represent our all-round decay,” Or, paragraph 7 or, any other thing you will consider a high in the article.

By Celine Robina

“The civility of a Nation can be determined by the way it treats its weak members”.

 For those who use public transport you may have noted that children are required to stand as adults sit in comfort fondling their cell phones. This includes the very people who are with the children. You will often find them conversing with friends unconcerned whether the child they are with is comfortable or not. It is also common to see a parent taking a kindergarten child to the bus stop at 5.45am in the morning to take a bus to school. What kind of society are we when we treat the weakest member of our society in this manner? How have we developed this unconcern for the others even for our own children? Let me submit that from what I see, I adjudge we are one of the cruelest human beings in the history of time.

It does not at all surprise me that adult young men in Nairobi can audaciously strip a woman right in town, whatever reason they may have for doing that. Having grown up being disregarded, they have over time come to learn not to take the other as a being with certain inalienable rights. If you observe these young men at the bus stations of Nairobi, you will discover that the cruelty they mete towards one another is unimaginable. Therefore, in our attempt to understand what triggered them to strip women, we must not be shallow to imagine that their violence is reserved for women. They spare no one. At Machakos country bus station, they act with unfathomable impunity. From this backdrop, it is irresponsible for us to pass swift judgments to the effect that they should be arrested. If we decide to arrest criminals in Kenya, believe me you, we will arrest half of the Kenyans. Be it the ministers of religion who suck their congregation’s blood, the lawyer who squanders a client’s compensation package after a disabling accident or a doctor who will recommend unnecessary tests to a patient to get an extra coin.

There is an astonishing resemblance between the strippers and the women who are victims. Both have a form of hatred towards themselves and both are making a statement to society albeit in different ways. Their statement to society could simply be summarised as a cry for attention. Please I am here, take note of my needs. For a long time, we have been silent because unknown to the strippers and their victims, we have no solutions to any of their problem the cardinal being their low self esteem. From childhood , we have condemned them through a punishing regime of schooling with a false promise that we will provide them with all they need if only they can trust and obey our word. Through observation and experience, they have at last discovered that we are pathological liars for we have no capacity to provide even a fraction of their needs. They have discovered they are on their own.

They, therefore, seek attention by resorting to unwarranted violence towards the other and surprisingly against themselves as manifested in different ways. It is not uncommon to get a lady who has bored holes on the entire lobe of her ears, nose and even some private areas. The same lady may subject her hair to all manner of violence after every two days – burning, twisting and immersing it in a variety of chemical. As if that is not enough, she forces her legs into some contraptions in the name of shoes which provide for hilarity if one were to watch the discomfort they clearly subject the wearer into. On the same vein, it is common to get young men who have struggled to make five hundred shillings in a day or two subject themselves to injurious loud nocturnal music, drugs and poisonous alcohol instead of buying food or essential human provisions. In brief, the violence we witness is not limited to assault on women. It has victims in the name of children, the disabled, the old, women and men themselves. However, young men form the largest group which perpetrates the violence. This is not accidental as they are the strongest physically.

The stripping has not just occurred. It has been an organic process developing though we have largely ignored it perhaps because it has lacked the physical violence. It has over time been registered in the form of giggles, which are then laced with insults. It is now at the stage of giggles, insults and stripping. The next phase will definitely be giggles, insults, stripping and then open air raping and finally murder. We already see some isolated incidents of this happening when a woman or girl is raped and murdered.  Surely, this will come to pass if there is no humanising cultural revolution coming soon.

Suppose the young underemployed or unemployed men in the matatu terminus had jobs which keep them occupied throughout the day, will they have time to giggle, insult and strip women? Suppose the women who were stripped had office jobs which have a formal dress code, which afford them a car and a home in what we refer to as leafy suburbs, could they have exhibited such self-hatred by exposing half of their breasts and three quarters of their legs on a cold rainy day?

Poverty contributes immensely to the current crisis. To solve the problem of self hatred and low self esteem, demonstrated simultaneously by the Strippers and the Stripped, Kenya has to take a radical turn to re-engineer its populace. Let us have policies which outlaw torture of children in the name of schooling. If children are brought up with love, they will be infected with it and will spread it naturally. The current generation is lost. We may save future generations. The current generation with its violence can only be tamed by the threat of superior state violence manifested in the armed forces particularly the police.”