Chapo tease sign of failure to uplift mama mboga
By Hansen Owilla, March 17, 2025Human beings, say George Herbert Mead and Herbert Blumer, create meaning through social interactions using symbols and language. It is the created interactions that shape their sense of self and understanding of the world.
In the last few days, we have witnessed a fairly interesting turn of events as the President promised to provide a one million chapo-making machine to support Governor Sakaja’s school-feeding project. Kenyans were quick to make fun of the President, going to the great length of caricaturing the head of state and even christening him El Chapo.
From a symbolic interaction point of view, our interactions with Chapo socialised us with the flatbread in a way that gave it status, and a few years ago, even when maize flour became more expensive than wheat flour, households did not resort to eating more Chapo. You see, older Kenyans associated Chapo with a pedigree meal reserved for very special occasions. It was an aspirational meal, and it is still a symbol of elite status to date in many households and neighbourhoods.
In fact, households that cooked Chapo were looked at in awe. As kids, most of us interacted knowing that we needed to be cool with each other lest a chapo-cooking day in one of your friends’ houses left you salivating without help because only kids who were cool with their friends would get the privilege of getting a taste of Chapo when their friends’ households had Chapo for dinner. We were socialising with the understanding that, other than special occasions like Christmas, not all our households would cook chapo on the same days.
I have no idea why it was always dinner, but for us kids we would hide somewhere waiting for friends in chapo-eating households to come out with some for us, just like they would wait when it was our household’s turn eating chapos at dinner. It was reciprocal and, in a way, it socialised us to build friendships as we grew up. Well, those were the good old days, unlike today when sometimes you labour to cook chapo only for your kids to let you know they are not hungry or they prefer an alternative meal.
But chapo, the aspirational meal, is symbolic of the hallmark of hard work and seizing of available opportunities to afford one’s household the dignity of rewarding themselves for their hard work. Therefore, the President’s promise to give school kids chapo should be situated in a context that explains both the celebrations and outrage occasioned by his offer. Look, every Kenyan family would desire more chapo meals, because we’ve been socialised to believe that wheat products are elite and aspirational. Therefore, there are Nairobians out there who are in cloud nine looking forward to more chapos and probably wheat farmers who were complaining in Narok the other day are also nodding in agreement.
But, from a critical tradition, one would fault this leadership for opting to nip the aspiration of many a Kenyan by resigning them to this space which suggests that they will not afford chapo through their own enterprise and hard work. That the best shot at chapo is through the indignity of subjecting their sons and daughters to queuing for it in school somewhere because the regime that is meant to enable them to make capital and afford this aspirational meal has given up on its mandate of providing an environment that will turn aspirations to lived experiences. The President is giving hustlers a glimpse of what they want but not the means of making it their sign of victory.
Giving chapos to hustlers reminds us of the failures of this regime to uplift mama mbogas and watu ya boda boda as they had promised. It is utterly insulting to give a people a glimpse of what they aspire to have and not a means to achieve it.
— The writer is a media studies Researcher