Guys, in the last couple of weeks we have sank the lowest yet. We have derailed and are hurtling down to a place of no return.

Call me a hater, pessimist or whatever, but the truth has to be told, so we stop revelling in a fools’ paradise.

If former President Kibaki was to wake up from the dead today, he would think that time had reset to the heady days when he was the Vice-President. Come on people, who’s fooling who here? The kind of weird events we have lately witnessed in this country without batting an eyelid needs no further proof that we have lost the plot.

That thousands of youth could line up for an exercise whose real objectives and consequences they have no clue about shows the level of detachment of, one, the government, which is supposed to be the custodian and defender of public interest.

Secondly, it shows the shockingly high levels of unemployment and desperation in this demography, and the lengths which they are ready to go to survive.

Nothing matters to the youth anymore. You can as well take them to the gallows and pay them for being guillotined, if that will make them stay alive!

The sheer ignorance and mirth with which they lined up to have their eyeballs scanned for the Worldcoin cryptocurrency project for Sh7,000 was comic, were it not so tragic. It is called selling your soul for a pittance.

But how such a scam took place on the hallowed grounds of one of the country’s most iconic landmark beats logic. I shudder to think that the money Worldcoin paid to use the grounds of the Kenyatta International Convention Centre was used to refurbish some of the infrastructure at the facility.

Suffice it to say that we have become a nation of handouts. No one wants to break a sweat anymore. But there is nothing for free, so I had it said.

Moving on swiftly. Mt Kenya has become the butt of national jokes. One is that we – I feel abashed to admit that I come from the mountain – have become cheap. Tragically so, for the men. One joke that puts the point home is that Mt Kenya people have moved from one man, one vote, one shilling to one man, one plate, one soda.

Another showed pictures of Kikuyu men in 1963 proudly holding guns, their tools of fighting for independence, juxtaposed with another showing Kikuyu men clutching plates of rice and meat, like it was manna from heaven.

It is really sad, honestly. How did Mt Kenyans become so cheap to the extent that fathers could be as excited as their children on account of free food? What kind of future are we bequeathing our children? Mt Kenyans, and the Gikuyu nation in particular, need to engage in serious soul searching on where the rain started beating the community.

The Gikuyu nation used to be the country’s trendsetter. The region set standards for the rest of the country on many fronts, especially education. Its kingpins were selfless men and women, not the current wimps and opportunists masquerading as the people’s saviours.

If you ask me, it is too late to redeem Mt Kenyans from the stupor they seem to have fallen into. The region’s ordinary folks have become desperados who while all their days gazing at people in shopping centres begging for freebies from whoever they come across.

A friend of mine who recently purchased a piece of land in the region told me he was shocked by the big number of brokers purportedly selling other people’s land like it was theirs.

Just pointing out land for sale is enough for the broker to demand a hefty commission from both the owner and the buyer. Cry, my beloved people.

— The writer is a PhD candidate in International Relations