Sun, Sep 29, 2024 page5

• Kenyan street poet aims to keep protests alive

  • AFP, NAIROBI
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  Holding his balance in a crammed Nairobi bus, street poet Willie Oeba delivers political punchlines straight to commuters in a bid to keep the fire of recent protests alive.

  “The president is setting a bad precedent. The first two letters stand for PR [public relations] to the residents,” spits Oeba to much clapping and cheers from his audience on one of the city’s trademark matatu buses.

  The 30-year-old spoken word artist is tapping into deep anger in Kenya at Kenyan President William Ruto — often derided as delivering good PR and little action — that came to a head in June with weeks of protests sparked by an unpopular tax bill. The streets have since fallen quiet, with many protesters scared off by a brutal police response that saw more than 60 people killed.

  

  Spoken word artist Willie Oeba, center, recites poetic anecdotes to traveling passengers on a matatu where he volunteers as an educator of the public on their civic rights and duties in Nairobi on Sept. 10.

  Photo: AFP

  Oeba has turned to art to keep the movement alive, offering a form of civic education on matatu that carry hundreds of thousands daily. Armed with cleverly weaved puns and metaphors about the government’s unkept promises, injustices and corruption, Oeba climbs aboard like any commuter, strategically timing his performances during the notorious Nairobi traffic jams.

  “What should Zakayo do?” he tells one busy matatu, using a nickname for the president based on the unpopular biblical tax collector Zacchaeus.

  “Ashuke [step down],” the crowd shouts back.

  The spoken word artist sees these ordinary Kenyans — the main victims of corrupt and shoddy governance — as his key audience.

  “The protests achieved a lot, so now the collective conscience of the nation has been pricked,” he said as he waited to board another bus and “inject” his message, as he likes to put it.

  “This is where the conversation matters most,” he added. “What we are doing right now is the revolution of the mindset.”

  Other activists take the message into Nairobi’s slums — home to more than half the urban population, rights groups said.

  Each Thursday, Wanjira Wanjiru and Kasmuel McOure visit Mathare, a sprawl of corrugated iron shacks with only sporadic access to water and electricity, to host discussions with young people. On a recent visit, they talked to a dozen-strong crowd about police brutality and accusations that politicians were trying to seize land in the slum. The group responded with spontaneous chants, the most popular being “Ruto must go.”

  Kenya’s systemic problems “cannot be solved by a protest” alone, Wanjiru said.

  “Without constant, consistent organizing, things will remain the same,” he said.

  There are signs that such bottom-up civic education is rattling the political class.

  Oeba says he has received calls from shadowy people accusing him of “inciting the public.”

  “Their work is so important, especially at the grassroots,” political analyst Nerima Wako-Ojiwa said. “Ideally civic education should be supported by the government, but that doesn’t happen.”

  The other activist terrain is online. On TikTok, where the June protests were started, people like lawyer Kebaso Morara keep the momentum going. He travels the country making short videos about government projects like roads, stadiums and schools that were never completed, and has amassed more than 400,000 followers.

  Analysts say all these efforts could fundamentally alter Kenya’s politics, encouraging people to vote more based on policies than on traditional tribal allegiance.

  “Distrust has grown over time because the political class has thrived on deceit,” expert Hesbon Hansen Owilla said.
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