Politicians criticise modern families because they fear children who think

When politicians say that families are not working well, we must read the power interest behind their words. What they are really saying is that something about today’s families is interfering with their grip on power. In our case, families are producing children who oppose greed, demand accountability, and ask hard questions.

So, what do these politicians want families to do? They want “good” families; the kind that raise children who don’t question authority. But we can’t thank Kenyan families enough for birthing and nurturing children who give greedy leaders a hard time.

We are deeply grateful for parenting models that instill the spirit of sitasimama maovu ya kitawala (I will not stand by and watch evil rule). These young people have understood something crucial: unless they unlock their own future, the generation ahead of them has no intention of including them in it.

One wonders: do politicians actually reason with themselves when they give parenting advice to the nation? Really? There is something profoundly broken when a nation begins to criminalise its caregivers and ridicule its reformers.

Kenya finds itself in a moment of spiritual contradiction where those who birth, nurture, and mentor life are being scapegoated by the very powers meant to protect them.

The irony is unbearable: political elites now mock the families that hold the country together, while hastening to arrest “terrorists” among the very children who cry out for justice. Suddenly, parenting is a crime, and treason has never been closer to homes.   

There’s a difference between resistance and rebellion. The youth are not crying out to destroy, they are crying out to be heard, to be valued, to be included. Their protests — often disciplined, organised, and deeply symbolic — are being misread by a State that sees only threat where it should see opportunity.

Families are nurturing liberators; the State system, on the other hand, has bred goons. How do we compare these wombs? And the midwives? Those who have raised thoughtful, principled youth have endured a broken system that seems designed to produce the opposite — violence, bribery, silence. It’s as if there are two maternity wards in this country: one birthing crime, the other birthing hope.

And what is this new obsession with the phrase, “Children are being incited”? That line only reveals the depth of the misreading. These youth are not being incited, they are thinking for themselves and acting on behalf of all. The political habit of hiring paid protestors and actors does not apply here. Kenyan politicians seem to believe their methods are universal, but no, they are not.

Suddenly “..they have become very clever” and are talking about families. They rush to speak when they have not taken time to understand the demographic they keep calling “children”? If they did, they’d realise they are dealing with a generation that has grown up fast, forced to carry burdens politicians refuse to acknowledge.

Rather than listen, the government reaches for the harshest labels: terrorism, treason. But this feels more like watching someone punch a wall in pain and instead of asking why they’re bleeding, you jail them for damaging state property.

Make no mistake: dressing up this repression as justice is a dangerous lie. Something deep in our national soul knows this is not right. The youth are not Kenya’s threat, they are its thermometer. And when you ignore a thermometer, the fever only gets hotter.

Churches in prayer have used the phrase “marriage is under attack.” That phrase typically points to spiritual enemies — Satan and demons. But lately the attackers are not spirits. They are elected.  

Broadbase operatives accuse citizens of raising “Protestant children” and mocked women for being “Seven(th)-Day Accompanist spouses.”

But these so-called Protestant children are precisely the hope of Kenya. They are thinkers, readers, organisers. And these Seven-Day spouses? They are the nation’s hidden strength; uncelebrated wives and husbands who stand by each other’s side for the sake of family.
A wedding liturgy reads, in part: “where marriages are not held in honour, even a nation fails to prosper.” To ridicule Seven(th)-Day Accompanist spouses and  Protestant children people is not edgy, it is evil. It is a betrayal of the very moral fabric that holds society together.

In the so-called parenting crisis, some political tongues have gone wild demeaning women and implying that men who listen to their wives are somehow weak or failed.

Let us be clear: we long left the shore where the voice of women was considered lesser than that of men. Why would we celebrate our daughters yet scorn their mothers?

We have turned the page and we now stand on ground where both daughters and mothers have a voice, a voice no lesser than that of any other human being. There is nothing wrong when women speak first. Sequence is not the matter, sense is.  It is contradiction to mourn the decay of the family while mocking the very signs of family strength. That is like complaining about famine while burning the granaries.

So, our police are not trained in parenting. But are they taught on rehabilitating? “police service” — right? Service that is supposed to suppressed its sight and  become children-blind and have a permanent setting: “everyone is a criminal.”  Worse still, they are coded to promote the criminals into cripples. Whatever happened to habilitation turning criminals to into law-abiding citizens? Reform has been replaced by deform.

What Kenya’s police need is not more bullets, it is a bullet training in parenting. A moral rearmament.

A course in how to engage youth without resorting to violence. Because when these officers face off with Kenya’s Gen Z, they’re not meeting criminals. They’re meeting patriots. Digital-age Daniels. Courageous Esthers. Young minds who refuse to sell their birthright for tribal porridge.