The Lang'ata Primary School saga has many themes, all of which point to a fatal flaw in the organising principle of the Kenya nation-state: Insatiable greed, a police apparatus designed to protect this greed, and a populace, especially the middle class, that has never quite recovered from the moral and intellectual paralysis foisted on it by 40 years of immoral and anti-intellectual governance.

The greed began right at Independence, when those who came to power elevated personal wealth accumulation to a national value, no matter how one came by this wealth.

There was a defining moment in the 1960s when Jomo Kenyatta confronted Bildad Kaggia, a member of a group that protested gradual erosion of the ideals of the freedom struggle. The president berated Kaggia for not doing as well for himself as the other political prisoners imprisoned with Kenyatta during the colonial era had.

“Kaggia, what have you done for yourself?” demanded Kenyatta. Thus was set in motion a cutthroat race for wealth, in which public money and resources, such as land, were fair game.

Politicians and other well-connected people became multimillionaires, causing JM Kariuki to warn that Kenya had become a country of “10 millionaires and 10 million beggars.” For this pronouncement and his consistent pro-poor stance, Kariuki was kidnapped and murdered.

If the jailing of opposition leaders such as Oginga Odinga and the murder of others seen as threats to the status quo had not awoken the populace to the reality of a police state, the egregiously callous murder of JM was a deadly warning that Kenya was now firmly in the grips of a neo-fascist clique that would use torture, detention and murder to protect its wealth and power.

The police state would become institutionalised by the Nyayo regime. Kenya became a de jure one-party state. The secret ballot was outlawed. Detention and sedition laws were employed to muzzle even imagined non-conformists. Torture chambers were built. The secret police became a shadowy omnipresent reality.

Militias were deployed against dissidents and their families. Groupings such as Kanu YK92, a viciously anti-reform lobby group, emerged, its members becoming overnight millionaires.

Kenya became what columnist Gitau Warigi calls a “primitive kleptocracy,” where now school fields, hospital lands, public toilets, national forests, etc, were parcelled out to the well-connected, and multibillion shilling corruption scams were hatched by those in power. And all this theft was protected by a deadly all-pervasive police apparatus.

All dictatorships create and thrive in a warped moral and intellectual context. Those viewed as dissidents are painted as being somehow morally deficient. In Kenya, they were painted as agents of the devil, out to impose ungodly values on god-fearing citizens. Thus the constant castigation: “Shetani ashindwe.”

Intellectuals who did not sing the regime’s praises “like a parrot,” were cast as brainwashed agents of foreigners out to destabilise the God-ordained government.

The result of this indoctrination is a populace, especially a middle class, that instinctively fears disruptions to their life. So as the Kanu regime stole, tortured and murdered, most people minded their business, often adopting a hostile stance towards anyone calling for change in the status quo. This state of moral and intellectual paralysis is one that we have never quite recovered from.

Thus the gassing of children protesting the grabbing of their school field was really the logical outcome of a history of insatiable greed, of police corrupted to see their role as protecting this greed, and a populace cowed and indoctrinated to mind its own business.

But the horrific images of unconscious children called attention to the flawed ethos on which the Kenya nation-state is built. We must confront it or perish. Cosmetic reforms will simply not do.

The question progressives asked when Uhuru and Ruto took power was catapulted back to relevance by the Lang'ata saga.

Can the duo, political and material beneficiaries of the past rot, help to reinvent Kenya? Can they first reinvent themselves ideologically? The answer, as Bob Dylan, sang, is “blowing in the wind.”

Tee Ngugi is a political and social commentator based in Nairobi.