https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=866045732954215

The widespread distribution of food aid across large swathes of Kenya, particularly in Eastern Province and parts of the Rift Valley, is not a sign of compassion, it is an indictment. It is a loud, humiliating confession that the State has failed its most basic obligation, to create conditions in which its citizens can feed themselves with dignity. When a government presides over a country where adults line up for sacks of maize year after year, where entire communities wait for politicians, NGOs, or foreign donors to survive, it is no longer managing poverty, it is institutionalizing it.

Food handouts have become normalized, politicized, and dangerously routine. They are now staged events, photographed moments, campaign tools, and televised performances, designed to portray leaders as benevolent saviors rather than as architects of economic failure. Yet no nation can call itself functional when food aid replaces policy, when hunger is addressed with temporary relief instead of structural reform, and when survival depends on charity rather than productivity.

This is what a failed State looks like. Not tanks on the streets, not collapsed buildings, but citizens stripped of self sufficiency, reduced to dependency, and trapped in a cycle of managed desperation. Kenya is not poor by nature, it is poor by design. The land still produces, the people still work, the youth still dream, but leadership has abandoned the hard work of economic planning in favor of speeches, slogans, and fantasies borrowed from distant lands that do not resemble Kenyan realities.

The cruelty lies not only in neglect but in deception. Leaders speak of transforming Kenya into global miracles, into replicas of foreign success stories, while ignoring the empty granaries, the collapsed small scale farming sector, the unaffordable farm inputs, the broken irrigation schemes, and the total absence of meaningful rural industrialization. They sell visions of futuristic cities while villages starve. They talk of prosperity while wananchi queue for relief food under the scorching sun.

A government with an agenda would invest in irrigation instead of emergency food. It would protect farmers from exploitative middlemen instead of importing cheap grain that kills local production. It would build storage facilities instead of photo ops. It would prioritize agricultural extension officers over political advisors. It would treat food security as national security, not as a seasonal inconvenience.

Instead, what we see is leadership that has accepted poverty as a permanent condition for millions, useful only as a tool for control. Hunger weakens resistance. Dependency silences dissent. A hungry population is easier to manage than an empowered one. That is why food distribution is accompanied by political branding, party colors, and speeches. The hand that withholds opportunity then extends a sack of maize and demands gratitude.

This is not compassion, it is humiliation masquerading as help.

The tragedy is deeper in regions that were once productive. Eastern Kenya knew farming. Parts of the Rift Valley fed the nation. These are not deserts, they are abandoned economies. Climate change is real, yes, but climate change did not steal public funds, did not mismanage water resources, did not collapse cooperative societies, and did not turn agricultural budgets into corruption pipelines. Leadership did.

Cruel leadership is not always loud. Sometimes it smiles. Sometimes it prays. Sometimes it promises heaven tomorrow while refusing to fix the economy today. But cruelty is measured by outcomes, not intentions. And the outcome before us is clear, a growing population surviving on handouts, youth without jobs, farmers without markets, and leaders without shame.

No country can feed itself on speeches. No economy grows on slogans. No dignity comes from dependency.

Until Kenya confronts the truth that food aid is a symptom of governance collapse, until leaders are held accountable not for what they say but for what people eat, or fail to eat, the cycle will continue. Hunger will be repackaged as relief. Failure will be rebranded as care. And cruelty will be normalized as leadership.

A nation that cannot feed its people has lost its moral authority. A leadership that accepts this as normal has lost its legitimacy.

History will not be kind to those who turned poverty into policy and hunger into a campaign strategy.