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When Scandal Becomes Our National Entertainment

The other day, I was in a matatu. The radio was on, as it often is, and a caller was given the chance to share their truth. What did they choose to say? That they were sleeping with a mother and her daughter at the same time. The radio hosts laughed, entertained it, asked questions. The matatu passengers chuckled. And just like that, the ride went on.

It struck me—not because of the scandal itself, but because this is the kind of content that dominates our airwaves. Morning shows, drive shows, late-night segments. Sex, scandal, cheating, love triangles, secret lives. And it isn’t just radio. On TV, online, even in comedy clubs, scandalous and sexual topics gather the biggest crowds. The more outrageous, the more viral.

Scroll through YouTube and you’ll see “story time” confessionals that rack up hundreds of thousands of views—someone narrating their affair, their betrayal, their secret lives. TikTok trends erupt overnight around gossip. Tabloids and blogs thrive on the downfall of celebrities, not their craft. And when politicians get caught in scandal? We laugh, make memes, and move on—rarely asking the harder questions about leadership, accountability, or policy.

So I ask: what does this say about us as a people?

We like to blame the media for feeding us filth, but the truth is more uncomfortable. Media only gives us what we reward. If a serious interview with an economist gets 2,000 views while a gossip clip gets 200,000, the choice is already made. We have shown, again and again, that our attention gravitates toward shock value.

And yet, every country has entertainment. Every society has gossip. What makes ours troubling is the lack of balance. Where are the equally loud platforms for ideas, for solutions, for uncomfortable but necessary conversations about who we are and where we are going? Why is it easier for us to laugh at someone’s scandal than to debate the cost of living?

Is this by design, or are we the architects of our own distractions? Is someone deliberately dulling our appetite for serious content, or have we willingly dulled it ourselves? And where does this leave us as a country?

A nation that treats scandal as its daily bread becomes blind to slow-burning crises. We stop demanding accountability because entertainment feels easier than anger. We normalize the outrageous until nothing shocks us anymore. And once nothing shocks us, nothing moves us either.

The man on the radio that day got his five minutes of fame. The passengers got their laugh. The station got its ratings. But I couldn’t help wondering—what if our hunger for scandal is the very thing that keeps us from growing? What if the biggest scandal of all is not what callers say on air, but what we as a people choose to give our attention to?

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