A Country of Open Eyes and Quiet Blindness

There is a disturbing moment in the novel Blindness by José Saramago when a man suddenly loses his sight while waiting at a traffic light. His blindness spreads quickly through the city. Drivers abandon their cars. Streets fall into chaos. Institutions crumble. Society begins to unravel.

But the true horror of the novel is not the epidemic.

It is the realization that the blindness did not begin with the disease.

The blindness was already there.

People could see. They navigated their lives, went to work, obeyed rules, and participated in society. Yet they failed to notice the fragile threads that hold a community together—responsibility, empathy, restraint. When those threads finally snapped, the collapse appeared sudden. In truth, it had been forming quietly for years.

Sometimes I think about that when I look at everyday life in Kenya.

We are remarkably skilled at diagnosing what is wrong with the country. Conversations are filled with sharp observations about corruption, inequality, bad governance, and poor planning. We debate these problems constantly—in matatus, offices, living rooms, and social media threads.

But there is a question that is asked far less often.

What small part do we play in the systems we complain about?

Because the truth, uncomfortable as it may be, is simple: very few people are purely innocent in broken systems.

This blindness rarely appears in dramatic scandals or spectacular corruption. More often it hides inside ordinary contradictions that have slowly become normal.

Take faith, for example. Many Kenyans proudly identify as Christians. Churches are full. Religious language shapes public life. Schools describe themselves as mission-driven institutions grounded in spiritual values.

And yet the commandment to keep the Sabbath holy often applies only to some people.

House helps cook meals on Sundays. Watchmen guard gates through church hours. Drivers run errands. Gardeners continue working quietly in the background.

Recently, I received a call from a school looking for a Mandarin teacher. It was a Sunday. Curious, I later looked into the institution. It proudly described itself as a Christian mission-driven school.

The contradiction was striking.

The Sabbath, it seems, is sacred—unless someone else is working so that we can rest.

The same blindness appears in conversations about the rising cost of living. Kenyans speak constantly about how expensive life has become. And rightly so. Rent is high. Food prices continue to climb. Transport costs stretch already strained budgets.

But in many homes and workplaces, the people who make daily life possible still earn very little.

House helps, watchmen, and gardeners often receive wages that barely allow them to survive. When this is questioned, the defense usually comes quickly: they receive accommodation and food.

But one cannot help wondering: what exactly is someone supposed to do with five thousand shillings?

What future can be built from that?

Savings become impossible. Education for their children becomes difficult. Emergencies quickly turn into crises. Over time, entire families begin their lives within economic limits they did not create.

In such situations, an uncomfortable question begins to emerge: have we quietly confined someone within poverty while convincing ourselves we are being generous?

The contradiction becomes even clearer in offices and businesses.

Across many companies, administrators, clerks, receptionists, and shop attendants earn salaries of around thirty thousand shillings or less before taxes. These workers keep offices functioning. They manage customers, organize paperwork, and handle the countless details that allow a business to operate smoothly.

Yet it is not unusual to find the owners of these same companies living lives of extraordinary comfort—earning hundreds of thousands of shillings each month while driving expensive cars and living in large homes.

People often explain this by pointing to capitalism. The owners took the risks. They built the company. They deserve the rewards.

And perhaps that is partly true.

But it is also true that organizations grow because many people contribute their labor and skill. Businesses are not sustained by vision alone. They are sustained by the quiet work of dozens of individuals whose efforts rarely receive the same recognition.

It is a little like the celebrated lawyer who proudly explains that they studied for years and therefore deserve the large fees they command. What is less often mentioned is that behind the scenes there is usually a clerk or assistant spending long hours researching cases and preparing documents that make the lawyer’s success possible.

No system can function if only one person carries the weight.

The blindness extends beyond workplaces and homes into the way we treat our environment.

After the recent heavy rains, parts of Nairobi’s CBD flooded. The conversation quickly turned to poor planning and bad governance. Government agencies were blamed. Infrastructure was blamed.

And some of that criticism may be justified.

But Kenya’s land is largely privately owned. In the rush to profit from real estate, trees are cleared, wetlands disappear, and green spaces give way to concrete.

Developers build. Homeowners build. Investors build.

Rarely does anyone pause to consider whether thousands of individual building decisions might also contribute to the flooding.

Everyone blames the government when the water rises.

Few people consider the quiet accumulation of private choices that helped create the problem.

The same pattern appears in smaller ways as well.

People throw plastic bottles and wrappers out of car windows. Garbage ends up in rivers and drainage channels. Streets become dirty.

Then we complain that the government does not keep the city clean.

Again and again, the same pattern emerges.

We see the problem clearly when it exists outside ourselves. We struggle to see it when it passes through our own hands.

The blindness that José Saramago wrote about was not simply the loss of sight. It was the refusal to observe ourselves honestly within society.

Broken systems do not survive only because of powerful elites or corrupt leaders. They also survive because of ordinary habits. Small conveniences. Quiet compromises. Thousands of daily decisions that seem harmless on their own but collectively shape the character of a society.

This does not mean responsibility is equal everywhere. Power still matters. Leadership still matters.

But focusing only on those at the top allows everyone else to remain comfortably innocent.

And perhaps that is the most seductive form of blindness.

In Blindness, one character eventually asks a haunting question: What if we are not blind? What if we are people who can see, but choose not to?

It is an unsettling thought.

Because if we begin to observe—not just look—we may discover something uncomfortable. The systems we criticize may also be sustained by small choices made quietly in homes, offices, and streets every single day.

And if that is true, repairing a society requires more than demanding change from leaders.

It requires the far more difficult task of examining ourselves.

After all, if there is one truth about broken systems that is difficult to escape, it is this:

very few people are purely innocent inside them.