Perhaps one of the most overlooked privileges is not wealth itself, but having enough margin in your life to respond to reality. Over the last few years, we have become fluent in the language of privilege, speaking easily about financial privilege, pretty privilege, racial privilege, passport privilege, educational privilege and social privilege, and in doing so we have become increasingly aware that people do not all start from the same place and that some doors open more easily for some than for others. Yet there is one form of privilege that seems to receive far less attention, and that is the privilege of being able to do something with the information you have, not simply knowing, but acting, because the truth is that information alone changes very little. We like to imagine that if people only knew better, they would do better, and entire industries are built around this assumption, from self-help books and documentaries to podcasts, awareness campaigns, public health initiative...
What happens to a people who believe they should keep receiving without ever renewing? I’ve been house hunting lately, and it’s been a brutal mirror. Not just of Nairobi’s inflated rental prices or neglected plumbing, but of something much deeper and much more disturbing—our collective tolerance for decay, and our strange belief that once something starts giving, it should never stop… even if we do. You walk into a house in Kileleshwa or Karen going for 150K a month. The gates creak. The tiles are chipped. The kitchen cabinets look like they’ve survived three regimes. You mention a leaky sink and the caretaker shrugs. You’re expected to be grateful to live in a postcode, even if the house itself is crumbling. And this is not just about houses. It’s about us. This habit of milking without mending. Of expecting fruit from trees we never water. Of choosing inheritance over investment. It’s a quiet kind of national rot—and we’ve all played our part. Our strange national comfort with dec...