Our attention is finite, yet we spend it everywhere but where it matters. This is not a moral failure. It is a structural one. Attention economics is the idea that in a world overflowing with information, human attention becomes the scarce resource. Whoever captures it, holds power. Over time, this has reshaped not just markets, but inner lives. What we notice. What we ignore. What we can tolerate. What we can no longer sit with. For a long time, people warned that television would rot our brains. In hindsight, television looks almost generous. A show required you to stay for forty minutes. A film asked for two hours. A detective story invited you to notice details, to remember names, to hold multiple threads in your mind at once. You watched. You followed. You waited. Listening to music meant staying long enough to learn lyrics. Reading meant sitting with confusion until meaning arrived. Writing a poem meant wrestling with language, not skimming it. Even boredom had a purpose—it ...
When Kenya descended into bloodshed in the wake of the 2007 general election, the world watched in disbelief. Over 1,300 people were killed, hundreds of thousands were displaced, families were shattered, homes torched, and neighbors turned against each other overnight. We called it election violence. But was it? The truth is more uncomfortable than the slogans, the press briefings, or the reconciliatory church prayers we clung to in the aftermath. What happened in 2007/08 was not simply about a stolen vote. It was the cracking open of decades-old wounds — social, economic, tribal, and political — that we, as a country, had consistently refused to face. We blamed the devil. We called for peace. We urged forgiveness — often from the very people who had been violated. But we never stopped to ask: What were we really forgiving? What had we truly understood? The Road to Rupture: Seeds Sown Over Decades To understand the violence of 2007/08, we must step back — far back. Land : At the heart ...