The following was written by ASFL Executive Board member Alex Njeru

The other day I attended an exhibition at the KICC grounds on during the international youth week. Needless to say my disappointment was palpable, this Uhuru Kenyatta regime and myriads of other development actors are still treating with the contempt ‘they deserve’. There was music blaring all around, we the youth were expected to be dancing around as the speakers blared.

There were exhibition stands and all the usual things that am used to were on display, from; beadwork, a few good paintings here and there, locally tailored clothes and things of that sort. There was a young man in a short and Barcelona jersey trying all sorts of different things with a football, his role and presence in such an exhibition I did not get. There were a group trying to sell a new echo-stove from Italy, there was Chinese woman, am not sure she is Chinese as I do not speak Mandarin but she was from the orient with a camera that had a 12 inch lens, economic espionage, I thought to myself, she was seemed interested in documenting things with her gargantuan camera in detail, she was stealing intellectual property. Like heck! in this country we do not what constitutes intellectual property and that which we know off we cannot protect, I am sure the next time the president goes to China, he will be presented with a gift of Maasai sandals made in Shanghai or so.There were also displays from rent seeking youth organizations on the hallowed land of Kenya, from the Kenyan Youth Parliament, to World Youth Parliament, World Youth Senate and something of that sort. I am not sure about the names, but all rent seeking youth organizations have the words like; youth, agenda, congress, parliament somewhere within their names. Oh there were stands for the Uwezo fund, and the Youth Enterprise Development Fund, more about these two latter.

Back to my disappointment, I was rather devastated that the youth in this country cannot make a good account of themselves, given the kind of self belief we have in ourselves, I expected better. Aren’t we the braggadocios who walk around letting all and sundry know that we are the generation that is going to unshackle this continent from the yoke of poverty? Well I expected a lot of gizmo and razzmatazz from the exhibitioners, not the same sort of bead work and necklaces that I saw in exhibitions by Baringo women in 2010, I mean no spite for the women in Baringo. Couldn’t we do better, where were the technological enterprises that we so often hear are driving Kenya forward? From the exhibitioners there was very little creative innovation up enterprises I could see, just a lot of copying and replication, I think we are the copy/paste generation. A television journalist was so an uninspired by the bore that she decided to engineer a story about how charcoal brickets are the thing of the future, brickets are sooo 2009 by the way.

Now the Uwezo Fund and the Youth Enterprise Development Fund are the new opiates that the government is using to lull the youth and push them away from asking all the important questions. I am sure the 6 billion shillings endowment received from the president Kenya read the ‘Kenyan taxpayers’ will be used in nothing more other than the operational expenses, and that the 6 billion shillings will have no transformative potential. The Youth Enterprise Development Fund to, the bureaucracy associated with this funds make general benefit from this fund quite arduous. The two funds are being used to lull the youth in this country, to make sure that they believe it in their heads that the two can be substituted for public sector reform, for reduced corruption and for less regulation and the country is not going to change if we believe in our minds that Uwezo Fund and the Youth Enterprise Development Fund will be the magic pill to wish all our problems away.