Durex-Love sex and Sex-Loving Kenyans,we struggle but Love sex!

As of today, right now, Kenya is under siege from all quarters by all sorts of enemies. Today was marked by another day of rowdy youths and hypocritical leaders combing villages and estates in towns in search of shops and brewers of the second generation alcohol that has claimed many lives while leaving behind them a trail of destruction of private property. Today we look so concerned including our very own president as if we had all gone out of Kenya for a trip only to come back to find our sons,daughters,friends and neighbours having either drunk themselves to impotence, death ,blindness or madness.

Were we not all here when the unscrupulous business people, hungry government officials and some of the bribe-taking Kenya Bureau of Standards officers and the almost dysfunctional NACADA decided to kill Kenya’s most important resource to its development, its young work force, by making them drink poison as they the janjes smiled all the way to the bank?

Yes, corruption! Is it not part of Kenya’s heritage? I wonder why the Kenya Tourism Board hasn’t considered factoring it in as part of our tourist attraction when they are marketing our nation of many beautiful things abroad. Every day, images and sounds of it stick in the air like the site of the stinking and unsightly Dandora dumpsite. It has accosted us from all angles we can barely breathe and focus our eyes clearly on matters development.
Insecurity is our biggest nightmare. We have lost too much of our very own to bandits with guns in Nadome –Baringo,Baragoi,Mpeketoni...name them all those places.Alshabaab militants have mowed us with bullets, always catching us asleep as if we never learn from the past that we need to be vigilant and have our homeland security apparatus working effectively and efficiently to secure us. It is not long ago we lost 142 young lives in Garissa University College attack and the killings haven’t stopped. The recent one is the killing of fourteen people including thirteen quarry workers and their land-lady in Mandera last Tuesday morning.

Our youths have been radicalized and promised the ‘heaven’ our benevolent government has locked them out of and given to the selected few as long as these young people blow up or shoot their own mothers and fathers. Yet we have watched unconcernedly while the damage has being done and now we cry foul.
The organs of power instead of working towards the best interest of Wanjiku since being put in place after the promulgation of our ‘robust’ new constitution in 2010 and after the new elected leaders were put in office in 2013, we have witnessed no or little progress because the men and women of power are busy arm wrestling to find out who is the strongest amongst them. When not arm wrestling they are busy eating the public coffers money by awarding themselves heavy pay checks or involved in some lopsided and valueless ‘national prayer meeting’ where they drink expensive tea and eat state sponsored lunches and talk cheap. When not taking teas,they are busy name calling each other or proving to an ethical Kenyan who knows his or her role as a patriot to the republic of who is in charge as they did Monica Juma recently.

Our people are still dying of hunger and young children cannot grow well nor go to school and learn because of malnutrition. In the 21st century! However, take a look at the political class, the powerful parastatal heads, the rich business moguls and those privileged in the society. Their necks have fine lines and their skins so smooth while others feed on wild fruits and others have nothing at all to put in the mouth. Do we have two Kenya?
Men have become useless in the family and they are being beaten for it by their ‘harmless’ wives and they come on TV weeping like fools as if they have forgotten that just like the women who work hard to hold the family together, they have to provide too, and in a big way because this is Africa and that is what ‘real men of Africa’ do
Our value systems amongst the youth are in tatters because parents are busy running away from their duty of nurturing and molding their kids. They have left their nurturing job to the teacher who either molests or rapes the child or due to the hyped value of grades, knocks the creative minds of the learners into a straight jacket of exam oriented wheel-burrow robots who cannot think for themselves. If lucky, the teacher is busy with his/her own life that the child is left out there alone to find their own path in this chaotic life for themselves. Instead of the pastor intervening, he is busy chasing the warm and fresh skirts in the church or busy performing fake miracles for his fake flock in order to grow reach because the only Kenyan way of tapping God’s blessings is giving only to the church and not to the church and the underprivileged members of the society for by pleasing the church we are recognized, praised and guaranteed a position on the right hand of God when we ‘ascend’ to ‘paradise’.

Drugs, apart from alcohol, are with us. Pornography is with us too. The TV never sleeps in the house. It is even busier than the owners of the house who bought it. Even if it didn’t sleep you would imagine it is on for the greater good but Alas!Violence,nudity and pure nonsense from the First World are the order of the day.Today,you would rather listen to a song but not watch its video because of the thoughtless and empty scenes they show. You would rather listen to radio than watch TV but even the radio has nothing good going on other than cheap talk about sex, bogus relationship issues and music being the order of the day.
Inflation is soon hitting 9%.Jobs are nowhere to be found. The number of orphans keep increasing by the day. Many Kenyans are still squatters fifty plus years since independence that was fought for to save the very problem yet a few people own vast tracts of land they would easily use to settle these Kenyans.
Devolution is under threat. The eating county officials have their priorities so twisted that they would dedicate billions to salaries and other recurrent expenditures while development gets a paltry allocation. The national government isn’t willing to remit money on time and so doctors and other county government officials cannot be paid till everyone else goes on strike while essential services cannot be provided to the impoverished Wanjiku. Hospitals are in deplorable conditions and so the poor who have neither money nor health insurance covers to access high end health facilities die like flies. Some doctors are not well trained so they kill patients instead of treating them.And no one says a word and those that talk are hushed to silence or their voices muffled by those that have muscles.

Then there are the exorbitantly outrageous school fees being charged by schools which think themselves elites yet the government remains non-committal towards reducing the rates to make education affordable and accessible to all. Banks have joined the madness by charging high interests rates that are seeing the exploitation ok Kenyans who need loans to develop yet one wise incoming Central Bank Governor feels that the government cannot, through legislation, cannot impose sanity in the baking corridor but it would rather play deaf and blind to the plight of Kenyans and be educated enough to let the forces of demand and supply determine the rates at which banks offer loans to the citizens of this great nations. Aren’t we so learned!
The list of our troubles is endless. We are in danger day and night. Every thread of our national fabric seems to be stinking and in need of urgent cleaning.

However, of all the offensive things we have to put with is the Durex Condom advert on TV. In most Kenyan families that can afford to watch TV, watching the 9 o’clock prime time news is a ritual. I can assure you that it is no fun anymore. Doing so comes with trauma that inflicts deep psychological injuries to everyone that partakes in this information ritual. Parents look dehumanized when the Durex thing comes on the screen. The guilt that the young feel is so immense that once the advert comes and goes, supreme silence reigns that even if there were bits of conversation pending nobody wills to tie the loose ends.
The advert is egocentric, thoughtless, demeaning and overly contemptuous.

In this age with the near apocalypse sex explosion we are struggling with, we are encouraged to be free to talk about sex with our children for the case of parents and vice versa for the young people.However,the Durex advert is a blatant encouragement for us all to get down to sex business because sex is good. Yes, it is good,I acknowledge that.It is through it that I am here causing all these unnecessary troubles but it can’t be the in thing that we ought to mind as the spirit of that crazy advert seem to posit.

In the middle of all these we have to seek lasting solutions to for a better society, is loving sex even the least of things we ought to spend the last drop of energy in our lives erecting alters for? Can loving sex solve our problems: put food on the table, end land grabbing in Kenya, tame the rogue parliament, tame the boiling tribal intolerance...Can it? In the face of the national and personal challenges that we face currently can sex be the THING we think about.

Prioritizing sex is Durex Condom advert which is the dumbest advert I have ever seen on TV and the most annoying of all. It is plainly ‘Durex.LOVE SEX’ without it being related to family planning or prevention of STIs or any relevant social or health campaign we know of.NO!It is purely about having unbuttoned experience of sex.It is about sensuality. It is about unparalleled pleasure.

Citizen TV and other TV stations running this advert: is sex the salvation we have been waiting for to get us out of the political, economic and social problems we have been grappling with.

Who decided that it must just come during the 9pm prime time news hour?Who did the concept anyway?
Where are our priorities? I know TV stations have to pay rent and salaries, but must it run pointless non-educative adverts like the Durex Condom one. How did this advert find its way anyway on TV.
What values are teaching our kids? Durex?Love sex?Aren’t we too serious about life?