By David Maillu
Published February 14, 2024
Jomo Kenyatta Foundation (JKF) has published more than 20 titles from me. Sixteen out of these are children’s books. The Foundation has published my Broken Drum, arguably the longest novel published in Africa, 1120 pages.
I am JKF’s leading author. I feel destroyed by the news that President William Ruto’s expansion of his personal grudge against Uhuru Kenyatta has taken a move to destroy JKF, the national pride of publishing, just because it was a creation of Uhuru Kenyatta’s father, Jomo Kenyatta. To Ruto anything with the Kenyatta name has become a monster that must be destroyed. If Ruto has any grudge against Uhuru, he should be man enough to go for a man-to-man physical fight without involving the nation.
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To overlook JKF’s contribution to the intellectual national development is a social crime. This move adds an insult to the injury of the government’s systematic move to destroy the publishing industry; ironically, instead of developing the industry. I was just waiting for my year royalty from JKF when Ruto moved in furiously, throwing the Foundation’s stuff out of the property to a hideout place in the urban centre.
They have told me, “Ruto has told us to stop publishing and concentrate on scholarship only. The impressive property of the Jomo Kenyatta Foundation in the industrial area has been given to the Kenya National Examinations Council.
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In the modern world, no development can be done without the use of the book. The book is the foundation of intellectual development. If we have to compete with the developed world, we must develop an aggressive reading culture. Ruto is doing this destruction at the time the population of bars is mushrooming. Can we accept going back to this primitive stage? When developed countries take reading culture religiously, we are trashing it and killing intellectual incentives.
As the most published author in Africa and with international acclaim, I am left with no other option with which to express this intellectual destruction bitterness, other than taking a drastic measure by giving the government the notice that, on behalf of the nation and Africans at large, unless the Jomo Kenyatta Foundation is restored, I am going to lead an all Kenyan and foreign authors’ national demonstration in Nairobi to reclaim the restoration of the complete Jomo Kenyatta Foundation.