@jasonhill,

I am not advocating for a substitution of English with sheng. But rather, my attempt is aimed to the many people who are not schooled enough to use english as a technological tool.

Besides, sheng has a dexterity that english does not have. 'We' can add words to the sheng dictionary, but can we do the same to an english dictionary?

Kenyans may be better english speakers than the Japanese, the Chinese, and the Indians, but this facility has surely not added much to our technological capacities.

We will speak fluent english when necessary, but we need a language of own to help us synthesize the vast amounts of information available on cyberspace, and to use it to solve our problems.

@aemathenge,

Thank you.

@jasonhill,
I agree that the solutions to our problems lie in our minds and hearts, and that we need to trust each other, and more so, love one another.

But what lies in our hearts and minds, are beliefs,thoughts,expectations...things that are made of words.

In order to act we must first 'speak.'

There are very many Kenyans who have not gone past class 8 and are not so proficient in the use of the English language. Most of them are unemployed, and in many instances they are approaching unemployability.

Yet we need them to participate actively in making social and economic decisions that will raise their incomes, and generally improve their standards of living. How will we get access to them, without losing a lot of time taking them back to class to learn English?

Since developing Kenya needs both the 'well' educated and the 'less' educated working together, it follows that it is much easier for the former to 'bend' to the level of the latter than to have the latter rise to the level of the former; at least in the short term when costs are high and fixed.

It is very difficult to explain 'social network' to an average youth in Kibera, and it should be much harder in the 'nethers.' To do so you need metaphors that are common to him/her, and these metaphors are mostly in sheng, or can be very easily transmitted in sheng.

Finally, I think sheng as a language presents a world view. That it has been created and that it has evolved implies it's necessity. I believe that this necessity comes out of the need for a 'median world' in the context of the conflict between Western civilization, and our 'Black experience.'

By using sheng we will be getting closer to the rest of the world.

- ati!
- aterere! (in kyuk)

but we get your point, the chinese have prospered without it by simply playing using their own rules. Patents, Interlectual property, Global Warming e.t.c.
Imagine we are signing treaties to reduce carbon emissions (a problem which was caused by the industrialization on Europe and America using fossil fuels). We should use our fair share of the same fuels first before we sign or implement any of them. we should burn all the coal in kitui to make cheap power to produce things that africans will use!

I think we should copy paste what China is doing!

Lets try this: We have 569,140 sq. km, or 113 million acres of land.

* Sell all the land at 100k (USD 1k) per acre, fetching us a tidy 113 billion USD
* Pay off government debt USD 12 billion
* Divide the remaining money equally among 40m Kenyans = USD 2,500 per Kenyan
* Seek employment from the new owners of Kenya (we are employees anyways) or start a business located in Kenya, or better still, emigrate to Tanzania or Rwanda