About a fortnight ago, as Valentine’s Day approached, the Central Bank of Kenya issued a stern warning against “money bouquets”.
This relatively recent Kenyan phenomenon, locally dubbed “maua ya pesa”, involves florists intricately folding high-denomination shilling notes into the shape of roses to create cash arrangements.
While lovers see it as the ultimate romantic gesture, the State sees desecration. Folding, pinning or glueing legal tender is technically an offence under Section 25 of the Central Bank of Kenya Act.
Beyond the legalities, many find the practice offensive in a country grappling with a high cost of living. It feels like a pointed middle finger to the struggling majority when wealth is not just spent, but mutilated for a social media post.
Kenya is hardly alone in this penchant for the performative display of liquidity. Across the continent, the “money shower” is a staple of the social scene. In Nigeria, the practice of “money spraying” is almost an essential ingredient of any “Ariya”, the Yoruba concept of festive joy.
At weddings in Lagos or birthdays in Abuja, guests rain notes on the celebrants, signalling status and appreciation. This culture extends to Ghana, where high-profile funerals often become competitive displays of wealth, and into Sierra Leone and Liberia, fuelled by the deep pockets of the diaspora returning home to party.
But all that is just the first chapter of the story. To spray money, one must first have a surplus of it, and in our part of the world, that volume of cash rarely comes from a monthly payslip.
The people who spray are seldom the ones who sweated for it the hard way. They are often the corrupt, tenderpreneurs, or those involved in the “wash-wash” economy of criminal enterprises, disdainful because the money came to them too easily.
Therefore, this lack of attachment to the physical currency note might suggest a confluence of two opposing sides: one, the disdain of those for whom the money came too easily.
On the opposite side, a counterpoint: a diminishing respect for national symbols that have been hollowed out.
Money, in a patriotic sense, is the most intimate contract between a citizen and the State. In Africa, the casual treatment of currency represents a social and political fissure. If you do not respect the face of the founding father on the note, you likely feel very little for the State he built.
We see this wider alienation manifest in the fading memory of the national anthem. In Kenya, a 2023 informal survey found that nearly 60 per cent of adults under 30 cannot sing all three stanzas of Ee Mungu Nguvu Yetu without stumbling.
In Uganda, despite having one of the world’s shortest anthems at only eight bars, surveys have reported that less than 40 per cent of the population can recite the full lyrics correctly.
In Tanzania, once a bastion of fierce nationalism, the tether between the citizen and the State is fraying. Recent Afrobarometer data reveal that the share of Tanzanian citizens who prioritise their national identity over their ethnic one plummeted by 23 percentage points over the last decade. Across the continent, these shifts are most visible among urban youth, who increasingly view State rituals with fatigue.
Conversely, Rwanda stands as a regional outlier. Following a State-led programme of national identity building after the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, surveys indicate that over 90 per cent of Rwandans can sing the national anthem from memory.
The physical spaces for these national rituals are vanishing elsewhere. There are many reasons for it, but among them, I remember many decades ago when our primary school mornings began with a rigid assembly: a prayer and the anthem. Today, schools have exploded in population, making the daily morning assembly nearly impossible. Rapid urbanisation and the globalisation of cities like Nairobi have further unsettled matters. In diverse private and international schools (where Kenyan children are sometimes a minority within a global student body), the singular national prayer or anthem becomes an anachronism.
Consequently, we have reached a stage where the State ritual is the preserve of the official or the hard-pressed urban worker. Unless you are a working-class resident attending Labour Day or Jamhuri Day celebrations in the hope of snagging a free branded T-shirt and a soda, you are unlikely to participate in a State ceremony.
For the average Kenyan, you will see the national flag carried more often by Faith Kipyegon or Beatrice Chebet at a Diamond League meet in Zurich or Paris than at any event you personally attend. The athlete has replaced the politician as the flag’s primary custodian. So, there it is. The African State is losing the battle for the hearts and minds of its citizens.
Still, on a lighter note, this picture of Kenya as a love-sick nation, where love birds are so into each other that they forget to equally love the country that minted the money for the “maua ya pesa” in the first place, is hard to reconcile.
The author is a journalist, writer and curator of the Wall of Great Africans. X@cobbo3
