Plain words
Glossary
Institutions often stay confusing on purpose — not because the ideas are hard, but because plain explanations threaten to make them accountable. This page removes that excuse.
Power, Government & Corruption
- Bill of Rights
- The section of a constitution listing specific rights every person holds, from equality and expression to health, food, water, housing, and education.
- Conflict of Interest
- Any situation where someone holding public responsibility also holds a private interest that could reasonably influence their decision — dangerous even when nothing illegal has technically occurred.
- Devolution
- The transfer of real decision-making power and real money from a national government down to smaller, local governments closer to the people those decisions affect.
- Elite Capture
- When institutions built to serve everyone quietly get redirected to serve a small group's private interests instead.
- Ghost Project
- Money reported as spent on a school, clinic, or road that either never gets built, or gets built at a fraction of what was promised.
- Kickback
- A portion of a contract's value quietly returned to the official who approved it, disguised as a fee, gift, or unrelated arrangement.
- Procurement Fraud
- Public money lost through a rigged buying process — an inflated price, a tender written to favour one bidder, a contract awarded through hidden connection rather than merit.
- Protectorate
- A territory controlled by a foreign power without being formally declared a colony.
- Provincial Administration
- A layered system of centrally appointed officials used historically to maintain order and collect taxes from the top down.
- Public Participation
- A legal requirement, not a courtesy, that citizens be genuinely consulted before major budget or policy decisions.
- Royal Charter
- A licence granted by one government allowing a private company to govern a territory on its behalf, for profit. This is literally how colonial rule began in Kenya, in 1888.
- Sovereignty
- The highest authority in a system, the source everything else must answer to. In a genuine democracy, this belongs to the people, not to any office.
- Subsidiarity
- The principle underneath devolution: decisions should be made at the smallest, most local level capable of making them well.
- The Constitution
- The founding legal document of a country, the highest law every other law and public office must answer to.
- Whistleblower Protection
- Legal safeguards for people who report wrongdoing from inside an institution — often the single point where real evidence of corruption either surfaces or stays permanently hidden.
Where this comes up:What Your Constitution Actually Promises You
Where this comes up:When Public Duty and Private Interest Quietly Collide
Where this comes up:When a Company Becomes a Country
Where this comes up:How Public Money Actually Gets Stolen
Where this comes up:How Public Money Actually Gets Stolen
Where this comes up:How Public Money Actually Gets Stolen
Where this comes up:The Country That Began as a Business
Where this comes up:The Word "Sovereign" Was Never About Kings
Where this comes up:Five Things Worth Knowing Before Anything Else
Where this comes up:Why Oversight Sometimes Works, and Sometimes Doesn't
Land & Belonging
- Community Land
- Land held collectively by an entire community rather than by a single individual, with its own distinct legal protections.
- Crown Lands Ordinance
- A colonial-era law declaring all “unoccupied” land to belong to the ruling government, quietly redefining land already in use as empty so it could be legally claimed.
- Group Ranch
- A form of land title created to give pastoralist communities formal legal ownership over communal land, later often subdivided into individual titles that could then be sold outside the community.
- Historical Land Injustice
- Land taken or unfairly allocated during a colonial period or shortly after independence, which can be formally investigated and, in some cases, remedied.
- National Land Commission
- The independent body responsible for managing public land and investigating historical land injustices.
- Native Reserve
- Land colonial authorities designated for displaced African communities, typically smaller and of lower quality than the land taken from them.
- White Highlands
- Fertile land reserved exclusively for European settlers during colonial rule in Kenya, displacing over a million people by 1948.
Where this comes up:The Argument That Never Really Ended
Where this comes up:What the Law Says About Land Today
Where this comes up:What Was Taken, and Exactly How
Where this comes up:What Was Taken, and Exactly How
Economy, Money & Debt
- Allocation, Disbursement, Expenditure
- Three different numbers often confused as one: what was promised in a budget, what was actually released, and what was actually spent as intended. The gaps between them are where public money most often disappears.
- Asset
- Something that puts value into your life over time, through income, appreciation, or a cost it removes.
- Auditor General
- An independent office that reviews how public money was actually spent and publishes findings any citizen can use.
- Inflation
- Prices rising because the money in circulation grows faster than the real goods and services available — functioning, in effect, like a tax that falls hardest on those holding cash rather than assets.
- Liability
- Something that takes value out of your life over time, costing money to hold while producing nothing in return.
- Odious Debt
- Debt taken on by a government without genuine popular consent, for purposes that harm its own population, which shouldn't automatically bind the generations that come after.
- Productive Asset
- An asset that actively generates further value — a skill that earns, land that yields, a tool that produces — rather than simply holding its value in place.
- Public Finance
- The rules governing how a government raises, allocates, and spends money, including required public participation in shaping the budget.
- Statutory Deduction
- Any amount legally removed from a payslip before it reaches you — tax, pension, insurance — each one a claim you're entitled to trace and understand.
- Structural Adjustment Program
- Economic conditions historically attached to large international loans, requiring privatisation and reduced public spending — decisions about a country's economy effectively made by its creditors.
- Value Chain
- The full journey a product takes from raw material to finished sale, and the specific point along that journey where most of its value actually gets captured.
- Wealth vs. Money
- Money is a token for moving value around. Wealth is the actual value underneath it — skill, health, relationships, land, and knowledge that keep producing something over time.
Where this comes up:Follow the Money, Literally
Where this comes up:Owning the Asset Before You Owe the Liability
Where this comes up:Follow the Money, Literally
Where this comes up:Inflation Is a Tax No One Ever Voted For
Where this comes up:Owning the Asset Before You Owe the Liability
Where this comes up:Owning the Asset Before You Owe the Liability
Where this comes up:A Nation's Balance Sheet Works the Same Way
Where this comes up:Reading Your Own Payslip Like a Sovereign
Where this comes up:When a Debt Becomes a Vote You Never Cast
Where this comes up:Who Actually Owns the Crop You Grow
Where this comes up:Wealth Is Not the Same Thing as Money
Rights & Justice Tools
- Access to Information
- A legal right to request information held by government, often with a strict deadline for a response.
- Anti-Corruption Commission
- An independent body tasked with investigating and prosecuting corruption within public office.
- Bodily Autonomy
- Your right to make decisions about your own body and health, and to have those decisions genuinely respected by anyone providing you care.
- Human Rights Commission
- An independent body that receives and investigates complaints about human rights violations.
- Informed Consent
- Genuine agreement to something affecting your own body, given freely, with real understanding, and with a real option to refuse. A signature alone is not the same thing.
- Ombudsman
- An independent office that investigates maladministration — situations where a public office isn't doing the job it exists to do.
- Petition
- A formal, written request submitted to a government body asking for a specific remedy to a specific problem.
- Police Oversight Authority
- An independent body tasked with investigating misconduct by police officers, separate from the police force itself.
- Public Interest Litigation
- Legal action brought not only for personal benefit but to enforce a right on behalf of a wider group or the public generally.
Where this comes up:The Tools Already Sitting in Your Hands
Where this comes up:Why Oversight Sometimes Works, and Sometimes Doesn't
Where this comes up:What Informed Consent Actually Means
Where this comes up:The Tools Already Sitting in Your Hands
Media, Narrative & Attention
- Algorithmic Feed
- Content ranking systems that tend to favour whatever provokes the strongest reaction, because strong reactions hold attention longest, regardless of whether that's good for the person experiencing it.
- Attention Economy
- A business model where your attention, not your payment, is the actual product being sold to someone else.
- Doublespeak
- Language deliberately built to make an uncomfortable reality easier to say, and easier to overlook — softening what's actually happening rather than describing it plainly.
- Fear Framing
- Messaging built around urgency and threat specifically because a frightened mind reasons faster and less carefully than a calm one.
- Free Will (as a practice)
- Not a fixed guarantee but a muscle, strengthened by noticing when a message is trying to move you before it has given you a real reason to, and weakened by never noticing at all.
- Manufactured Division
- A pattern where a genuine grievance against specific individuals gets attached to an entire group, making real accountability harder and distracting attention from the shared structure both groups actually live under.
- Media Ownership Concentration
- A small number of companies or individuals owning a large share of the outlets a population relies on for information, shaping coverage through incentive rather than explicit instruction.
Where this comes up:What Your Attention Is Actually Worth
Where this comes up:Language Built to Hide What It Describes
Where this comes up:Fear Sells, and Fear Governs
Where this comes up:Protecting Your Own Mind
Where this comes up:Divide and It Governs Itself
Where this comes up:Who Owns the Story You're Being Told
Community, Organising & Life
- Chosen Responsibility
- Carrying real weight for someone else because you freely chose to, not because a state or authority compelled it — the practical form Ubuntu takes in daily life.
- Civic Education
- Teaching ordinary people, regardless of schooling or background, what their rights are and what tools already exist to hold power accountable.
- Distributed Leadership
- A model where many people can lead within their own sphere, connected by shared values, with no single person indispensable to the whole.
- Harambee
- “All pull together” — the Kenyan tradition of communities pooling resources for a shared need without waiting for the state. Ordinary self-governance in ordinary language.
- Patron-Client Politics
- A pattern where access to resources flows through personal loyalty to a powerful individual rather than through equal rights held by every citizen.
- Restorative Justice
- An approach to harm aimed at repairing what was broken and preventing its repetition, rather than only assigning punishment and considering the matter closed.
- Self-Reliance
- Becoming steady enough in your own life that others can genuinely lean on you when it matters, without needing no one at all.
- Small Group / Circle
- Eight to twenty people who already trust each other, meeting regularly to learn together and take real, if modest, collective action — needing no registration, budget, or outside permission.
Where this comes up:Real Responsibility for Each Other
Where this comes up:What This Is Actually For
Where this comes up:Why No Single Person Was Ever the Whole Plan
Where this comes up:What Was Already Here
Where this comes up:If It's Unjust, Why Does It Keep Going?
Where this comes up:Hurt People Hurt People — So Look for What Heals, Not What Punishes
Where this comes up:Be Someone Others Can Actually Count On
Where this comes up:How Eight People Can Start Something Real
Words From the Older Order
- Age-Grade System
- A way of organising social responsibility by stage of life rather than birth or wealth, distributing authority across generations instead of concentrating it in one place.
- Council of Elders
- A governance body common across many pre-colonial communities, where authority rested in those who had earned it through age, wisdom, and demonstrated service — and could be lost the moment that service stopped.
- Hut Tax
- A colonial tax on every dwelling, deliberately designed to force people into wage labour on settler farms so they could earn cash to pay it.
- Laibon
- Among the Maasai, a spiritual and prophetic authority whose counsel on major community decisions could carry more weight than any single political leader's command.
- Mbari
- A Kikuyu lineage group that traditionally held land in common, with individual families cultivating specific plots inside a larger, shared inheritance.
- Natural Law / Living Law
- Principles of right conduct and legitimate authority understood to exist independently of any government's declaration, discovered by communities over generations of living together.
- Ubuntu
- “I am because we are.” The idea that a person's identity and dignity are realised through genuine relationship and responsibility to others — chosen, never enforced.
Where this comes up:What Was Already Here
Where this comes up:What Was Taken, and Exactly How
Where this comes up:The People Who Did Not Forget
Where this comes up:You Cannot Own Land the Way You Own a Chair
Where this comes up:Real Responsibility for Each Other