Politics in Kenya is a lot like customer service in commercial banks, only with the service replaced by servitude.
Pretty much like in a bank’s Loan Office, the year we currently find ourselves playing snakes and ladders in happens to be one in which we receive the ‘BIG’ vision. “Cheapest interest rests in town…mortgage deal in the most posh suburb in all of Milky Way’s suburbia...hurry while you still have an income yawa!”
So we buy into it. We take the loan.
Then comes the interlull; that period when none of the banks need to offload the copious load of crisps they borrow from the Central Bank. Like your local MP, suddenly their instant goldrush mavuno creative ads featuring recently released extreme makeover convicts go off the radar, or at best relocate somewhere under it. Well, at least with the banks you can be sure they’ll be back within the year, with “even better rates, forever more posh suburbs in the entire multiverse’s suburbia. Double twice.
Your political mouthpiece, his pockets and general excuse for lack of the vaguest shot at the bull’s eye on the integrity board, however, has five years to run around in the backbenches of legislative oblivion. That, or an intense propensity to deliver the most perfect charade every other day in broad daylight. Yes I know that’s a double superlative.
Twenty-four short years of the Nyayo dominion seem to have whacked this nation into fertile submission, so eager to spread our figurative legs for the quick buck made in the political campaign stretch. We forget, ever so maddeningly, just how much that accidental pregnancy of a government we voluntarily spawn will cost us as we await the next dollar. Our senses are so numb to sense that a bucket of ice, the Syokimaus and Sinais of our times, serve as pleasurable jolts of a reality we are willingly unwilling to conveniently forget at the ballot.
Pleasurable, you ask? Pleasurable. Because for a fleeting millionth of a second, we take to the streets screaming bloody murder this, revolution that. We take to our pads and pods, our IQs yelling iQuit on our foreign-owned communication technologies, and perhaps even end up feeding a story to tomorrow’s nyama quarter wrappers. We rant and rave on the Friday rave as we sip cold malts, displaying our current affairs analysis expertise to other drunks before walking off into the impending sunrise with that electric blanket we just spent the rest of our time at the sina taabu wetting with booze.
And then what? Zilch. Nada. ShNiet. Classic 105 come up with an ulcer-inducing crap ounce of delectables, and we change stations.
Meanwhile, your member continues to exceed the wildest expectations of malignant buffoonery you could dream of. CIC building cedes to Re-insurance Plaza, then in turn covers taxis, school buses and personal vehicles shuttling the working nation to town hoping to somewhat insure their own petrol costs. The rest of us take to highway patrol duty, on the walk of lame as our poverty comes into play, our only means of transport parked in the depleted soles of shoes gone by.
Cheap thrills. Barcotic highs…we barely ever seem to awaken from the deep comatose slumber we have learnt to enjoy suffering, the dripping hypodermic needle that is tribalism, corruption and the maligning “haki tunaomba serikali” stuck deep into the depths of our psyche.
We are begging the government? How about we turn it around while we still can, before ‘the bank’ forecloses on our vision? They, whoever you will vote in, are your next government. So technically, right now your next serikali inawaomba. Vote them in based on double talk and an easy way with the money dishing fly whisk, and reap only the former end of that stick. Vote them in, however, as genuine stakeholders in your angst and anger at a degenerate status quo and perhaps, just perhaps, brand Kenya will no longer be guilty of myopic astigmatism.
As the politicos Photoshop their images in a blatant attempt to blur out the shady background and crop out the warts, REMEMBER. All we need do is remember.
Because convincing yourself that you don’t give a fuck is not only the hardest thing you can ever do; it’s the hardest you’ll have to live with. For FIVE years!
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