And he wants to be president?

By Edward Indakwa

I left my house at an ungodly hour yesterday because I had an errand to run that I assumed was quite urgent.

I probably should have remained in bed and kept the mosquito that is a perpetual latecomer to my house company because barely two kilometres away was this humongous traffic snarl-up.

Forty minutes later, however, when I was admiring a couple sitting mute and sullen in a sleek Mercedes Benz – like they were Raila Odinga and William Ruto forced to hitch the same ride, I heard a siren.

Wrong side

I didn’t mind because I know the jam is for a good cause — the Chinese are fixing that notorious junction near the Bomas of Kenya.

I was on Langata Road and the siren announced the arrival of a big man headed to work. His escort was tellingly modest so one glance and I knew who it was.

Two things disturbed me. One, the lawmaker was being driven on the wrong side of the road. And two, I took offense that a man who wants to be President was going to work at 7.30am.

Crack of dawn

My father, who is 76 and long retired, always inspects his cowshed at the crack of dawn. And here we have a man who wants to be President heading to the office – on the wrong side of the road – when village hens have started laying eggs.

That picture disturbs me. When you are weighed down by the travails of an entire nation, when you have a burning desire to lead 40 million people, sleep escapes you.

I assume you would be up at 4am. You would fool around the gym in a vain attempt to get rid of the old gut. You would eat imported porridge – or whatever it is that big people have for breakfast – hurriedly. You would be burning with ideas and the urge to get to work to uplift your people from poverty, ignorance and disease.

Scrambled eggs

I assume that by 6am, you would be at your desk, poring over briefs, listening to aides, barking orders and generally getting things done. Now when at 7.30am, you are belching scrambled eggs in traffic, the impression I form is that you are an idler, that our problems are the last thing on your mind. So go on and can kiss my vote goodbye, mheshimiwa.

You honestly can’t want to be president and then evade a traffic jam by driving on the wrong side of the road. If you don’t sit in traffic and learn first hand how that shoe pinches, what motivation will you have to fix it?

The fishmonger

This is what happens when taxpayers provide huge houses for non-tax-paying leaders in affluent neighbourhoods where crime is non-existent and water and electricity flow 366 days a year.

They simply forget the problems that the fishmonger in Kibera, who pays their salaries, and starts getting driven on the wrong side of the road — by our policemen, in our cars, with our fuel.

A peace meeting in Mombasa

Seriously, who goes to Mombasa to work? Our coastal town, which is not in Kenya, is the place you only go to shoot the breeze.

You throw away the business suit, stick your scaly legs in oversized shorts, retrieve your Seng’enge ni ng’ombe T-shirt, and dial up the clande and run.

You get royally drunk, fool around the poolside, give your clande the slip to sample indigenous goods and get drunk some more. You only come back to Nairobi when your wallet is flat.

So it beats me why all Members of Parliament flew to Mombasa for a ‘peace meeting’. I’m not even bothered about the cost. We have oil.

What shocks me is, we’ve just refurbished Parliament Buildings at a cost of Sh900 million and thrown in some really nice seats. Why didn’t these chaps sit in their chamber and discuss peace for one week while sleeping in the houses we bought for them?

If the urge was to get out of town, Kasarani Stadium could have come in handy, having just been refurbished by our Chinese friends. But oh no, they just had to take that meet to Mombasa because a few Mombasa Republican Council adherents stole a policeman’s gun and beat up a poll clerk.

In Kenya, the places where peace is elusive are known. You have that notorious Nairobi slum in Nairobi that I cannot name for political reasons. And then you have the Rift Valley and those wild places in the arid north where people get slaughtered like chicken.

Any serious Kenyan who wants to talk peace should head to those places, not Mombasa where one wonders when the bloody meeting will end so they can go for a beer.

Bits and pieces

American hypocrisy

Americans watch too many movies. That’s why they can dare cut military aid to Kenya because our soldiers allegedly beat up innocent people in Mt Elgon.

If they had their way, our soldiers should have politely arrested the murderous crooks associated with the Sabaoti Land Defense Force (SLDF) after reading them that ‘you have the right to remain silent’ thing.

But they forgot two things. One, when crooks slit your husband’s throat, abduct your three sons and chop off your ears, you are not about to start singing their names to soldiers.

The SLDF were so crude that they even levied illegal taxes on schoolteachers. Granted, the army could have kicked a few innocent men in the nuts, but the suggestion that we should have approached the SLDF armed with the Bill of Rights sticks in the crow.

As an aside, Americans have some cheek. Lest they forget, none of our soldiers went bananas and wasted six Sabaots like that American sergeant did in Afghanistan. None of them performed those outrageous acts of torture that amused American soldiers in Iraq, either. Humph.

See how they run

Rumours wafting in from the warfront suggest that Al Shabaab leaders are scattering to the mountains and diving into Yemen like their pants are on fire.

Yet for all their fright, our boys are still camped tens of kilometres away from Kismayu, swigging beer and swapping village dance stories.

This should be a lesson for the Kenyans with wool where their brains should be who have been flinging hand grenades at their own people. You are fighting for renegades without a cause, cowards who would rather terrorise shopkeepers than fight warriors.

Lax security

I visited one of those glitzy shopping malls twice in one week itching to pinch someone’s nose. I am, however, unhappy to announce that instead of subjecting me to an irritating body search, the guards smiled and politely waved me on.

It hurt my machismo that they didn’t find me dangerous looking and it probably didn’t help that I was clad in tight jeans and a T-shirt — nowhere to hide anything. But did it, perhaps, occur to them that I could be hiding a fertiliser bomb in my underwear? Search me for heaven’s sake. I need to pinch something.

CCTV cameras wanted

The one place in Nairobi that you should never park your car is the police station — any police station. Car batteries and wheels grow legs faster than you can blink.

One, therefore, hopes that when we install our brand new Chinese CCTV cameras all over the city, we should remember to hang a couple in police parking yards.

It would also be prudent to also throw a couple in the report offices and station commanders’ offices without forgetting the traffic roadblock.

More serious crimes occur in these places than anything an idiot jumping the traffic light could ever dream of.

Poor students!

The good news is that the Government has finally disbursed funds meant for the free primary and secondary school education programme. Parents love it because had their children been sent home, they would have had to feed them and then pay up all fee arrears when schools resumed.

Headmasters love it because they were in real danger of having dormitories razed to the ground by our silly children when porridge was served without sugar. But our children must hate the Government because they were itching to be sent home and spend hours watching Spanish soaps on TV.