Do you like what you see on Saba Saba?

It starts in a beautiful kitchen of a home in a leafy suburb. A man sits with his wife at the breakfast table. Outside, somebody is waiting for the man of the house to leave for work. The husband suspicious of his wife, and the stranger outside, pretends to leave for work and hides behind a bush.

The stranger enters his home. The husband follows him into the house, and upstairs into the master bedroom where his wife and the stranger are locked in each others’ arms on the matrimonial bed. The husband grabs a pair of scissors. Just as he’s about to stab the stranger, oblivious of his wife’s screams, John Anderton bursts into the room through the window and stops him from committing the murder.

John Anderton was a drug addict. Six years before, his son had been kidnapped from a public pool where they had gone swimming. In an attempt to escape from his miserable existence he drowned himself in his work during the day, and in drugs when in the refuge of his home. While at work he was in charge of Precrime.

Precrime was a system designed to prevent crimes from happening. It punished people with imprisonment for future murders. Haunted by the tragic loss of his son, John threw all of his passion into a system that could potentially spare thousands of people from the tragedy he lived through.

The murders were predicted before they happened. The predictions were extracted from three human beings with the gift of precognition. They were called pre-cognitives.

The three precogs were kept in a room called the temple. Images of visions of the future from their brains were projected onto a screen. Using these images John would search for clues on the location of the future murder, the murderer and the victim.

In most cases all three precogs would have the same vision of a murder about to happen. In rare cases, one of them would project a vision that was different. This was called the Minority Report.

One day the precogs projected images of John killing a man known as Leo Crow. As the head of the unit, John was the first to see the images. He didn’t know the victim and this led him to believe he was being set up. His life was suddenly turned upside down. He escaped from Precrime and went on a mission to prove his future innocence.

Was it possible for the precogs to be wrong?

John tracked down Leo Crow’s apartment where he found a pile of photographs of children, including that of his missing son. Though he wanted to, John did not kill him. Crow confessed that the photographs with John’s missing son were doctored.

They were given to him to leave in the apartment in order to set up a confrontation between him and John. He was promised that if John killed him his family would receive money. John didn’t commit murder as predicted.

Leo Crow shot himself.

John’s future crime was a set up to hide a murder that had been committed by his Precrime boss. Precrime was not perfect. It could be manipulated. All criminals imprisoned under it were pardoned and released. The precogs were also set free.

Like all systems, Precrime was only as good as the people who operated it.

This adapted story is a paradox. If you know what will happen in future, can you change the outcome? And if you can change the outcome, is the prediction of the future accurate?

Saba Saba has succeeded in forcing all Kenyans to look into the crystal glass of our nation’s future. Do we like what we see? Do we want to and can we change the outcome?