What President Uhuru can learn from hair salons

By PETER WANYONYI

The President, clearly, is in a bind. He is squeezed in from all sides. Everyone wants something big from him and they want it now. MPs, for instance, want a salary increment or else they will refuse to approve Government expenditure.

They are even threatening to pass a law lowering taxes, just so the government can run out of cash. The county governors are baying at the central government, demanding various disbursements so they can begin eating the cash, while pretending to buy Chinese curtains for the county headquarters and swanky flags for their 4X4 vehicles.

The teachers are now getting in on the act, promising to go on strike next month if the Government doesn’t give them billions of shillings they believe they are owed. And all that before we even get round to advertising for the usual conmen to pretend to supply us with the Class One laptops, promised in the Jubilee Manifesto.

ruthless

This is a money management nightmare because with everyone holding their hand out for some dough, one wonders where the money will come from, and how it will be shared. It’s the President’s job to find the money any which way (that phrase does exist!) — including forcing housemaids to register with the NSSF.

However, for some ruthless money management lessons, the president needs to go to a place where Kenyan women run the show, for it is the Kenyan woman who knows how to make money stretch out. Yes, the President needs to visit one of the many women-only hair salons in Nairobi.

Hair salons are a lot like Kenya’s government. For one, there’s too much heat and talk in the salon for anyone’s head to function properly while in that talk shop. For a place where beauty is supposed to be perfected, the hair salon is shockingly filthy. You see, random hairs float about the place undisturbed, various oils and fats clog the fingers of the hair stylists, and don’t even get started on the taps and sinks, in which that precious hair is washed before various poisons are applied to it.

poisonous

In other words, it’s just like Parliament, where MPs float about the place randomly, looking for someone to extort money from.

Their poisonous tongues apart, however, the MPs are sequestered in the guarded houses of Parliament for good reason; if they emerged on any random day and wananchi recognised them, various crimes would be visited upon them by otherwise law abiding citizens.

Anyway, just like Parliament, hair salons are hotbeds of negative gossip. For instance, who is sleeping — or not sleeping — with whom and who took out a loan to buy a new sofa. That sort of mindless drivel.

But that aside, every successful hair salon has one ruthless financial secret: Everyone working in the salon earns the same. Stylists will talk, and when one discovers that she is the best paid, she begins to preen and prance about and quickly forgets that her job is to style hair.

And so it should be with all our State officers. Maybe the President, pressed for solutions, should take the entire Government wage bill and divide it equally among all state officers — including his gardener, who works harder than 20 MPs combined.