Folks, let me be clear from the onset, I stand with the Sultan. And don’t ask me about Migori because we all know what that was about. For the past few weeks this admirable gentleman from the coastal strip has got nothing but venom from clueless lynch mobs on social media.
I am upset with these hordes of haters because the Sultan, Governor 001, His Excellency, Ali Hassan Joho is an honourable man.
Humble to a fault. The man who hardly says anything offensive has been accused of many things, but this time they have crossed the line.
They claim the governor did not sit for his Form Four examinations. As a matter of fact, they won’t even listen to the fact that he got an impressive D-minus at a time when many ‘A’ students haven’t earned themselves even the job of an MCA, let alone governor.
These are the selfsame noisemakers who, for their own selfish reasons, sneaked in Section 22 of the Elections Act that unreasonably requires governors to not just have degrees, but that they be from something called 'recognised universities'!
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And the Mombasa governor was spot on at his press conference. He rightly blamed his troubles on people who don’t understand what it means to come from a less privileged background.
How else would you explain the fact that Joho is not even allowed to hold six bank accounts? Their excuse is that he hasn’t filed tax returns for years.
They can’t even live with the fact that he has two paltry luxury cars. Add to that the harassment he has been subjected to for several years about his time at Kampala International University.
But the governor should have known better. How could he dare reveal that he is from a humble background?
He should ask Deputy President William Ruto, who got into a lot of trouble as soon as it emerged that he grew up roasting maize at some indistinct address in the Rift Valley.
Suddenly the mobs could not allow him to do anything to advance himself.
When he and his friends tried to build a small hotel near an international airport, they brought out indisciplined pupils to pull down a wall that would have shielded the hotel from the noise from the school.
When he took a simple jet for important State business in West Africa for a paltry Sh100 million, they said a ‘hustler’ was not allowed to do that.
Now these same people have turned on another poor man’s son, the distinguished governor from Mombasa, who is simply pursuing the Kenyan Dream. First they didn’t believe he went to school until they listened to how well he could speak the Queen’s language.
His detractors lost count of the thousands of students who lined up to swear by their blood that they were right there when the governor finished his last KCSE exam paper.
When he produced his documents, they realised that he had performed way better than some 33,000 KCSE students in the world-class Matiang’i examination of 2016.
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When they heard he is pursuing an MBA, they were gutted. Now they claim there is no way he could have found his way into a university with a D-minus. Please!
This is the great land of Kenya, a land of possibilities. We are trailblazers and the world knows it.
Where were these naysayers when Archbishop Dr Gilbert Deya, an evangelist far less educated than Joho, managed, against all odds, to dramatically shorten the gestation period for several mothers who could not bear children in the first place?
In just one year these mothers had conceived and given birth at least three times each!
So amazing was the technology that he immigrated to the UK, where he has lived happily ever after and continues to offer his services to women of diverse nationalities.
Where were the haters when a lowly hairdresser impressed all of us when she defied established scientific law of weights and mass to neatly pack Sh52 million in a sack? Why would merely converting a D-minus into a university grade be such a feat?
My fear is that now these idlers might turn on the Nairobi gubernatorial aspirants. They have started claiming that some of these aspirants have questionable papers.
What would become of the great city of Nairobi if inconsequential things such as going to school stand in the way of great leadership?
In fact this dragnet might even spread to Kiambu County.
Who wants that kind of anarchy in the race for governor? After all, what these governors do is to merely count money.
In the meantime, because I also come from a rather nondescript village on the shores of Lake Victoria, let me look for my old classmates – just in case the haters come for me.
