The parable of small-time pencil thief turned industry captain

Veteran journalist and The Standard columnist, Peter Kimani.

Folks, belated, happy Jamhuri Day! I wanted to say how envious I am that most of you were out and about, engaging in what the departed Prezzo Mwai Kibaki called kurega rega, while I was glued to my computer, writing this page.

But I realised that would be hypocritical because I have had a week of kurega rega, climaxing with a night filled with three guilty pleasures: dark chocolate, refined Canadian whisky and invigorating conversations.

On the third pleasure, let me clarify although we had three professors, two lawyers and a media executive in the room—I fall in none of the categories as all I do is to eavesdrop on their other people’s conversations and invent narratives— this hallowed company did not yield in sanctimony. We had a gentle, well-grounded chat about the state of our nation.

This is timely as we reflect on the making of our Jamhuri (nationhood).

Predictably, there were many tales to tell, starting off with a cautionary tale of fundis who had been offered the smooth stuff from Canada on a different occasion, to celebrate a construction milestone, and the good fundis took swigs and drained the whole bottle in a few hours.

Predictably, they all slept through the following day. And when they woke up, one behaved like a mangy dog, looking for things to provoke a throw-up, while the other said his head pounded so vigorously, he thought someone was knocking blocks of stone to his head.

And since everyone in the room had constructed a home or two, the conversation quickly turned into a review of schemes and scams used in the sector. A fair summation of the night, which is a good test of my cognitive skills, after hours of indulgence, was how stealing has become a bedrock of our national ethos.

For clarity, those in the room made a distinction between theft by State and non-State actors, from politicians to church people, from tenderprenuers to technocrats. The thieves in those categories are well researched and documented.

What they sought to probe were the social and cultural underpinnings that produce the sort of mentality that makes stealing a legitimate, even proud achievement.

One lawyer used an analogy of his boyhood days in school. “A pencil fell to the ground, and it would never be recovered,” he started, adding there were adequate apprehensions about a particular boy with multiple pencils in his pouch.

Well, since pencils cannot walk or dance into oblivion, it was concluded that the pencils were ensnared by barefoot chaps using their toes to drag pencils to the safety of their hands, and added to the pouch overflowing with pencils.

There were various interjections from the assembled group: Did the suspected pencil thief use them to write? Not quite, came the answer. The suspect was irredeemably daft, so the accumulation of pencils wasn’t to advance his faltering academic journey.

And did the lad’s barefoot status betray his disadvantaged background? Nooo, said another. Almost everyone walked barefoot, and not everyone was a thief.

The only conclusion: If the pencil thief derived particular satisfaction from his primitive accumulation of pencils, what was to stop him from evolving into a fully-fledged tenderprenuer of the future?

There was unanimity that his stealing ways could have ended prematurely if there was some level of sanction at home. After all, most parents instilled fear of the Lord in any child who had a penchant for taking home things that did not originate there.

We turned 61 years as a republic yesterday. Our pencil thief has come of age; he is now an “investor” of repute, and he prides himself in recalling how he started off by selling pencils in the streets.

He doesn’t reveal they were stolen, or that he’s still stealing.

Once a thief, always a thief.