Ole Lenku should tighten Nyumba Moja first

By TED MALANDA

I hear the government wants us to love our neighbours, a policy that is bound to excite bachelors who have been trying without success to whistle at the snobbish lass with wriggling bottoms in the upstairs flat.

It would, however, be a good idea to remove the log in one’s eye before nosing around the neighbour’s flat. I say this because it took me months to realise I had been sharing my humble pad with an invited guest — a rat so discourteous and greedy that it even chewed my socks.

Shriek

Not that rats are a security issue, unless the girlfriend pops in, sees one, let’s out a mighty shriek and invites a horde of armed neighbours keen to interrupt what could be presumed to be domestic violence.

Thing is, most of us have no clue what happens in our own homes. I recall a parent who was called by the police to identify his 16-year-old son’s body at the morgue. Yet to the best of his knowledge, the lad was in boarding school kilometres away and not the armed gangster the cops alleged he was.

On another occasion, when a most wanted gangster was felled after a ‘fierce exchange of gunfire’ (there were like 40 armed cops against his rusty AK47), his wife confessed she didn’t even know his second name!

And it’s not like this sort of things only happen to criminals or people who live in slums. You could be reading this, secure in the belief that your wife is at her place of work kumbe she flew to Malindi with her boss this morning and will fly back this evening without you being any wiser.

And who lied to you that your hubby is in Lodwar for a seminar? The scoundrel is in Athi River with that bad woman as we speak. Nyumba moja, indeed.