MPs throw homecoming parties as voters starve

By PETER WANYONYI

KENYA: There’s no place to be a big shot like Kenya, and nothing announces that a big shot has arrived, like a homecoming party does.

Non-locals might hear that and wonder where the big shot had gone to, to need a homecoming party.

That is missing the point, though. You see, Kenya is one of those uniquely African experiments in state-building: we have what is supposedly a modern, western outlook on life, giant skyscrapers in Nairobi and other cities, and cars and mobile phones and what not.

But Kenya is also very African. Our politicians visit witchdoctors before heading out to bribe voters, and when we die, we get buried upcountry — “at home”— on ancestral soil where kindred spirits of clan warriors long gone float around the villages, assuring all that everything is ok.

Schizophrenics

And so the Kenyan is a bidirectional being. One side is educated, speaks English and listens to the funky FM radio stations of Nairobi.

The other side just wants to “go home”, back upcountry, raise a herd of cows and spend the rest of life blissfully enjoying the slow pace of African days and the cool, dewy, moonlit nights of many an upcountry destination.

When one of these cultural schizophrenics is elected to office, it is a “sending off” of sorts.

The man — it is almost always a man — is sent off to the big city to do what important people do, perhaps sit in an office and read big words on perfumed pieces of paper, and to then try to make this help the people “back home”.

Danger

This is why, a couple months into the newly elected politician’s term, he must throw a huge party — back home — to thank his constituents for sending him to the big city.

The old people say that a man who throws a party for his friends does not do so to save them from starving. But in the village, matters can be a little different.  Kenya has changed so much that, in vast bits of the country, starvation is a real danger for entire villages.

People go through days eating little more than a few roots here, a boiled leaf there. In the five years between elections, such wretched souls officially do not exist.

A few years back, a government spokesman — who is now a showy governor of a county east of Nairobi — declared, in the middle of a punishing famine, that all those dying of starvation were in fact dying “of natural causes”.

And so when there is a homecoming party, the local folks with little to eat will show up in droves, perhaps to get a good meal — for once in their lives — that makes having cast their vote for the big shot worthwhile. But put together, all the homecoming parties, the money spent on them, the fuel wasted driving to such parties, the food thrown away after the worthies have eaten — and one wonders, would it not be better to contribute the money, so thrown away, to a food charity?