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The Wannabes: Leeches who should have nil-by-mouth

One of my editors told me this week to send this piece earlier in the week so he can utilise his after meeting time productively, and get a jump on next week. Now, I’m not sure Joe Ngunjiri wasn’t just subtly telling this writer he would rather not dance on the edge of deadline. Our lot is notorious for last minute putting of fingers to the keyboard, claiming that the ‘pressure brings out the muse’s fire.’

But what I find very wannabe is those writers who try to reel us into their conspiracy of laziness, claiming how it takes a whole week to come up with a page, or even a half or ka-quarter page (that is not even enough to wrap a lump of nyama from Waka-knife’s) of pen acreage.

After all, it is not like what these columnists are penning is the next War&Peace.

The other day, one bling-necked Atwoli was yelling about workers’ rights at Uhuru Park.

But there are folks in this nation who should be ashamed to call themselves workers, or wear the title ‘employee.’

Forget ghost workers, those don’t exist (and in City Hall, you have to have faith to see them)!

I am talking about ‘zombie’ workers, the kind who are slow and shuffle around the office, producing very little, except photocopies of papers and hot air. Yet they are very fast to dash to the office canteen for lunch, or leave at five sharp.

And then these so-called workers are outraged when they are ‘down-sized,’ yet they had effectively retrenched themselves in/to employment. You cannot purport to retire at work by working at the least minimal of human effort possible.

Some of these wannabes operate like they switched on their computers and then died on the job. Their cubicles are virtual coffins, and they have the energy of corpses RIPping in a World War I cemetery.

It is like they are on a permanent go slow, for all the psyche and motivation they show at work.

Their real job is to lower morale and spread gossip and despondency at the workplace.

If you want to be at war with capitalism and your exploiter employer, sir, resign, grow a beard and declare yourself a wannabe Marxist and a lump out of the lumpen proletariat and oppressed masses.

Then there are the blue collar wannabe lazy bones.

That domestic help - Miss Mboch - who thinks she was brought to Nairobi to sit her butt on a soft all day and watch De La Muer de la Hoya in re-run. There’s that lazy houseboy who will not wash dishes, yet his appetite is so vast that after cleaning out the fridge, he will even lick the top of the Omo!

Then there are those folks who are so lazy, every chance they get, they go to bed and ‘take a siesta.’

If you didn’t know these wannabes better, you would think they were bitten by a tsetse fly and suffer from a permanent case of sleeping sickness. It is as if while the rest of us breathe oxygen, they survive off chloroform.

The Bible says of these - too lazy to put food into their own mouths!

Let us move on swiftly to slow tailors who never finish your wedding suit, lazy mechanics who never get round to fixing your car until you are there, and that wannabe carpenter who has been delivering furniture to the wife since Valentine’s Day, two and a half months ago - yet it was your surprise present to the lady of the house.

Lastly, lazy wannabes are the kind who when their ‘labour day’ comes, and they are in the maternity wing of some hospital, and the nurse says ‘push,’ they refuse and demand from the doctor: ‘Daktari, tuendee tufanye caesarian’.

tonyadamske@yahoo.com