Pray tell, why does God protect the White Widow?

God knows I am not a religious man. As a matter of fact, when you hear street preachers raging against sinners, it is me they are referring to!

I partake of the evil brew with unruly enthusiasm. I smoke like a chimney. I swear like a sailor. I lie without batting an eyelid. I have on more than one occasion coveted my neighbour’s donkey. I worship money. Like the next man, I have evaded tax, pinched this and that and fornicated ravenously.

Of the Ten Commandments, I have probably only stopped short of murder. But that is not because I am a good, God-fearing man. It is just that guns are illegal and I am far too windy to strangle the numerous irritants that I bump into once in a while. Plus, I hear nasty things happen to men at Kamiti, and I am straight.

In short, it would be extremely difficult for me to go to heaven. To paraphrase the Bible, it is easier for a camel to squeeze through the eye of a needle than for me to discover myself in heaven, burping on milk and honey and humming boring gospel songs with the enthusiasm of the young Biblical David stringing the harp for that scoundrel King Saul.

Which is why each time I read Psalms Chapter 68:5, which I must confess is not too often, and see the words “God is a father of the fatherless and a judge for the widows,” I am overwhelmed by cynicism.

These words make me think of the ‘White Widow,’ the British ‘Jezebel’ Samantha Lewthwaite who bedded a terrorist or two and rightfully and quickly became a widow.

In these parts, Samantha, who has again been fingered in the murder of 142 Garissa University College students, would have become a plaything for an army of men shamelessly creeping into her lonely hut in the dark with a kilo of sugar and promising enduring love only to vanish at first light never to return.

Has God elected to be a father of Samantha’s fatherless children and the judge of the good men and women who have chosen to make it their life’s mission to destroy her?

Each time she is scheming to kill kids, turn wives into widows and children into orphans, the White Widow probably prays, mumbling a version of the Christian verse, “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.”

Perhaps that is why security forces have never gunned her down and why she slips through security cordons like a ghost.

Maybe that is why she hides in some foxhole undetected by all the sophisticated security agencies of the world, executing heinous murderous attack after another.

The way things look, she stands poised to live into ripe old age, blubbering like an idiot, drooling at the mouth and pleasuring herself in some dark, cobwebbed cave.

Would be nice for her to die in an evil jihadist mission, and find 72 starved male virgins queuing with wolfish grins on their faces, huh?