The Wannabes: Annoying wannabes who live in dreamland

Last Friday I was in a bar with this bugger called Barry who was drinking everyone’s barley, while buying nary, but busy shooting off his mouth as the rest of us boys tried to shoot the breeze by the billiards table on more palpable topics like women, why the fiction writers at the Met made up ‘El Niño’, ‘will Mourinho survive 2015?’ and hoping that Uhuru had visited us on Jamhuri Day and delivered a nice speech at the Nyayo Stadium. But Barry would not stop talking, or rather, sharing his ‘mission statements’ aka drunken fantasies to all and sundry.

‘I used to be in the Kenya ‘B’ team of basketball when I was 19 and was meant to go to the States on a basketball scholarship, but we could not raise the air fare or one year stay money,’ said Barry, who is not-that-tall, stooping, skinny (from free booze), ‘so I stayed.’ Barry, if this hairy story of his is true, is still stuck in the perido when he was 19, in 1998. ‘I could have been big, like LeBron James!’ he added.

Now he was starting to get annoying. It reminded me of a wannabe animator filmmaker I once knew called Davie, who, every time he watched an animation, would say he could do better than those ‘privileged Hollywood white guys’ if only his dad, way back in the day, had sold a piece of the family shamba for his college fee abroad.

‘I would have made something ‘bigger’ than The Lion King, the nigger would brag in a wannabe way, ‘if only my damn dad wasn’t so stingy.’ These kind of wannabes always have someone to blame for their dreams not coming true, when the truth is they are not ready to put themselves through the sort of grueling effort it takes to make even a quarter loaf of their dreams come true. For Davie, it is his stingy rich old guy.

When you hear of MPs’ sons staging robberies against their parents in their plush houses, a la Tett, a la that MP’s son in the dock at the Coast, it is because these brats are fantasists with a sense of entitlement to their folks’ wealth. They like prestige but hate kazi.

Barry, for example, relies on his working wife, but feels her head with ‘big deal’ tales that are just pipe dreams and the beer drinker’s daydreams. ‘I will cut that deal, kesho!’ No you won’t! You will nurse that Goliath-size killer hangover, then because your big brother is down from Dallas with some dollars (more on that, later), you will drink yourself silly until January 9th when he jets back to America, as you continue to wallow in your shallow wannabe fantasies.

I am personally tired of the so-called artistes who meet one on the street then say they are the next big thing. The musician who is forever in studio (or planning to go talk to Anto at Ogopa), the TV script writer who has worked on one 15-minute ‘pilot’ but expects you to take them and introduce them to wadosi wa KTN. At least be a serious wannabe! Do some work that looks hefty, even to the naked human eye, and life and other folks will surely give you that much needed break.

Then there are those ‘standing’ MPs, wannabes who wish to unseat the current Mpig, but still want everyone to call them Mheshimiwa.

‘Tuma M-Pesa kwanza if you expect us to call you an Mpig,’ even with the elections as far off as the erection of a celibate 98-year-old man. The problem would be with the wannabe pastors (we have spoken of these fakes here before) who cheat people to ‘confess their dreams’ to others, especially the ladies, then the Lord will maketh true the words of your lips. Describing your dream car to your colleague in an ‘apostle’ inspired reverie is like that male colleague describing how he would make love to Angelina Jolie, if only Brad Pitt was not in the picture. Stick to your lane, wannabe, and if you want to build a superhighway, better be prepared to call in the Chinese and put in the sweat.

Talking of highways, a cousin from California whom I picked up from JKIA was loudly shocked ati Mombasa Road now has bypasses and flyovers as opposed to the solo bridge near Davies’ Motors that connects South B to South C.

This is a guy who left Kenya in mid-2001, in the middle of blackouts, convinced Kenya was going to the dogs, in his words, and so missed the whole Kibaki era of ‘maendeleo, ma-highway na no more ma-loans from IMF.’

If you are a wannabe winter bunny (I don’t know why guys call them summer bunnies, yet in December, these fellers are fleeing winter in the northern hemisphere to come floss to us in Kenya), just STFU! (see, we also know cool acronyms here in Keenia)! I wanted to tell this wannabe if he’s already missing mazuri ya Missouri or whatever, we could always cut back to JKIA, but that would be unfair because perhaps he was only marvelling that we didn’t die, already, in poverty. Instead, I asked him to turn the knob on the car radio and look for Destiny’s Child on the stereo. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Coz, cuz, that is what is hot in Kenya right now, now that the year is 2001!’

Winter bunnies, I know this piece was not about you, but I could not let the year end just, fwaaahh, without ‘entering’ you. Somewhere right now in Nairobi, there is a winter bunny telling white wannabe lies to old amigos about how fabulous life is majuu, kumbe all that is waiting for them there in January is a grey bum to be wiped, and a mid-brown colour burger to be flipped.

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