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William Ruto's 'shuttle' diplomacy has room in government

Opinion
 President William Ruto meets United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in New York, USA. [PSCU, Standard]

A week is a long time in the life of our spanking new Prezzo Bill Ruto, who is suddenly swamped with lunch dates with kings and lords from far-away lands. He is still away as I write this, still lunching with more kings, I presume, although I saw him on a bus, smiling so broadly, we could see his wisdom teeth.

I'll revisit the bus manenos in a moment, but first, let me hail our new Prezzo for a lofty performance in New York. Yes, it's hard to keep track of him, and I don't know when he made it to the US. This time, he didn't use a malfunctioning iPad in his address, as he did in Kasarani; he had an invisible teleprompter that made many hustlers think he was speaking from the heart.

Hear him: "In many respects, the Covid-19 pandemic stripped us of many illusions and exposed stark justice and solidarity deficits in the face of existential crisis..." When did our hustler Prezzo start speaking in such complex terms?

Things got elephant as he progressed on: "It (Covid-19 pandemic) brought into sharp focus the global economy's two-lane highway, repressively patrolled by a rising tide of exclusionist nationalism."

When someone courses through highways and seas in the same sentence, and it's not Wajackoyah, you have to look at them twice. Prezzo Ruto veered dangerously towards a mishmash of incomprehension: "pan-Africanisation of multilateralism and a more just and inclusive system of global governance."

Since I don't read gibberish, I figured I was better off following the story using pictures, so I returned to the picture of Prezzo Ruto on his London bus-ride.

A brief context: The Queen of England, on whose order this country was colonised-the term has such innocuous feel, we should elaborate that it entailed occupation of our land, where our forebears were subjected to 70 years of rape, murder and plunder to their personhood-was laid to rest this week.

An assemblage of some 2,000 world leaders were invited for the funeral, including Prezzo Ruto and the First Lady. But since England is such a tiny country-that's why they had to colonise other lands to expand their own-they decreed that mourners would have to abandon their vehicles at some point and trek to the venue. Or take the bus.

This order, however, only applied to wanyama wadogo; the Beast, the official limo used by US Prezzo Joe Bidden was allowed to trammel through the London streets, grinding to a halt at some point. Yes, no one clears the traffic in London, even for US Prezzo, because Londoners are busy folks. For ye who lock down entire cities for small-time dignitary, the world has moved on...

The leaders from France, Israel, Canada, Japan, etc, were also allowed to use their limos and battle with the London traffic. Our Prezzo hopped into the bus and moved to the back. Why, he is young, strong and agile enough to eject from a window in the event of an emergency. And he seemed so happy to be in that bus, a back seat, going to the Queen's funeral, that some of us silently questioned the rumour that leaving only mainly African and Asian leaders to take the bus was an affront to our continents.

But I want to transcend this "shuttle" diplomacy and wonder what's to stop us from adopting buses as the official mode of transport for the hustler government. It's cost-effective, timely and will decongest our roads, while keeping Prezzo Ruto in direct touch with the masses who put him in power.

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