Clay Muganda
2 July 2009
opinion
Last Monday I received mail from a reader who asked me to write about the peculiarity of Kenya, or Kenyans for that matter, in 120 words. A tall order you may say, but for someone who earns a living from selling words, that should be an easy task.
Wait a minute! How much can I earn by writing only 120 words? More importantly, is there any writer who can capture our peculiarity and our wicked, wicked ways in only those words? Put differently, are we that infinitesimal in the scheme of things that only 120 words are needed to describe us, yet our national carrier is the Pride of Africa and our land the magic of Africa?
Of course our peculiarity is not confined to calling habits alone. As a failing state where we have set our standards so low, we are not even peculiar. We are unique, and our mannerisms border on the bizarre, the paranormal, the absurd - and our ways of doing things more often than not expose our congenital idiocy.
It is only in Kenya where you can spend hours in a traffic jam and later discover that an idiot of a driver parked his white Toyota bang in the middle of the road. Reason? He is waiting for a traffic police officer to assess the damage caused by a cyclist who grazed the car's plastic bumper and made centimetre long mark.
We care less about one another, but we like others to be part of our problems and share in our misery and bad driving skills. When we inconvenience other motorists be cause of our carelessness and ignorance of the traffic rules, we get a sense of déjà vu; a feeling that justice has been done.
As a people, we lack the drive to think on the road. Do you know of any country where pedestrians chat casually, some time even while holding hands, across the road when the light turns green for vehicles to drive through? This is very common in Nairobi where we even ignore footbridges - wrongfully called flyovers - so that we can dash across the road.
And motorists are not any better when it comes to obeying traffic lights. When the light turns red, they honk their car horns, and when the light does not respond to their haughtiness, they just drive through while hurling the Mercedes Benz of invectives at the equally wayward pedestrians.
When it comes to language, we have devised our own, and I do not mean sheng, that amorphous mish-mash without any commercial value and which we will never export. Icons, heroes, legends and kings are our stock in trade, but we can never explain why we refer to people using those terms.
For Michael Jackson to be called the King of Pop, or to be referred to as an icon, he had to do many uncanny things like changing his looks, religion, country ...and had to be charged even with child molestation. Of course he won numerous music awards and changed the way music videos are made.
Granted, Benjamin Ayimba has done his bit both as a rugby player and as a coach. Jua Cali also has done his bit in speaking sheng all the time and wearing a trailer park T-shirt with his image on it. Of course there are other things they have done, but they are no match for MJ. However, according to our sports writers and entertainment journalists, Ayimba is a sports icon and Jua Cali is the King of Genge - whatever that is.
It is only in Kenya where people who have won as many matches as Ayimba has, and singers who have been nominated for as many awards as Jua Cali has been, can be icons and kings. We are surely in a class of our own. A class of low standards!
Then we have the prophets. You know, Kenya is the only country where entertainment journalists classify a yet-to-be-composed song as a hit. "Avril and Nyota Kubwa will do a collabo and it is going to be a hit...", reads a story in an entertainment pullout. "The lyrics of the song are yet to be written, and they still do not know when the track will be released, but Avril is the next big thing in Kenya's music industry." Phew!
Experience has taught me that anything, or anybody that entertainment writers declare 'the next big thing' fails to launch, no matter how long it had survived. Ask the Kisima Music Awards organisers and Maureen Medza formerly of Q FM.
On less important matters, ours is the only land where public servants look gift horses in the mouth and then start throwing tantrums, yet they (the public servants) did not even have their own horses in the first place.
We could almost hear Soita Shitanda's wailings when Uhuru Kenyatta made a half-hearted attempt at austerity. "I cannot drive a teenager's car," Shitanda cried like a baby who was being denied his birth right. "I have to drive in a car commensurate with my age." What we never asked, or what he never said, is what kind of a car he used to own before he became a minister.
When it comes to buying vehicles, we score many firsts. When people in other countries set out to buy cars, they look at how the cars will help them move around. But Kenyans are so futuristic they start considering the price at which they will sell the car after 10 years of drunken driving, another peculiar culture that comes with Kenyans' drivers' licences and log books.
"You mean you have a car and yet you do not drink?" an oaf of a Nairobi boy asks another. "You buy a car to make it easier for you to drink as you drive, or to drink and then drive."
That school of thought is supported to the hilt by our (traffic) police officers whose duty is enforcing the laws of the land, but many a time they bend them and when they are tired of doing that, they just break them, without any regrets at all.
In other countries the police fight crime, but in ours, they fight one another just like our politicians, those cry babies who think it is our patriotic duty to dry their tears - and that their duty is to lower our standards of living.
It has been a while since we heard about Beth Mugo's and Peter Anyang' Nyong'o's unhealthy differences. There are very many Kenyans who are getting bored because nothing else is coming out of Afya House.
It was fun to hear two adults go for each other's neck as if the winner was to get a bigger car -- an item ministers have been crying over ever since Uhuru Kenyatta drove to Parliament in a sleek Volkswagen Passat whose engine capacity, fuel consumption and price tag we did not bother to ask.
While Beth and Peter were fighting like Kilkenny cats, Kenyans without lifestyle diseases -- because they lack style and cannot afford life as it is known in higher echelons of the civil service -- and who cannot be airlifted to South Africa -- were waiting in pain and suffering in long queues outside our ailing hospitals.
To cut a long story short, Nairobians were in shock when the news broke that a clinic in Westlands had been closed because of swine flu. But Beth labelled the rumours "a false alert" -- and we stopped worrying.
Three days later, the story changed. What a coincidence that swine flu did not exist in Westlands that borders Beth's Dagoretti constituency and was confirmed in Kisumu Town, a stone's throw from Prof Nyong'o's Kisumu Rural constituency!
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