Now contrast this with what happens when an American or Briton who dropped out of kindergarten wants to visit Kenya.
He buys a ticket, answers five questions on a yellow form inside the plane and lands at JKIA to a mursik bash with female traditional dancers wriggling their bottoms in honour at the runway.
Long live the Queen!
Why Egypt should let Pharaoh go
If there is such a thing as overkill, it is happening in Cairo. The Egyptians didn’t have to hunt down former President Hosni Mubarak in a culvert. He handed over power to the army when things got too hot.
Egyptians, far from letting the matter rest, took him to court and charged him with murder – an old geezer with many of body organs way past their expiry age.
In court, where he appeared in a cage like the old trapped lion he is, he lay on a stretcher where his former subjects stared at him with the curiosity and contempt with which a lynch mob looks at corpse whose owner they have just stoned to death.
Last week, the court found Mubarak guilty and sentenced him to life. The old geezer is 84 and his heart keeps creaking shut like an old window.
Why, in one day, they had to arm-twist that aged heart back to life twice by shocking it with electric shocks (In Kenya, he would have died because a power blackout would have ensued just when the doctor was about to do his thing).
Now, I have no idea how many evil things Mubarak did, but I have a feeling he feels quite remorseful about most, if not all of them. In any case, being out of power must be more punishing than spending the rest of his life behind bars.
Here, I think, is where Egyptians need to grow up. Mubarak, for all his failings, wasn’t such a monster. Africa has seen worse. He served them well, if a little too selfishly and with too much zeal (he wanted to install his son as his successor).
You can’t build a nation by angrily jailing an 84-year-old sick man for life. Let Mubarak go.
