Why this casual behaviour with no sense of shame?

I once had a boss who, when the deadline for a crucial book you were editing was nigh, would always be on the phone threatening to “come to your office and lay an egg right there on your desk”.

In the hectic publishing world, deadlines are not just a day or time when the project ends. Deadlines churn things in your stomach, make you dream about a non-existent error on page 34 that you forgot to correct and which will appear in print for many months.

They mean high blood pressure and heart threatening to leap into your mouth whenever you are reminded that you have to keep time with military exactitude and guarantee impeccable quality.

And on Tuesday, I felt like laying an egg when I read a news report from the Police Air Wing. Our reporter had asked a source how it came to be that a chopper that could have have helped neutralise the Garissa terror massacre was out on civilian duty.

“This kind of thing happens all the time,” the source said with a casualness that captures the ‘Hakuna Matata’ attitude that people in public service seem to have adopted.

We simply have no remorse even when blunders reach cataclysmic levels. As someone would have it, the trouble with us is that we have no sense of shame. If you are caught doing something as sacrilegious as stealing or abusing resources meant to save lives, you simply deny, then when tempers cool down you grudgingly admit it from both sides of your mouth and life goes on.

It is the same lack of shame you see when a top police officer of modest education tells intelligent fellows that he started a Sukuma wiki kiosk with less than Sh20,000, before his wife, perhaps with the help of a miracle preacher, multiplied it over the years to Sh8 million now safely tucked away in some not-so-secret account.

Now that is the metaphor for our law enforcers. Good Lord, what do these guys take us for? At this rate, I propose in next year’s drama festivals we enter a play by the police service. Seriously, the service is teeming with talent.

It’s not easy for a well-fed guy who has served in the force for decades to break down and shed real tears when he remembers the kind of poverty he and his siblings were brought up in.

The same weeping cop can really switch moods. Just try walking into his office with a request on anything. The dismissive rebuff you are likely to get would make you think he is made of steel!

Or where else would a young politician walk into a police station and start dropping insults that, where I come from, are reserved for incontinent octogenarians.

Even in our politics, we are unmoved even by the fact that we are at war. So when we are not reasoning with our hormones, our opinion is not based on facts.

Government functionaries, when not disobeying court orders, they are denying obvious blunders occurred. As for the Opposition, why think hard when Baba has said the solution to the terror war is withdrawal of KDF from Somalia?

Seriously? This when intelligence indicates the attackers are increasingly Kenyan? This while we know we went to Somalia when Baba was in government and the Al-Shabaab lunatics had pushed us to the wall? But like I said, nothing is serious in Kenya.

To be fair, not all is lost. I have not met Joseph Nkaissery, but when the old military man went to Lang’ata to apologise to children who had been teargassed by the police over a land scandal, some hope was rekindled in me.

A man of honour should be meek in authority. And while I was not impressed especially with the response to the Garissa attack, I think Nkaissery’s is a rare attitude in a country where people take office not to serve, but to wield power and flaunt cash at the same poor peasants they vowed to lift out of poverty.

And to line their pockets, turn up their noses at the ignorant unwashed polloi and generally be the boss. It all makes you want to lay an egg.