By Ted Malanda

I like George Saitoti. I really do. Mostly because he is the only politician I know who doesn’t have a tribe and also because he is strong as an ox.

That man has a heart of steel, emotionally speaking. And those of you who are old enough may recall the heady days of the second liberation when the likes of James Orengo tried to disrupt the budget speech by spiriting away the Parliamentary Mace.

I will never forget how George barrelled into the melee like a headmaster, scattered all the rioting schoolboys and reclaimed the Mace. I like that in a leader.

But the other reason I like George most is because he has introduced two words into the national vocabulary that are pregnant with meaning.

The first is some innocuous thing that he calls "garment".

Now, we all know he means government. But have you ever wondered how apt it is to describe government, especially this coalition thing as a garment, yaani kiraka?

If you are of a certain age, picture yourself aged ten, standing next to the tailor at the local market, waiting to have your school shorts fitted. Whereas your father had procured a sufficient length of khaki, it was never enough, according to the tailor, meaning he had had to patch it up with pieces of this and that pilfered from here and there.

The result? A pair of shorts that was too tight with little triangles of visibly differently coloured material slammed into places that severely injured your self-esteem.

Another Saitoti gem that captures my imagination is ‘contusion’. Of course, this is the learned professor’s way of saying ‘constitution’. But think about it. Isn’t ours, especially the search for that confounded document, just a contusion?

When this contusion business began, I was a young man straight from college. In the intervening years, I became a father, changed jobs thrice, got retrenched twice and became a middle-aged man with one miserable little hair sprouting out of his left ear.

But the Government is still a garment and the search for a national constitution remains a contusion — a bruise, a discoloration, a black eye, a bump if you like.