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For weeks now, everyone has been running scared, shouting Ebola this, Ebola that. You would think the world is ending!I was even afraid NGO activists would besiege the Kenya Airways headquarters and chain themselves to one of the planes to petition the airline against its continued forays into Ebola territory.
Yet I don’t think anyone, least of all a Kenyan, should lose much sleep over this thing. Not too long ago, a flu called SARs erupted somewhere and we went bonkers. After lots of panic the flu passed, without as much as killing one chicken.
As disasters go, Ebola is a pretty tame thing by Kenyan standards. If it has so far claimed only a mere 1,200 lives, it has no business claiming to be a ‘deadly virus’ or ‘scourge’ as my colleagues in the meat wrapping business would colourfully put it. Look, this is a country where cattle rustlers can wake up one morning and murder 50 police officers in broad daylight. Another band can stroll around Lamu slitting hundreds of people’s throats.
Another can swagger into a shopping mall and waste 70 people. In an hour. In a republic of this nature, it is childish for adults to start laying eggs because people are eating bats in a foreign country.
In fact, when you look at it, an Ebola attack in a country where virtually everyone has suicidal tendencies – like the pedestrians who dart across highways - wouldn’t be such a bad idea. It is no coincidence, for instance, that before most Kenyans embark on a journey, they pray. Down here, one who boards a public service vehicle stares death in the face.
Each time a Kenyan walks into a restaurant and orders a meal, he or she risks cholera, typhoid, food poisoning or good old diarrhoea. Each time a Nairobian buys meat, he risks death because one never knows whether he or she is eating tortoise meat.
Even booze is a potential death sentence. Either you could be drinking poison or the woman you are tuning could poison and kill you. You could board a boda whose rider is drunk and get squashed like a bug by a huge truck.
You could even make it home and end with a knife sticking out of your ribs because your spouse is ‘mad’. Or you could be sitting in your house lusting for your sweet chubby wife only for a ‘stray’ bullet to smash through the window and dispatch you straight to hell – or wherever it is that dead people go.
Amusingly, folks discuss Ebola in pubs, then duck into the lodgings for unprotected sex with a wench they met ten minutes earlier. Well, the probability of getting killed by a stray bullet, or a thug, is much higher than contracting some virus anyway.
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