By Ted Malanda

While the country sweats over the chilling murders in Busia, Bungoma and Mandera, the Inspector General of Police should appoint two of his most incompetent detectives to police newspaper classified ads.

I say incompetent because it doesn’t take brains to sniff criminal elements in most of the fiction published in the classified ads. A look at just one newspaper should suffice. 

Spell check

First is someone who purports to have a ‘formula’ for treating ‘male dysfunction (sic), prematurity (sic) and boost tesotosterone (sic)’. This chap’s formula also encourages ‘wild growth hair for fuller and larger hair’ and fixes ‘instant tightening of verginity (sic) liquid’. 

Now, if you won’t be bothered to spell check an advert before firing it off to a newspaper, you have no business prescribing human medicine or even preserving dead bodies. The best this formula can do is probably kill cockroaches, but only if you squash them using the container.

There is also another fellow whose ad claims he can get you ‘white’ muzungu lovers’. You mean some wazungu are navy blue or orange in colour?

And then we have these ‘virgin angels’ who will shower you with ‘caring love’ in the event that you are lonely if you call their number. Sorry, they are neither virgins nor angels and they have no idea what caring or love means. They are prostitutes.

But that is nothing compared to this guy claiming that if you invest Sh3,000 in his tummy, you can earn Sh26 million. What kind of investment is that? Robbery with violence? Could be, except you would need to invest in a gun. Unfortunately, Sh3,000 can’t even buy second hand bows and arrows.

And what can one say of the gentleman seeking ‘30 staffs’ for an international NGO at a salary of Sh65,000 a month? Rather odd how an international NGO hires ‘30 staffs’ in a classified ad through a second party. In fact, there is also a UN body seeking nurses, clerks and drivers also at Sh65,000 a month. But a keen look at their ‘UN’ email address shows it ends with ‘yahoo.com’!

Sleazy

Finally, is this ‘handsom stud, liv nairobi wants a rich sugarmam in nairobi or msa to sugarcoat me n I make her hapy anything’.

I don’t know about women, but if I were rich and female, I wouldn’t ‘sugarcoat’ a stud who can’t spell ‘happy’. And by the way, handsom stud? You will eventually get a potbelly like me. You think anyone will want to sugarcoat you then?

Get your sleazy bum off the couch and get a job like a man. Nktest.

 

Spare the rod, raise a brat

‘Why would hundreds of high school students camp outside a school gate on opening day,” I asked myself as I approached a school that reporters would describe as an academic giant. 

More curious is that they all seemed to be studying in the sun. For one moment, I thought an industrious teacher had ordered them to paint grasshoppers or something.

But the jigsaw puzzle became clear when I met a schoolmaster walking around in the Rambo-style manner teachers borrowed from Clint Eastwood. He was taunting his charges. 

“Three weeks at home for holidays and you couldn’t do your homework? You were just watching cartoons. So now you are doing your homework in the sun, as if your parents’ homes were washed away by floods,” he sneered.

contraband

By this time, I was walking through the school gate where the watchman, in the no nonsense manner of all school watchmen, was inspecting school bags for contraband. More intriguing, however, was that he held a metal detector.

“Gosh, you mean apart from sneaking in home clothes, hooch and wrinkled cigarettes, they now smuggle guns, knives and grenades into the school as well?” I asked the watchman, thinking we could be taking this insecurity business too far.

“No, not guns,” the watchman answered. “I’m looking for phones. One of them had hidden a mobile phone inside a paper bag full of mandazi. Were it not for this gadget, I would never have found out.”

“Phones? Why would students need mobile phones in school,” I mused as I walked towards the staffroom.

The answer became clear when I asked a senior teacher why his students didn’t perform well last year.

“They refused to read. Those with phones were waiting to receive exam leakage by text message from God knows where and when we confiscated all mobile phones, they were caught flat-footed,” he explained.

My journalistic eye, however, kept roving and I became curious when I noticed a big group of suspiciously young looking men and women who had spent a lifetime in sagging jeans struggling, and failing, to look formal.

“Who are those?”  I asked.

“Oh, those are university students on teaching practice. Last year, we had to send away four of them.

“Two had become thieves, pinching teacher’s mobile phones, balls — anything. The other two, females, had become incorrigible. We thought they were coaching Form Four students after prep only to discover they were sleeping with them,” the experienced school mater reported.

At this point, I was beginning to feel my age. Holy cow! Male trainee teachers pinching phones in the staffroom and female teachers sleeping with boys? What would they do next? Hurl Molotov missiles into the principal’s office? 

“And mwalimu, what do you intend to do with the 500 boys who didn’t do their holiday homework and those caught with mobile phones?” I asked, my head still spinning.

“Oh, those ones? We will give them academic guiding and counselling,” the teacher explained.

“Counselling? But these scoundrels just need a good whipping. Riot police don’t counsel rioters — they beat them to pulp, mwalimu!” I gasped.

Well, what do I know?