Greetings Baba, also known as Jakom, Agwambo, Tinga, the Right Honourable former Prime Minister of the Republic of Kenya, senior statesman, elder of Kenyan politics, master of spinning yarns and vitendawili!

This is to welcome you back home and to let you know that you were sorely missed. I can hardly believe that you have been away for over two months. I’m sure you enjoyed the break, immersed as you were in proper discussions about Kenya and Africa in global geopolitics. Now, that’s where men of your stature truly belong.

I want to fully associate with your efforts to put Kenya on the world map, as you did in that land of Cousin Barry, who also happens to be Prezzo of the United States of America, but do we say!

Talking of Barry, I’m sure you two had a tête-à-tête away from the prying eyes of watu wa magazeti (newspaper men) and spoke a thing or two about home affairs. It would break my heart to hear you did not spare a moment for our relatives.

Anyway, as I said, mine is to welcome you back home, and alert you what has been happening while you were away. Of course you are familiar with our small-minded politicians; while you were away, they took their pettiness to stratospheric levels.

Some have been whispering that you jumped ship to escape wrangles in CORD, following the bungled party polls in which your acolytes were openly humiliated. Yet others claim it was your purportedly waning influence that shocked and surprised you that you literally had to flee from the scene to absorb the shock and regain your breath.

Some even had the temerity to insinuate your trip was meant to evoke other political epochs, such as the Lancaster conferences where our country’s political future was debated, or even the 1992 return of prominent son of soil, Kenneth Matiba.

I can’t believe such nonsense from grown men, considering we are not faced with elections, at least not for a couple of years. In any case, what’s wrong with making a dramatic entry to your own country?

Yet, the same chaps who talk of your waning political fortunes are having sleepless nights about your impending return, and have gone all out to frustrate any prospects of people proclaiming: let us rejoice, for our Baba has returned from his sojourns in the land of the white men!

But as the Good Book warns, where we plant peace and joy, the cunning one supplants suspicion and chaos.

So do not even raise your voice when you encounter petty people in the airport. It does not matter – or does it? – the lounge that you use to get back home.

There are those who will try to pull the rug off your feet, quite literally, so that you do not step on an inch of carpet at the airport.

But do not be troubled; the greatest carpet is the black-brown canvas that shall be rolled out in every hamlet, from the poverty-stricken ghettoes of Kibera that you represented for decades, to the sun-kissed slums of Marigu-ini, the masses that truly cherish you will line up along city streets, all the way to Uhuru Park singing in unison: Our Baba is back, our Baba is back, our Baba is back!

For they know their Baba will not return empty-handed, if all he has, as he usually does, is a pack of words that will stir the mind and fill the heart with restlessness.