It is said the family is the smallest unit of the nation. And away from what Jubilee and CORD politicians have been saying on the economy, cost of referendum, East-West relations and other such matters that don’t increase the number of sufurias in your houses in one day, I feel the best way to analyse our progress as a nation is by critically looking at the state of the Kenyan family.
If you listen to radio call-in programmes, some of which we blame for holding the mirror right to our ugly faces, you can tell the Kenyan family is under siege. There, you hear horrific tales of single ladies proudly thumping their chests how they have become socialites surviving on handouts from rich married men, as young men regale us with heroics on orgies with sugar mummies and married women, old enough to be their mothers. There is also the occasional, bizarre case of a man, or woman about to get a baby with one of his or her children, and is blaming it all on the devil, evil spirits and other invisible night runners from the occult world. It all has to do with our rather devilish worship for money.
Of course, there are good, happy families out there based on love, trust and other virtues a stable nation should be built on. But these are, naturally, a teeny-weeny minority. Then there is the rest of us who think the ideal life is one where you wake up tomorrow as the surprise owner of a mansion, with enough cars to match the colours of your designer clothes and doing nothing more than forever quaffing champagne and entertaining a harem of latino girls with endless legs.
It does not stop there. We want to cruise in private jets we have not worked for, sow wild oats everywhere and grace every social occasion that brings together class, beauty, power, influence and all that money can buy.
So we have slowly been selling our soul to Old Nick. Today, the most beautiful, nubile models are not paragons of virtue. Many of them are vultures circling above old men with receding hairlines and bank accounts that call to mind a national Treasury. Don’t get me wrong, I know there are many of these geezers who lure these young lasses out of college with promises of weekends at the Coast or in Zanzibar, but many of these closet socialites are willing to trade their – sometimes artificial - looks for the alacrity to leave the halls of residence to apartments in leafy addresses.
They want to stop walking along River Road looking for places where French fries go for Sh50, and stop buying second-hand clothes and instead do their shopping in London; before their internship. There is nothing wrong with ambition, or even watching Mexican soaps, reading step-hop-and-jump novels or listening to phony tales from creative friends, but must we act it all out in real life? Thanks to this fast-lane mirage, we have converted many of our men into potential thieves always looking out for a ‘financial breakthrough’. We are all in a mad rush to get some cash for an eighth acre and a Toyota, not for convenience and security, but to keep up with the Joneses.
And while investing in a salvage Toyota and buying a stamp-sized plot outside Nairobi County must be encouraged, our itch for quick riches would by now have turned comical if it were not so inimical to our survival as a decent, organised society where buildings crumble even before they are completed in the rush to net rent cash.
Even preachers now say miracles are directly proportional to your ‘seed’. We have universities where, I’m told, lecturers are hired to teach ‘marketable’ courses and none of the ‘customers’ (read students) should ever fail. It’s not all bad, though. There is the photo-op image you see at high-end resorts, of couples luxuriating in fairy-tale bliss, but beneath that façade is a worrying social trend especially in the lower rungs of the social ladder. Those of us who work in newsrooms must have noticed that the number of men waking up one day to behead their spouses, parents, children and other kin over money issues is reaching dizzying levels.
