Degree, the campus jokers often claim, ni Harambee. And Super Senator Johnson Sakaja took that joke literally. Of all the universities he could join, he chose Uganda’s Team University, the only institution that included the ‘Degree ni Harambee’ phrase in its name.
That was not the only thing Sakaja took literally. Amid talk that Nairobi needs a manager for governor, our Super Senator opted to study management.
A university that assures getting a degree would be a ‘Team’ effort, and which offers management, was an incentive he could not resist.
He also did not have to meet the ‘Team’ that would help him secure the degree. And so Super Senator sought higher education abroad while never setting foot there. He had told Nyashinski as much when he suggested he has never left Kenya chasing an education.
Team University clarified that Sakaja did not attend the institution physically, doing so in spirit, offering a posh term for it - distant learning.
Sakaja wasn’t always a lover of distant learning. Swollen with an ambition to study Actuarial Science, the 37-year-old enrolled in the University of Nairobi, although not quite the Harvard for which his heart yearned.
That was in 2003, when the mission-driven freshman must have vowed he would work hard to earn the coveted degree. He is still working hard, 19 years later.
So hard has he been working, as a rapper and lawmaker, that his first Alma matter thought he had completed his studies. UoN listed him as an alumnus, delisting him later when they couldn’t locate his name on all its graduation lists. As he had predicted in one of his raps, mara sipatikani.
The second university wouldn’t let a teammate down and offered to save Sakaja, saying he was one of theirs. Some chap named Dennis Wahome did not buy it.
And so Wahome thought Sakaja deserved a taste of what the senator did to Mary Wambui in 2019 when Sakaja challenged Wambui’s appointment to chair the National Employment Authority for lacking a degree. As the case dragged on at the electoral agency’s Dispute Resolution Committee this past week, many Kenyans would share Wahome’s view.
A photo, just one, in a gown, was all Super Senator Sakaja, Triple S, needed to shut down maadui wangu, as Sakaja would call those who proposed to rename the freezing point of water, zero degrees, to ‘Sakaja’.
Kenyans waited. The photo never came. Led by Sakaja’s opponent Polycarp Igathe, the masses thought they would drop hints, publishing on every social media platform photos of themselves in gowns.
Sakaja didn’t take the hint and would instead issue nimesoma, nina makaratasi declarations, which probably count as much as the number of degrees Bwana Wahome says Sakaja owns.
Super Senator should have probably known that few would believe that the man who has a thing for displaying his dimples on billboards was too shy to pose in a gown. And that is why they implored his Highness Bwana Wajackoyah to donate one of his 17 degrees.
From Sakaja’s office perched at the Kenyatta International Convention Centre, the view of County Hall, the governor’s office is enticing. Every morning, this is the view that must spur his dream to take over the city.
The Milimani Law Courts, the arena that threatens the same dreams, probably isn’t as visible from Sakaja’s office. Triple S would savour the courts in all its gory glory this past week. He spent lonely hours in the cold corridors of justice, perhaps longer than he spent walking the alleys at Team, staring at his phone, hoping that it was all a dream.
Sakaja would spend longer hours inside the chambers packed with Thomases doubting his degrees and supporters who couldn’t care less whether he, indeed, has makaratasi.
He would watch his dreams, fired up when three petitioners withdrew their complaints against him, almost go up in flames when the Commission for University Education rescinded recognition of his imported makaratasi. And in those low moments, he would reach the conclusion that Mtukufu Rais, a man whose career “he had helped” build, was trying hard to destroy his. But he did not reveal the president’s transgression. Had he, perhaps, failed to pay Sakaja’s fees?
The lawmaker ranted on Facebook and fumed before cameras, to save his political life, into which he was introduced by former President Mwai Kibaki and later god-fathered by President Uhuru Kenyatta.
For five years, he has hoped to earn a new name and having grown tired of ‘Triple S’, he has urged voters to rename him ‘Super Governor Sakaja’.
Someone, having misheard the senator, thought he intended to be renamed ‘Koskei’. Arthur, he would tell the IEBC tribunal, worked just fine. Bwana Arthur, depending on whom you ask, hasn’t been working fine. The DCI, for instance, would probably tell you that he hasn’t been hearing right and that is perhaps why he heeded ‘non-existent’ summonses on Friday.
And having lived in Kenya long enough, he ought to have known that no one goes to the DCI. They come to you, on Friday evening, in dark, speeding cars. Of course he remembers how he was ‘not arrested’ in 2020 for flouting Covid-19 regulations.
Super Senator will soon know whether his dimples will be on the ballot. And as the CUE instructed on Friday, he will have approximately 24 hours to find a gown, a photographer, a student ID and other documents that he may probably need a Team to help him find.
