The tale of two hard-working but differently treated Kenyans

One of the best African poems I read as a young man was Ugandan Henry Barlow’s ‘Building the Nation’. The stinging satirical piece of literary art talks of two people who have just done their part in building the nation. One is a PS who had to attend a sumptuous luncheon at a high-end resort aptly name the Vic. The other is his driver. On the way back, the PS – who has had cold beer, friend chicken, ice cream and coffee – breaks wind and keeps yawning to stay awake, as the driver yawns out of hunger pangs, which he downplays by saying he is slimming.

It is to Barlow’s poem the mind wonders with all the stupefying figures being bandied of money either stolen or offered as a bribe. Like the hungry driver in the poem, we watch on TV as the lucky ones with connections to people in power narrate how they pocketed millions for supplying air to the State.

So Njamumo is destitute even after spending years trying to sell roasted termites to dismissive motorists at Kawanjara in Embu, while Njege, who failed all his exams and has never done anything harder than eating a mountain of ugali four times a day, was hiding hundreds of millions in his house. And what did Njege do to earn gunnybags of cash? Just opening a few companies on the advice of a political hot shot who helped him supply pens to a government office. Then after buying plots through his relatives and huge cars through his mistresses and law firms, he employs a few graduates to clean his cars, till his land and drive his harem to city shebeens, all at a uniform salary of Sh5,000.

It is the tale of our times. With unemployment among the youth so high, I’m told even the old art of dating is becoming somehow impossible. A young man in Eastlands may try to make a move on a girl and the best he gets is that she tries to sell a Chinese phone to him. End of engagement.

It gets worse. Another young man meets a beautiful girl at a bus stop in Rongai and they move in together the following weekend. Things move so fast and just when he starts entertaining thoughts of starting a family, he comes home to find an empty hall. This after the supposed new wife lied to the neighbours that the new family was moving houses, yet she was moving alone. Yes, with all the households the young man on his first job bought after taking a Sacco loan whose repayment period is longer than he can keep his current job. And this is not funny.

Kenya has become a tale of two citizens. There is the gardener earning between Sh3,000 and Sh9,000 to mow the lawn around a tenderprenuer’s Sh100 million house. Both work very hard as cleaners. The gardener cleans the compound, while the tenderprenuer cleans public coffers. Their relationship reminds you of a god and a mere mortal. Yet both are employed and the economy is good. Any claims of poverty and high cost of living, you must be reminded, is propaganda started by the opposition.

Something is wrong when, after working all his life, a man cannot retire peacefully. He has to leave his large family every evening to risk the night guarding a building in Kakamega. A building is owned by another old man who owns so many other such buildings that his monthly profit can employ tens of thousands of other old watchmen.

Yet the owner of the building, who should be rotting in jail for stealing from us, has never done an honest day’s work.

So you have a country of potentially hard-working men and women with nothing to do or reeling in underemployment and a cabal of stinking rich ne’er-do-wells who have enough for generations to come. More like a company where those who work hard are demoted or fired while those who never lift a finger to do anything productive get huge perks every year.

As they say on Facebook, isorait!