Kakamega needs a dose of kumi kumi

By Ted Malanda

I took leave to cool my ageing brain. Now in its 42^nd year, the darn thing has begun rattling like an old tractor.

Occasionally, it even ‘hangs’ like a computer in the throes of senility.

In the recent past, I have absent-mindedly driven past the turning to my house. And when I found spelling ‘cigarette’ rather taxing, I knew it was time to run for exile in the land of my forefathers and reboot.

Home, as always, was fun, if you ignore the small matter of some chap I hired to slash the grass in my compound mistaking my indigenous trees for weeds and uprooting the whole lot.

Crude oil

I also noted with alarm that louts who hang around the bus stop were no longer harassing me for a pound to buy chang’aa, but for just ten shillings for food. Apparently, the price of chang’aa has skyrocketed — perhaps in line with the rising cost of crude oil on the world market — to the point where only teachers can afford it.

I fear that in the near future, my people will no longer be able to afford Nubian gin to numb weary souls, meaning they will join my in-laws in Central Kenya in solidarity and start partaking of fluids that are in clear contravention of the Poisons and Chemical Substances Act.

Remedy

But that may not be such a bad thing after all. If indeed nursery schools in some parts of Central Kenya are bereft of learners because would-be fathers are too inebriated to put their wives in the family way, such remedy is needed urgently in Western Kenya.

Bungoma town, for instance, is like a beehive. Bicycles are everywhere, elbowing for space on muddy roadsides with swarms of pedestrians. Mumias town is no different while the sleepy market centres dotted along the highway are quickly turning into concrete jungles, with garbage, hookers and idlers spilling onto the tarmac.

Rant

It is not for nothing that Bungoma and Kakamega are among the top three populous counties after Nairobi. Much as pastors rave and rant against fornication, evidence on the ground suggests that they have been preaching to the wind.

Family sizes are gigantic and land sizes have shrunk alarmingly. In a decade, fathers will barely manage to sub-divide their pieces of land for their sons and daughters (oh yes. No more will we order our daughters to go back to their husbands, thanks to the Constitution).

Kwashiorkor

When I was a child in the 1970s, everyone, apart from teachers, in my village walked barefoot. Schools and health centres were far apart and most children suffered from kwashiorkor because all they ate was cassava. Many died.

We were dirt poor then, if development statistics can be believed. But then, a child never slept hungry even if all he or she had was kwashiorkor inducing cassava. The paradox, however, is that we are today poorer because we are ‘wealthier’.

Because of hospitals and better nutrition, our loins have sub-divided our land to ridiculous heights because our babies rarely die — thanks to donor-funded mosquito nets and vaccination programmes.