Parable of our prodigal son

By Ted Malanda

This thing about people shifting from one phone network to another is playing out very biblically, if you remember the saga of the prodigal son.

While every phone network is bending backwards to woo new customers — the kuhama people — they seem least bothered with their old, loyal customers. The emigrants are getting showered with all manner of enticing offers to last for as long as three months. Colossal amounts of money are going down in a massive advertising blitz but no one is offering a lollipop to loyal customers who opt not to move.

This, by the way, is how men woo their second wives. You have the long suffering wife who met this idiot when all he owned was the shirt on his back and one orange underpant dotted with holes.

After struggling together — and bearing an army of toddlers in the process — our man wakes up one day and discovers that his butchery business is thriving so much that it has made him more handsome.

That’s when the hunt for Number Two begins. He buys her chicken and chips. He buys her a mobile phone. He buys her boiro. He gives her money straight from the cash till. And all the time, he forgets that the titles to all his plots are in the safekeeping of ‘that woman’ in his house. He has found the love he had lost.

But then, so the Bible said of the prodigal son. You were lost but now you are found. And that precisely is the reason Cricket Kenya should reopen the file on our most illustrious prodigal son, Maurice Odumbe.

To be frank, I know nothing about cricket. In fact, I only discovered this game when Odumbe performed magic at some World Cup and became a superstar — our superstar. Later, I hear, he fouled up. But who doesn’t?

The lad has paid the price. While I have never set eyes on him, I have a feeling that there is a fire burning in his belly, a fury to make amends, to rise from the ashes.

If this boy is a flawed genius, he is our genius — our son, our prodigal son. He was lost but now he is found. The only thing he knows is cricket.