There’s a feeling you get when your stomach is getting ready to empty its contents, either from either end. You begin to feel flushed. You touch your hand to your forehead and feel the heat rising off the surface of the skin. Your palm reacts by going cold and clammy and you experience that unsettling feeling of being hot and cold at the same time. The ground begins to shift beneath your feet and your reach out for something sturdy to lean onto.
As you lean heavily on the kitchen counter, your mouth begins to fill with saliva, a sure sign that you’re about to spew your breakfast. Serves you right, you shouldn’t have eaten that second kebab. Okay, maybe it was the third, but who’s counting? But before you can begin to berate yourself about your eating habits, your stomach heaves. You feel your intestines coil as they prepare to evacuate your innards.
Clutching your tummy, you stumble blindly towards the bathroom, and fall to your knees in front of the toilet bowl. Grasping the sides with both hands, you bend over and open your mouth, steadying yourself to eject a bowl full of puke. But all you get are a couple of dry heaves, which stretch your abdominal muscles so tight you could beat your stomach like a drum.
Bent over the loo, with tears streaming down your face, strings of saliva leave the corners of your mouth and travel slowly into the water below. You notice that there are skid marks at the bottom of the bowl, and try to remember the last time you gave it a good scrub. You lift your hand to wipe your mouth and realize that someone tinkled on the seat. So now you have pee on your hand as well. Who knew you had such a high tolerance for yuck?
Not right
You grab onto the sink, which is a few inches above your head, and pull yourself to your feet. Now the mirror is right in front of you. Your eyes are as red as a ripe tomato. Tears have made your mascara clump together, and there are streaks of eyeliner running down your face. You look deranged, like a woman who’s just found out her husband secretly wears her panties.
You want to wash your face and start the day over again, but you can still feel a twitch somewhere deep in your gut. Something’s not right. Your breakfast is not boarding. It looks like you’ll have to give it some inducement, otherwise you’ll spend precious minutes waiting for your tummy to empty so that you can begin again, maybe make healthier food choices this time around.
Toilet bowl
So you get back on your hands and knees, put one hand on the toilet bowl. With the other you stick your finger down your throat. The first time nothing happens. The second time, you feel the familiar coiling of your food tubes. The third time you begin to heave proper, and all the food you ate, plus what are possibly bits of your intestinal wall, rush up your oesophagus, into your mouth, and finally into your streaky toilet bowl. The room immediately fills with a really bad smell. It’s so bad that you feel like vomiting again.
That is how I feel every time I hear the word ‘plebiscite’. The word alone is puke-inducing. Just the thought of the expensive, ill-advised, and in my view, unnecessary referendum makes me want to puke. It should make us all sick to imagine that while this country is haemorrhaging cash, some people think that spending billions to amend the constitution is the answer to all our problems. The likelihood is that it will do little more than create more room for the political elites to rule and plunder.
We’ve been on this referendum diet for a while now. The calls to amend our constitution have been made and regurgitated ad nauseam. And the likelihood is that they will not stop until the vote is had, whether Kenyans agree with the need for a vote or not.
Here’s the thing though: this is the kind of diet that can only lead to bloat. It’s hard to imagine a government that’s even more top-heavy, and lopsided than the one we have currently, but depending on how the amendments take shape, that’s exactly what we might end up with. I’m still trying to work out what the alternatives might be, but in the interim I’m going off this referendum diet; only healthy thoughts from now on.
Ms. Masiga is Peace and Security Editor, The Conversation Africa
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