Baba's supporters opt to eat cake now that price of 'unga' is up

Kisumu MCAs led by Seth Kanga (in blue) and Speaker Elisha Olaro (brown cap) cut a cake in Kisumu in celebration of Raila Odinga's 79th birthday. [Michael Mute, Standard]

Alas, it’s January again and January babies are scrounging for coins to organise small feasts, after going for broke in December.

The roll of honour of January babies features heavyweights like Martin Luther King, whose birthday is up next week, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and of course Raila Odinga aka Baba. Yours truly, not a heavyweight of any sort, is also in the lineup.

I marked the milestone by writing this column, which is to say work comes before the celebration, perhaps because we celebrate life by working. That’s what it means when you have a working-class background, although the term “working-class” sounds like such a privilege here; most Kenyans belong to a “no-work” background.

I turned the mature age of 53; my birthday mate, Ngugi, turned 86, and Baba turned 79. What does it feel to be 53, the eldest man in the family, now a budding youngster with a voice deep enough to rattle a wall, asked. The honest answer is that I don’t know. I told him so, but he didn’t seem convinced.

This prompted some deeper introspection. I think once you get to fifth floor, the air is cleaner - because the critical mass of our citizens are at lower demographic rungs—and there is clarity of vision. You can see clearly the next frontier of your life. Or, perhaps you don’t; so much remains out of view, even to those on the age pedestal.

At 79, it must be assumed, Baba sees his future with even better clarity. So, after lamenting about the rising price of unga for most of the year, he decided to do something about it. He splashed cakes all around the country, evocative of the Marie Antoinette saga: if the masses can’t afford bread, why don’t they have cake instead?

For those who have forgotten, Antoinette was a French royal who was aghast at the masses’ protests because the price of bread had gone up. Antoinette was curious why the masses insisted on eating bread while cake was sweeter. The element of price wasn’t important to her.

Of course, Baba is aware of such history and I suspect he wouldn’t make such insensitive displays like splashing cake all around, when the citizens can’t afford to buy goro goro of maize. So, we must assume his motivation wasn’t to display cake but to give his supporters a holiday of sorts, just as Martin Luther King’s birthday is a public holiday in the US.

And when Baba declares a day a public holiday, that’s the way it’s going to be. Only that he hadn’t declared this one so, and only a handful of his supporters were assembled. The meeting point was Moi Avenue in Nairobi’s central business district.

And when the policemen on patrol saw slogans that reminded them of maandamano, such as reduced VAT and slicing the price of unga, I suspect they mistook the life-size images of Baba that foregrounded the celebration for the man himself and decided to do what they do instinctively: lobbed teargas into the party.

All this while, Baba was waltzing to taarab tunes somewhere in Malindi, cutting his cake and eating it. And by having maandamano slogans on the cakes, Baba succeeded in getting a symbol of upper-class decadence to serve as a canvas bearing progressive messages.

Or, it could be that the police wanted to remind Baba that tear gas still tastes as bitter, now that he has declared he will be returning to the streets soon. Or it’s simply a case of sour grapes on the part of the policemen, wondering why some folks toil and eat under the shade, while the rest of us are pushed under the harsh rays of jua kali.