Parable of PLO's hammer-lifting mosquitoes, and professorial pecking order in Kisumu fete

PLO Lumumba takes centre stage in a curious clash of professors, protocol and pecking order in Kisumu. [File, Standard]

Parable of PLO’s hammer-lifting mosquitoes, and professorial pecking order in Kisumu fete

Patrick Loch Otieno Lumumba, aka PLO, has fashioned himself as the quintessential public intellectual. A lawyer by training, he’s popular in local and international conference circuits due to his energised delivery of kizungu mingi. One of his memorable quips was that one doesn’t kill a mosquito using a hammer.

All too often, his antics mirror the prospect of mosquitoes lifting hammers, as happened earlier in the week in Kisumu, where PLO was miffed at being interrupted because Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o, who happens to be the Kisumu governor, wanted to make a belated dramatic entry.

Well, Nyong’o might be the Kisumu governor, and a professor to boot, but PLO is also a professor and he had the floor, so why would Nyong’o be so uncourteous by striding in late and disrupting the good prof? The last time I encountered PLO at an airport somewhere in East Africa, before M7 and Mama Suluhu’s henchmen started abducting Kenyans from their territories, he offered a soft palm in greeting, and a business card that I can’t recall using. What I recall was his gentle demeanour and diffidence.

This week, PLO looked chubbier than I remember him, while his mane is greying at the temples. These transformations appear to have added an aggressive streak to his genial mien. “That’s part of the African problem,” he scoffed when someone whispered to him about the governor’s arrival. “I am now being stopped because the governor is coming,” he said, querying what was more important between a disruptive politician and a professor’s pontification. He fumed off the stage.

I have no idea if PLO was in drama club during his days at Pumwani Secondary; Nyong’o was a regular act at Alliance, but does he say that he also dabbled in poetry? With better artistic direction, PLO could have waited for Nyong’o to get on stage, then offered a pointed rebuke fit for a late professor along these lines: “A professor does not demonstrate his professorial acumen by arriving late where more prominent professors are holding court; he stays overnight to ward off mosquitoes using a hammer, lest eminent minds like this professor are stirred into a sudden restlessness to trigger an unpremeditated, unceremonious departure ...”