The best way to solve our problems would be to eat up all troublemakers

It has been nine years since one Otto Octavia White advised me to find a life. He advised me to begin living instead of filing this column week after week. Seven years earlier my late friend, Prof E S Atieno Odhiambo, had written to me from Rice University in Texas, “We are following your weekly perorations. Why do you worry about a society whose values a moth has eaten?”

At about the same time, my late grandmother advised me about a different situation. “My child,” she said, “Do you think you can heal the world? You cannot, my child. Nobody can heal the world. What matters in this world is to find something you believe in. When you have found it, live for it passionately. The rest you can leave to God.”

And I suspect that we each find something we believe in – most of us at any rate. I believe that we are all passionate about something – it does not have to be a good thing. Again, even things like “good” and “bad” can be very relative. They mean different things to different people, in different circumstances and times. It is like President Yoweri Museveni supporting the International Criminal Court (ICC) when a Ugandan rebel is before it and opposing it, should the rebel become the President of Uganda. Your mission in life could be perorating about abstract things like freedom, fairness and justice, which mean nothing to your elder brother. Or you could be a passionate collector of charms.

Someone else has recently asked me about the utility of “worrying about a people who are so cruel to themselves.” I did not know that I was “perorating,” and worrying. Perhaps the thing to do is to turn to Paul of Tarsus’s cryptic quip to the early Christian faithful in Corinth when he said, “Therefore let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.” People who love themselves don’t have the kind of leaders Africans have, unless they arrive through the barrel of the gun, I was told.

Looking at the flow of things in my own country, I would go a step beyond Paul of Tarsus, if I were to commit to finding a life and living. I would be specific about what we should eat. I would borrow from the Irish poet, novelist and master satirist Jonathan Swift, where he said, “Let us eat the children.” Swift ‘s writings made for compelling reading in my formative years in Primary School. I expect that everyone has at the very least read about the little people of Lilliput in Gulliver’s Travels. If you haven’t read this narrative about Lamuel Gulliver, “the Man Mountain,” you are to be envied. Unexplored joy awaits you.

But my sister Josephine was recently discussing Jonathan Swift, telling his countrymen that they should eat the children in their society. And I have been thinking, “What a brilliant idea for people who want to find a life and start living!” If we were to eat all the children in Kenya, our problems would end. We would not worry about moths and abstract things like values. Perhaps my grandmother was wrong, after all? You could actually heal society, simply by eating up the children, couldn’t you?

When you have eaten up these latter-day “Lilliputians” there would be no need to worry about juvenile street protests about stolen playgrounds. You would not wonder whether to say “land thieves” or “land grabbers.” For when the thief is an honourable criminal, you must coat his title in sugar. He becomes a “grabber” or “private developer” or better still a “Somebody Singh.” Titles like “thief” you leave for people who mess about with chicken and suchlike stuff in Kamirithu and Emanyulia. They are a disgrace to stealing.

If we were to eat all the children, there would be no schools. We could then take all the land that we waste on schools. We would build twenty-star hotels. All other problems associated with children and schools would also go. There would be no examinations and ranking of schools and children after exams. The quarrels about ranking would go. There would also be no teachers’ strikes – indeed there would be no teachers. Professors in the Ministry of Education would not worry about their voices going hoarse with shouting at stubborn teachers.

If I should find a life then, I should possibly join Kenya’s army of “private developers (hahaha – you mean thieves).” I should join sundry ghosts at child eating parties. Nobody would know who has eaten the children. As we gobble down the kids, we should discuss which former school grounds we are going to accost next.

With all schools closed for lack of children, there should be no need to build perimeter walls around our new land. We, the living class, should therefore discuss at these parties how to make sure that the menace of creatures called children is obliterated forever. It might help to consider eating their parents as well. You see, if we don’t eat the parents, the risk of new children being born would remain. Now we don’t want to go through unending waves of eating these little things. Could we, therefore, nip this problem in the bud by eating the parents, as well?

Here in Kenya, we could start by eating all those unmannered people who have been lately talking about a school in Lang’ata? You know the school where some Lilliputians are causing big people in Government to get angry and others to apologise because the police tried to save a “private developer’s” property from the Lilliputians. Hahahaha!

One of my former friends sent me a text message suggesting we should also eat up journalists for showing the world pictures of what went on in this school where children were causing trouble. “Now see our dear motherland is being compared to apartheid South Africa.” They should have asked the police to show them which https://cdn.standardmedia.co.ke/images to publish, these journalists. Mercifully, the Communications Authority has begun eating up journalism. Parliament set the pace on December 18 last year, that darkest of days. In the end, we can remain with Chinese journalism.

When you think long and hard about it, you could actually cure society by making it your food. That was what people like Idi Amin of Uganda, Marcias Nguema of Equatorial Guinea and a certain “Obiang Somebody” from a country called “Somewhere” discovered, long ago. They ate their political rivals’ fried genitals for breakfast. In the evening, they ate grilled tender parts from the rib cage.

If you were in power, the best way to solve your problems would in fact be to just eat up everybody. That way, the whole country would be yours, from border to border. Nobody would accuse you of “land grabbing,” tribalism, greed, “private development,” and allied pejoratives. Moreover, there would be no political competition, no elections . . . no political parties to merge, insecurity, no unemployment . . . nobody to make you angry. You would not, need to suffer from regular fits of anger in public. Hahahaha, there would be no public! Hahahaha ! And you would be king forever! Hahahaha, let’s find a life and live.

If you were in power, the best way to solve your problems would in fact be to just eat up everybody