We normalised stealing exams then discovered brains cease without Viagra

I used to wonder what was special about the late Bishop Philip Sulumeti, the retired and founding bishop of the Kakamega Catholic Diocese who was laid to rest last month.

Whenever politicians wanted to murder each other, and it was all the time, it was that son of Teso who stepped into the melee and called everyone to order.

Indeed, I recall former President Mwai Kibaki once saying that it was impossible not to agree when Bishop Sulumeti was holding court at the head of a negotiating table.

When the good man passed, I checked him out. Turns out he wasn’t all white robes and Latin. The man was a towering intellectual. PhD in Canon Law, and top of his class, too. It gets better. In his Cambridge School Certificate Exam in 1958, the man hammered a First Division: 11 points, with distinctions in mathematics, geography, history and Latin. That is huge – even for a prayerful man.

See, exam cheating wasn’t a thing then, so if a kid from Gara village in South Teso scored four distinctions, it was a given that his brain was firing on six cylinders. Locked up in a room with quarrelsome politicians, they were toast.  

I bet you are wondering why I am dragging a celibate man of God into a story about Viagra, but be patient. I will get to it in a second.

In the 1980s, it was impossible to get a passport or a driving license without paying a bribe – if you didn’t know someone who knew someone who knew someone. So, bribing to acquire government documents became the norm.

Then, exam cheating became so normal that kids would stone school principals who refused to facilitate cheating. In no time, cheating became a national pastime. We cheat to pass exams, cheat to get jobs, wives, children and promotions. Hell, we even try to cheat our way into heaven.

We have become so brazen at this cheating game that we, the men, now cheat women that we are amazing in bed – by popping blue pills by the fistful. Of course, one could gym, jog or gnaw on nuts like a hare, but why sweat when you can cheat? 

Trouble with cheating in exams or in bed, however, is that the ka-boom always catches you pants down.