Chinedu, welcome home, ‘broda’

Maybe, just maybe, we, Kenyans, were ‘born yesterday’. We pride ourselves on being wajanja, but Nigerians have always beaten us — hands down — at it.

Some time back, Nigerians assembled a bunch of relatively old chaps who did not need ‘an extreme makeover’ or plastic surgery of any sort to masquerade as an under-17 soccer team. All they did was fake their birth certificates and shave their beards, then they were dispatched to Nairobi to break the tender bones of our legitimate under-17 team.

They, of course, taught us soccer, hammered us, and not only went back with a win, but left our teenagers limping. Ouch!

Luckily for them, they got away scot-free, for back then, our now very vibrant and enthusiastic online-rapid-response-lynch-mob unit was nonexistent. Our lethal ‘someoneonetellnigeria…’ hash tag had not been invented. Otherwise there would have been ‘online bloodshed’, if you know what I mean. We may be nondescripts in virtually everything, but when it comes to online barbs and salvos, we take the biscuit.

As usual, we only knew that they were over-age long after they had done the damage. We launched an official complaint in vain. At this point, I beg to pause and allow all the Naija brodas in Kenya reading this to laugh. But our misery with Nigerians did not end there.

You see, in developed countries, the moment a crook realises that the authorities are suspecting him of being involved in illegal enterprises, say drugs, and that he risks being deported, the fellow shivers like a reed, wets his pants and even goes into hiding. Not in Kenya. When a rogue expatriate is suspected of any wrong doing, he calls a press conference, gets really excited, and becomes an overnight celebrity, with groupies to boot.

If you remember, not long ago, President Uhuru Kenyatta read drug dealers and related scoundrels the Riot Act and told them Kenya is a no-go zone for miscreants! Within a few hours, three Nigerians, among them Anthony Chinedu, were deported. Interestingly, in a strange turn of events, immediately upon disembarking, Chinedu ‘Snowdened’ (a technical parlance for being held hostage at an air port for weeks!) the crew and other government officials and demanded ‘ransom’ (full payment for his investments). Never mind that public coffers were raided to offset the accumilated bill — running into millions, for the grounded chartered plane.

Four weeks down the line, we are told Chinedu cheated his way back into Kenya. So, the new director of the  Immigration Department, Jane Waikenda, was kidding us after all, when she promised to fix our porous borders? Are we waiting for narcotic drugs to completely ruin our young people and only ‘launch investigations’ long after the culprits have left?

Now that he is back and Mr President said ‘we’ had solid evidence that ‘those people’ were dealing in illegal activities, isn’t this a window of opportunity to arrest him, torture him (oh yes, our mboys do that all the time) to name his accomplices and toss his sorry behind in jail?

I know the Inspector General of Police, David Kimaiyo, will say “Police have launched investigations.” But, as Ted Malanda writes, so much for orders, directives and, in this case, investigations.