Blame bestiality on broken social ties

By Tony malesi

Kenya: It’s unfortunate that livestock continues to feel the heat as bestiality runs rampant. Our society is gone to the dogs (and livestock).

Folks, we lost the plot when we logged onto social media. Nowadays we invite each other for dates, reunions, get-togethers and house-parties.

But once we arrive, we unashamedly ignore one another and only steal glances when we are sure the other person is not watching. Unlike we used to do to break ice, no one talks about the weather, or complains about government and taxes.

Instead, everyone displays their sophistication by whipping out iPads, tablets and laptops (and to ensure no one bothers us, we plug in earphones) and disappear into outer space. We begin chatting with perfect strangers on Facebook and Twitter, cheating them that we are at a bash ‘having fun’.

That’s why the first thing a visitor asks you — unlike back in the day when they relaxed and expected a drink — is “Uko na kale ka charger ka pin ndogo (you have that phone charger with a tiny pin)? To which I always say ‘no’, lest they charge their gizmos and then roundly ignore me.

Not long ago, Kenyans would meet, and socialise properly. Business deals would be struck, unemployed ones got jobs, bachelors would get wives and vice versa. This fidgeting with electronic gadgets at social gatherings is killing our social capital. No self-disclosure anymore. Broken social ties are to blame for our woes.

News that a chap I had been acquainted to at a party killed his wife a day later; a boy in Kirinyaga stubbed his brother to death for accidentally breaking his three eggs and refused to pay; and a son in Naivasha hit his father with a blunt object and killed for allegedly asking him to turn down the volume of the radio... such stories have become so commonplace that they are no longer shocking.

In the leafy suburbs, things aren’t any different. When it’s meal time, I hear people get notified via WhatsUp because veryone is busy in their bedroom browsing the internet on their phones. And if they don’t like whatever is served, they don’t discuss, they write a protest memo and cc everyone or better yet, tweet about it.

When frustrated, other than sharing the problem with family, they make it a Facebook status for strangers whose only help is ‘like’ it. When worse comes to worst, they commit suicide.  We chat, for hours, with strangers online in far flung places, yet we have never bothered knowing our next-door neigbours’ names or just saying ‘hi’.

Worse, courtship is no longer the drawn out process that it used to be — complete with spies dispatched to investigate prospective in-laws . Today a social misfit unknowingly seduces his distant cousin (on Facebook), marries her and they get kids. Three or so years down the line, he confidently strolls to his home village — wife and a tot in tow, and introduces them.

Tongues begin to wag because he has not only married a cousin but a descendant of a banished social psychopath! Hell, of course, breaks loose, someone commits suicide and the husband begins to ‘act funny’. Before you know it, the man is reported to have molested a hen that looked at him ‘suggestively’.

Anyway, sorry I have take so much of your time because I know you are dying to go back to your phone and ogle at the six nude  pictures stored in your photo gallery.