Prayers for our wonderful women

My beloved mother used to say when we wanted something that she couldn’t buy right at the time of our asking — “Money grows on trees the way wings sprout from the sides of pigs” - which always left me feeling mystified. What had she just said?

So when last week one Beryl Wanga Itindi (who takes a break this week) ‘enters’ men for being fiscally irresponsible, she forgets there are worse women out there who leech on men for money. Every man knows a woman always has a beady eye on the bulge in his pocket. Not that. The wallet is by far the more important bulge in the female eye, whatever else the ladies may tell you, true or untrue.

But that ‘your money is our money, and my money is mine alone’ mentality among many women is abysmal. There are women out there hiding money not in bras and under mattresses as in the olden days; but chamas, stocks, shares and secret plots, like human Cayman Islands’.

Yet they spend a man’s money casually, on hair, shoes and dresses, and if you walk into any casino this afternoon, you will find women with ring fingers on their hands, gambling like there is no tomorrow. For some, there is none, as in they will arrive in the house at 1 am to mad husbands and quarrels.

Yet if the man attempts to put a loose fiver on SportPesa tomorrow, it is World War III. Others, now that the man is the bread winner, lie around the house the whole day, watching series like ‘Empire,’ with the seriousness of judges, then fired up by the rude wenches in these American shows, want to talk to the man of the house like they are Olivia Pope.

Remember the young woman who stabbed her boyfriend to death (in Buruburu) because he changed the channel from a soap to football and refused to budge with the remote control? How meaningless it must be to perish, because of Alejandro of ‘La Mujer de Mboch’?

The rich men also cry bitter tears from ruthless partners and unfaithful wives.

She does not lift a finger in that Runda bungalow because you all have many maids. Her work is to shop herself to exhaustion in those many malls you see cropping up every other day in this metropolis of Nairobi. And because you are constantly travelling to maintain her, and maybe the tois ‘in the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed,’ she decides you are boring, have drifted apart, not giving her the attention she deserves. Next thing you know, she is in delicto flagrante with that hyena friend of yours or her gym instructor. And it is “all your fault.”

I found it to be perfect poetic justice that the ex-wife of a powerful politician, after publicly playing hookey with her AP guard (I predicted his demise in this column years ago) now sells food by a roadside.

Then there are the women of the ‘Xaxa’ generation who are insisting that men must wear aprons and cook in the kitchen with them; and roll up their trousers, fill pails and mop floors. I see my little girl Chelsea leading squadrons of even older boys these days in their play.

Some years from now, on Saturday mornings, you will find a huddle of men not around the newspaper vendor’s discussing the latest juicy political scandal, but bent over buckets at the communal washing area of the complex, discussing how a certain iron lady came home drunk at 2 am last night, and beat up ‘Baba Nani.’

‘Aki mpaka his shrieks woke up the neighbourhood mongrels,’ one of the gentlemen will say.

Then they will all put their hands over their mouths, and giggle.

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