Granny laughs at fuel prices

Why is everyone splitting hairs about the high cost of living? Why, when no one, as photojournalist George Mulala, avers, is living? Look, when you barely scratch the earth, what does it matter whether the price of kerosene doubles? You couldn’t afford it when it was Sh50 anyway.

It’s enough to drive one up the wall. A guy pulls up at the gas station and instead of filling up the tank and driving off, he insists on irritating the petrol station attendant with stories about the high cost of living.

If you can’t afford the oily stuff, walk. If Luis Moreno-Ocampo, who makes tough people tremble, cycles to work, what makes you think you ought to drive to work?

Look, this country is facing a serious problem of lifestyle diseases. We don’t walk anymore.

Toxic fumes

We eat and drink too much. And of course we burn too much kerosene, diesel, and petrol, thereby spewing tones of toxic fumes into the atmosphere.

Now with fuel and food prices hitting the roof, we’ve just killed the proverbial two birds with one stone: Leaner bodies, clean air, and a happy life.

With food virtually unaffordable, the problem of flying toilets will be neutered, burst sewers will heal and water, otherwise wasted on cooking, will be conserved. The people who jog every morning to burn the odd fat globule will spend that time more usefully; say thinking up ways of propelling Kenya to industrialised status.

And with everyone walking because they can’t afford bus fare, matatus will honk to a noisy halt and instantly kill corruption and death on our roads. And people have the cheek to run around with twigs, complaining?

More irksome are the people you find pontificating about the high cost of living while facing a table overwhelmed with the weight of frothy drinks.

Come to think of it — someone should double the price of beer and send drunkards scampering back home to their long-suffering wives.

But maybe it won’t. People raise hell when you increase the price of diesel, which they don’t drink, and barely mumble when you double the price of beer, which they quaff by the barrel.

Now that that’s off my chest, let me tell you a nice story about this widowed great grandma. Her favourite grandson studied something she calls ‘baraton’ – laboratory technology for you – but no one has so far showed the slightest interest in giving him bloody specimen to examine.

One of her daughters has a tumour that’s already gobbled up three goats, a cow and a gigantic gum tree in medical fees.

Worse, her sugarcane crop failed and she does not own a granary because she has no use for one even though she feeds an army of grandkids. Meanwhile, her right breast is swollen, I fear, with a monstrous lump that could be cancerous.

Do you know what she does? She laughs. And you dare whine about the high cost of living?