Why men are endangered species and women the dangerous ones

Recent research findings show that women in Kenya are living four years longer than men. What the study did not tell us is why women are getting an extra four years over men. Methinks, besides pressure from modern lifestyle, women play a big role in reducing men’s life span.

From a young age, our boys are under tremendous pleasure to do well to meet the high threshold — of course set by women — for marriage. So as we work our asses off, the girls are tracking our growth and development seeing who is making good progress in minting money and who is lagging behind. This cut-throat competition has its good side, the economists will say. They insist that it leads to a healthy economy.

Men sacrifice a lot

What they forget is that the so-called ‘healthy economy’ has been built by men breaking their backs. I usually get a lot of inside stories from men over a mug of beer. Believe you me; there is something magical about men seated at a table drowning their sorrows. They tend to be quite forthright. Perhaps more truthful than they would be to their shrinks.

Last weekend, I was having a drink with some boys somewhere in Maasailand. As the beer flowed so too did tears. Two men told us how they had been mistreated by the women they loved. One of them has been working in the perilous and dangerous South Sudan, sleeping in tents — just to ensure that he secures a life for the woman he engaged.

After two years of saving, he returned to Kenya only to find the woman had diverted the funds from their joint account to her personal one. Worse, she had also shifted her intimacy from him to another man working for an international organisation.

The difference being that, the new man was white and looked like he was worth more. Besides, by making more money right here in Nairobi and drinking coffee in fancy coffee shops in Westlands, the new man offered a real possibility for the woman acquiring new citizenship in a European country.

The second man had an even worse story. He had married a woman, stayed with her for a good two years and been blessed with one child. Then one day, during the school holidays, two teenage fellows checked in. The man thought they were ordinary hoodlums from the estate, hovering around as they looked for girls to ‘tune’. He was quite wrong.

Dark secrets

As it turned out, the two teenage fellows were ‘his’ children. They were his wife’s children from an earlier marriage. A marriage that he had not heard off. How could his lover have kept such a dark secret from him for this long? What else was she hiding from him? The man told us he just picked his academic certificates, his passport and took off. He has never looked back.

When girls fail in the education system, she gets a man to finance her needs and wants. Women just need to get someone rich enough to accommodate their shopping fantasies. When a man fails in the education system, he becomes a desolate fellow residing in the countryside or as a State guest at Kamiti!

Unlike men, women can always get jobs and go up the corporate ladder ‘horizontally’, if you know what I mean. Men are going through hell to make money to please women and feed families.