I shouldn’t have made so many mistakes but I did

“When I am alone I take the stairs,” he says. We are standing among a group of students on the lift lobby of University of Nairobi Towers. Our destination is 10 floors up. And while I am not one to trudge up flights of stairs on a hot day, I also don’t want to look like a wuss, so I suggest that we could still do it. He looks like he might say Yes, and I die a little inside. But he shakes his head and says, “No, let’s just wait for the lift. You would die!”  I am not even miffed at that remark because he could be right. 

His stair-taking efforts have paid off though. Bitange Ndemo, now 59, is literally half the man he used to be. In his hefty days, he was Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Information and Communication. This was between 2005 to 2013. And as the new government came into power, he wasn’t reinstated. And that is when his world went silent. “The day I left office, my phone literally ceased to ring. My “friends” had moved on. I found myself checking my phone to establish if I had inadvertently put it off. The phone was fine.” He previously wrote. And it was a lesson for the man. A study in society. He was now irrelevant.