Dagoretti MP KJ returns to stage with engaging sketch containing echoes of Kamotho

It was so refreshing to see Dagoretti MP John Kiarie, better known by his stage name, KJ, back on stage. A generation ago, KJ was part of the Reddykulus trio that used satire to puncture politicians’ rhetoric and expose their hypocrisy.

I have no idea where KJ was performing—it’s so hard keeping track of these politicians—but Prezzo Bill Ruto was in the audience. The exhortation, “Your Excellency,” was delivered five times in one minute, with the MP pausing at appropriate intervals for applause, eyes focused in the presumed direction of Prezzo.

“Your Excellency,” KJ started. “We know you are working at a vey difficult time, but it would be important for us to say you are keeping the promise. Your Excellency, you promised you that you are going to change the education sector. And in the last one year, you have employed in excess of 56, 000 teachers.” That’s a strange formulation, measuring teachers in volumes.  And is it the Prezzo who employs teachers, or the Teachers Service Commission? Okay, I forgot we’ve entered that phase where the State is personified in the person of Prezzo Ruto, and vice versa.

By this time, KJ had warmed up, so he shifted to a more relaxed mien and his tenor changed for emphasis, veins jutting around his neck, as though he, too, needed energy to enunciate the words. “In less than an year! This is historic because it has never happened in the history of this country…”

Words get garbled and tangled when one is trying to achieve so much in their minute of glory, and KJ’s historic performance reenacting the drama that he mimicked with so much gusto a generation ago, ridiculing the late Joseph Kamotho, told an interesting story.

Perhaps that’s what they mean when they say life does imitate art, and vice versa. And while Kamotho might be gone, the ideas that he represented, like sycophancy, are very much alive, and KJ the comedian is his worthy successor.