Tales of men drunk with power, seeking reinvention of youth

I have been out and about this great city, run by a not-so-great governor, if you ask those seeking Johnson Sakaja’s ouster, catching up on the muchene in tea places where they demand payment before service.

It is a good sign of the state of the nation, as Juliani sings; things are so bad, one wonders what’s wrong when things go right. So, I wasn’t surprised when I asked for a cup of coffee, after a surprisingly good cup of muteta soup, and I was offered a cup of hot water and a sachet of coffee powder.

But since they were not paying me to brew my own coffee, I politely declined and asked for a nicely brewed cup. Someone would have to do the work that I was paying for.

“Oooh, you want Americano… Itabidi uongeze pesa!” the service girl said.

So, I went to my phone again and made my seventh payment in one hour.

That’s the level of trust deficit in our land. Business owners cannot trust customers to partake a cuppa and pay in good conscience. They reasonably suspect that they might jump out the window and crash ten floors below to evade the tab.

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Anyhow, we sat with old friends, many of them old newsroom hacks, reminiscing about this and that, when a high school buddy trotted in. There was a suspiciously black sheen to his hair, men my age are either grey, bald, or both, and he had a suspicious tale about how he met my journalism buddies.

He said they had a mutual friend who had served as a top honcho at the House on the Hill, which is now a fortress because Gen-Z protesters have vowed to reclaim it and show Prezzo Bill Ruto the art of going home.

Anyway, the name invoked by my high school buddy was a chap whose first and last appearance in the Press was when he was whisked juu juu for getting too close to the power men of the time. Now, a mythology has been invented about the crook having held an important office in the presidency.

What we hear from afar is that that residence has become a proper den of thieves and that the real power barons operate from its corridors. I think the term “corridors of power” was especially invented for the Nairobi State House. So, the stories flowed, between cups of muteta soup and bonoko coffee. I don’t recall how the tale veered towards the corridor-bound chaps at the House on the Hill.

Another newsroom hack, neither old, nor male, but a young and pretty lass (I am allowed to objectify my kindred spirits) and who was recently returned from Majuu, needed some help and someone recommended she reaches out to one of those newsroom oldies, now serving the State House.

The man in question has a proper office, with a title on the door. It turned out their rendezvous was peopled by those State House types, the mikoras who operate from the corridors and whatnot, and as she waited, one of those power barons threw a drink her way without her solicitation. She declined the overture, her rebuff eliciting a wail from the waiter:

“Unakataa kinywaji cha…” one would think the fluid had been extracted from the body of the dreaded man.

Despite her protestations, and not touching the first drink, another round was delivered. When her buddy finally arrived, he re-enacted the waiter’s wail: “Unakataa kinywaji cha” The elliptical note to the wail conveyed not just the dread, but also the unstated threat of rejecting this man drunk with power.

Incidentally, the man in question is a Class Two dropout which says a lot about the depths from which we have to climb to reclaim our nation and our collective dignity so that young women can reject offers of drinks from idiots, without fear, and old men can show their greys in confidence.