Coming soon: Riots and related activities consultancy company
By K24 Editorial, July 29, 2019Patrick Wachira
Away from my desk where I pound a computer keyboard for a living (though I hardly ever have time to live nor the resources), I have spent long hours mulling my looming retirement.
It has become such a weighty matter to ponder that I am losing weight about it. In between, I have discovered that the best way to lose weight is to leave it on the dinner table.
I am going through the painful process of desisting from eating more than two pieces of mandazi, two slices of bread or two eggs, whichever is available. And leaving food on the table is agonising.
But back to our story and the options open to a man of my age who will soon cease panel-beating stories by writers who did not listen very well to their grammar teachers.
I know you know that apart from the gradually approaching amnesia, which my boss has interpreted as stubbornness, other dwindling fortunes start with the scalp, where hair loss is winning. Isn’t that an oxymoron? How can loss be a win?
Anyhow, I was telling you about my looming retirement. I was thinking the other day that I can rear chicken and sell both the birds and their eggs. But there is the lanky neighbourhood boy who pinches my eggs.
But now I have another idea.
I am going to start what I will call the Protest Demo Kit Enterprises, simply PRODEKIE. Don’t let that Russian-sounding abbreviation scare you.
Let me bring you up to speed.
My company will stock livestock and equipment needed to stage an attention-grabbing street demonstration.
Watching governors and senators pretending to be in a demo the other day gave me a brainwave. It was a pitiful attempt that failed because it was planned to fail. Which means it wasn’t planned at all.
It was a farce, really. Demo? In designer suits and Italian shoes? Pooh! Actual demonstrators do not carry mineral water to swig after walking a few metres on asphalt, surrounded by gun-carrying bodyguards.
If you ask me, they should have consulted Yours Truly how to get media falling over themselves to cover a demo, get memorable sound bytes and to get action pictures to splash on front pages of newspapers.
Do you recall the Mpigs saga? The pigs that were ferried to bunge, covered in blood and the little mess they caused? Now that’s a good demo.
Now, my little company will provide missiles and rocks of all shapes, sizes and composition. Igneous rocks (recall your high school geography?), the like.
Of course, I will rear a few pigs, just for this purpose. Animal rights activists will make some noise, but not to worry. By the time their statements appear in the papers, I will have made my money and retreated to my favourite joints to savour my success.
Graffiti
I will hire a graphic artist to do graffiti all over town in the dead of the night on the eve of a demo. This has two dramatic effects: surprise when folks wake up and find half the town coloured in murals and graffiti, and two, the obvious hard task by the authorities of trying to find who did it.
The first effect will have achieved the objective of the demo, or what do you say? Is that not how folks earn a decent, honest living?
And when the next day I go to Njoro’s to enjoy my mutura and matumbo, he will ask me if I saw the colourful demo, to which I will feign ignorance and listen to his rendition, complete with the teargas fumes that wafted from Nairobi to his banda.
Njoro gets to know lots of stuff, of course. He will embellish the tale until even eyewitnesses to the event would have trouble recognising it.
PRODEKIE would be my contribution to local entrepreneurship (my good friend Emilio Stanley Mwai Kibaki once had trouble pronouncing this word, gave up and just said “whatever!” and proceeded with his speech).
Just imagine the number of fellows who would be hired to clean up the mess in town by the time I and my pigs are through with our display of creativity. Is that not job creation, which Uhuru has been exhorting us to do?
In other words, what good is a fellow if he cannot do what his President tells him to? Have a drama-filled week, folks!