The Meatballs:
I remember the meatballs at UoN mess. Massive chunks of
spiced ground beef with a whole boiled egg buried in the middle. I don't know
what the recipe was but those were the best meatballs I ever had, to date. They
dominated the plate, rising upwards like the Dome of the Rock, with an
accompanying chapati sitting nicely at the side.
You need to understand that meatball days were a weekly
celebration of life that made student life on campus truly special. When
structural adjustment programs hit, with their accompanying corruption and bad
policies, the meatballs were the first to go.
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| Stealing one's meatball can lead to a revolution |
We weren't having it. The male comrades poured out from Hall 11 and led a campus-wide strike while we cheered
them on as they went down towards Uhuru Highway with twigs and chants-
"nyama nyama nyama-- nyama! Ya meatballs-- nyama!"
Before you know it, boom was gone too- that allowance that
equalized all students, making the DF and the Ozone all equal opportunity
boom-box owners; water was heavily rationed at the halls of residence which
caused serious unsanitary conditions; janitors who cleaned our rooms were laid
off; new students had lots of upfront expenses...
Things have never been right since. Ours was the end of the
age of paradise. We had it good, better than those who were scurried off
straight from high school to colleges in London, NY and Paris, courtesy of able
relatives. They never had meatball heaven and boom and Visions and late night
chips at Exotica. They had loneliness and broke-assness and cruel winters. They missed the meatballs.
The Revolution:
The road to rotten institutions starts when they take away
your meatball. I'm sorry, Kenyan doctors, that your meatball was snatched off
of your plate so long ago, and you've had to scrape the bottom of sufurias to
survive, and strike after strike you got played, and you've let go the
crumbling pillars because your arms are too weak to hold up the roof, arms
which they have now shackled in handcuffs, and the whole ugly mess has
collapsed on patients...
There's a beautiful Kenya that we love to hold up as a
poster of success whenever we're faced with our ugly side. The glitter of the
cities and malls, the new infrastructure, booming businesses, middle-class estates, sunsets on
peaceful countrysides... This is what we want the world to see and story about
us. I want that too, because there are hard-working descent successful Kenyans
living their lives just fine, and I abhor the pitiful singular stories that
American TVs tell about my people. But that successful and happy Kenyan bled out and died waiting on a doctor at
the maternity ward.
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Things have been falling apart a long time. Kenyans had
their Trump moment when they voted in the duo of ICC suspects. Whatever your
politics, this was a deplorable moment. Kenyans still genuinely gave them a
chance. The duo has had 4 years to prove skeptics wrong. But the President has
lacked the balls to do a lot of things he had the power to do to set the
country right. Now thugs and drug kingpins and greedy politicians have taken
away the meatballs and stuffed themselves and vomited on our plates.
I'll say what I said soon after the last elections- that
only a revolution will fix that country. It's coming. Let's hope an MLK arises
so it won't be bloody.
Sere
