Who Moved My Meatball?

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.

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.

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