THEY CAME IN THE NIGHT

They came again last night. They always come in the dark. Once the Ghost Of Robert Ouko told me that the dark gives people special qualities. The dark allows you to do such uncanny things like shooting yourself in the head and then pouring acid all over your face, maybe because you do not want the world to remember you. (But the world never forgets, never could. It just moves on.) Well, I never shot myself in the head and neither do I have intentions to that effect, but I have the irrepressible ability to shoot myself in the foot. It happens a lot when I talk. When I talk and talk like I was Githongo on the BBC news night.

They came again last night. They came to take away my computer. (Reader’s Voice: “Which Computer”) Well, what about the one that I do not have. They found me sitting in the dark, like I always do, starring at where the ceiling ought to be. Sitting in the dark because my tin lamp ran out of paraffin last..uhm..er…sometime in the east.
Man, with what kerosene prices been like lately, you must of necessity, wait for daylight to pluck that pesky jigger off your suppurating toe.

In daylight that suppurating toe is shod in Gikomba Deluxe- finest quality patent leather- Kshs 85/- (Eighty Five Only) at Toi Market. That is more than a dollar and your NGO TIMES told you I live on less than a dollar a day. That might be what Harambee Avenue wants me to live on. They have a decided interest in my poverty. It means that, when they need it, my vote won’t cost more than a dollar either. But you know me; I am a Yuppie- Young Urban Poser- too. I insist on living beyond my means. But I digress.

They came again in the last night. They said that my utterances at Mama Pima’s last Friday night amount to high treason. I quoted certain sections of their preferred constitution- just to suck up. They said I could shove it up my dysentery prone posterior. Besides, in their book, my so-called Right to Bar Room Intellectualism is not a human right and neither is holding my ‘selected’ leaders accountable for their actions in public office. I asked them, what about Shebeen Intellectualism, which is my Particular Specialisation. They slapped me all upside my head. (Yet another one for Maina Kia’s in- tray: with Black-eyed-regards, Potash).

They came again last night. They came with Uzis and balaclavas. Swiftly. (If only they had arrived that way the night before when Kamanu and his Forty Thieves held up the nieghbourhood for four hours). They sent such an elite unit to get me that for a moment I thought I had died and reincarnated as a Mungiki Grand Master. They showed me the Ceska- it is always a Ceska Pistol with two rounds of ammunition- that would be recovered from me after a shoot out.

And the good cop said: “Potash, the general message is that you take it slow.” Then he laughed, “Ke..Ke..Ke, There is nothing wrong with looting a country that is already too willing!”
But the bad cop had nothing but contempt for me. He just kept snarling: “High Treason!” working himself into a torrential sweat. He hated me like a well-kept voters’ register.
If I had my patent leather- Gikomba Deluxe- on, he would have vomited on the same.