LAST THURSDAY

Walking these streets; sitting on these stones, does it feel good to be back? I walk into Mutua’s kiosk and borrow the headlines, just like I used to. Nothing has changed out there- Kibaki and Raila are still the news- so how do I expect anything to have changed down here?

They are still bickering over barroom memoranda that we were not privy to but no one says a thing about what we all heard: 500,00 new jobs. Then again maybe those jobs aren’t a contentious issue, they created them after all, and it is just that we were too young to take them. Oh, but now they realize that this is an election year so they drop us a 50,000/- blindfold.

50 kay, what cheap whore would shag a parliamentarian for fifty ngwanyes? Well, unless that whore is you and me. So young fellows lets us line up for our money; lets get drank and forget. Hopefully we will survive to die another day. We drink coz wo don't got shit... we drink to escape the reality that we don't got shit!

Now my mind wonders back to last Thursday. Last Thursday. Where were you last Thursday? Don’t lie because I saw you on T.V. While I sat at Kamwana’s Video Parlour (Aseno juu), I saw you on T.V. You were at K.I.C.C. You were at K.I.C.C in a suit. In an suit and we all know that you have no job. Of course we know that you have no job because if you had one then you wouldn’t have been at K.I.C.C getting sun-burnt and brainwashed.

Oh come on, don’t tell us you were there because you believe in this government. Believe that this government will give you money. Give you money to change your life. You were there because you had nothing better to do. We saw you in your threadbare suit and that crumbly shirt that you inherited from your late uncle, Baba Betty. For one moment we wanted to imagine that you were out there picking pockets, at least that would have been worth your bread winner while. But who knows that whatever you took from there wasn’t worth it, maybe we missed the applause from your for siblings when you served them a hearty dinner of HOPE garnished with Political Rhetoric that night.

We saw you last Thursday. We saw you clutching that ubiquitous brown envelope. An envelope filled with worthless yet formal looking papers. Papers that you have collected with ease because you are smart and yet that ‘ease’ has been reduced to ‘perfunctorily’ because the papers are of no use to you and your starving kin. They are just tokens, the junk memorabilia of your journeys through a conveyor belt system of education.

We saw you youngster… but can I tell it all to you when you get here... I need to catch a gaff, man!