#PoBo #4

IX. Do You Write (or Read)?

I wish I could say, yes, I write checks. Like P. Diddy. But me… me I am a cash guy. Hihihi… if I wrote you a cheque you best treat it with the same dharau you reserve for your M.P’s cheques. The big difference between that M.P and me, really, is that I am a businessman servicing a need while he is a make believe civil servant who robs the needy.

Honestly, who sleeps better, the guy that stole the poor man’s unga or the guy that sold some bangi? To a bunch of American exchange students for crying out loud. Yaani, to a bunch of mzungus who come here, get arse, get ghanja and get out. Go home and get therapy… N.M, in his Mongo-speak would say, ‘no Africans were harmed in Dinda’s ghanja plantation.

I am not a slave driver, that is the fucking muhindis…Me I am the good guy.

The other day Potash is saying ati I am like a Mombasa beach hotel, I do not like doing business with Africans, what the hell does he know about business. Who has got some ethics here but me? Me, I do not sell drugs to people who don’t have health insurance. How does that make me a bad guy?

Busia Gold is a fair trade product.

Let us save the rest of the bull for those who know nothing about being a business man out here in Africa. Business, I mean, not biashara biashara…kuhustle, kuuza nyanya marikiti.

As reading goes, I am not much of a reader but I can tell if it is a fifty or a hundred. If it looks like money but I cannot read the amount, then it must be Chinese… and I do not touch Chinese shit. Hell, I do not fucking do business with the bloody business. Someday I must tell you about how Kang’ethe got burnt on a Semenya deal. No, not that Semenya, Semenya is, you know, a dual SIM phone. Hihihi, it is kinda clever, really, wish I could say I coined it.

But anyway, I do not touch Chinese shit… I mean, angalia phone yangu, unaona kama imeandikwa fockya.

I went into biashara for the dough-lo…and the only schooling I needed in money I got.

Peddling on the streets of Nairobi doesn’t teach you shit. You are selling joints for twenty bob but all the money you worry about is the 30 grand the cops want from you after they planted a joint on you. What was left of the joint you had share with them, that is. Dadi, you are no better than the hawker who has to bribe the kanjo who just smashed her tomatoes.

Waafrika! It is not worth playing, really.

If you aren’t playing big then you must be playing niche otherwise you are not a businessman, you are jailbait. Niche was my kind of game. And niche if I can attribute it to one philosophy of the Potash Book Club, it is that it is better to be read by ten people who get you than by ten million who assume they do. At the book club they used to say that they write for Kenyans who seek the truth outside the Nation, what I say is that my product is for consumers who care to trace it from farm to fork, so to speak.

And as a niche player I rubbed holsters with the fat and the fabulous. Waah… I have seen a guy pay for pussy with a fake hundred dollar bill. And he wasn’t Naija, just acting like one. There I was thinking: stupid bitch, stick to the Karumaindos and the two socs that you are used to.

Me, I have been on the Highway, some chick shooting off my dingila and two Johnnies sitting at the back looking like Big Ben and his twin. Tucked away, at least for now, are their British Army issue pistols.

The Johnnies are driving a hard bargain on a stone of Busia Gold. They are acting like this is 1954 and it is their place to tell an African what to do including what to charge for his crop. They acting like mzungus after they have been in Kenya long enough to say ‘Tusker baridi.’ You know how they play: Oh, my cab guy can get me more than that for five hundred bob… sijui my colleague is with some NGO in Ethiopia and he is bringing me Shashamane. Well, you know what I say to that shit, ‘my stone is 20 large, that is why I am pushing a VX and not driving you around in a taxi.’

So I am saying to the Johnnies, ‘I am told the weed in Europe kicks arse something, but how good is it to you when you are planting landmines and chasing Samburu arse in Kenya?’

Between them Brit falas they have like five thousand Kenya Shillings. But they have British Pounds too. So I hit them and more- like twenty Kenya Shillings on every Pound.

Soon they are handing me Pounds and Shillings. And I have to count them, do the math and fold them. The Malaya wants me to smack her in the arse but I think it is silly and feel inclined to tell her to stop using me in her sales pitch to the bloody Johnnies. I want to tell her to get her mind back to Kenya where she lies on her back and I hit it- simple! I smack her arse, anyway, coz it feels good to do it with a fistful of money. Do it like a Jay Z no one has heard of yet.

Long of the short is that if you be playing on anaa level, you’ve got to know your money. Live it. Feel it.

Oh, and of course I never gave them Busia Gold. It must have been a sudden feeling of hatefulness, you know, suddenly thinking too much about what their ancestors had done to mine. So I passed them some pussy brand called Zion from Mt. Kenya where it is too cold and too wet for a good crop. But, really, British Army, Embassy Marines, Kenya Police… is all the same from my business end view. And I do not have an arsehole big enough to hold my shit and theirs.

Well, I know this was meant to be about reading and writing but then again they did tell me to write what I know. And the Business it is. As for lessons to take away, I always say that everyone always gets the lesson they choose to learn. But if I must impose one, it is: If you hear someone say it is never personal, just business, then they learnt their business skills from movies.