Georgy is the guy that fixes my computers and phones, I’ve known him for the last six years. He is one of the smartest electronics engineers I have met, with a familiar portly physique of a successful Kiuk businessman, his strong accent when talking about his love for fixing tech gadgets and his customers makes the stories he tells even more interesting to listen to. In another continent he would be Elon Musk, but he is here in Accra rd, downtown Nairobi, akivumilia kuwa mKenya like the rest of us. Georgy had my laptop for 5 months, and suffering from the Kenyan Fundi syndrome he stopped giving me any status updates and ghosted. Tired and upset, I went to his workshop and gave him an earful. After this incident we needed a fundi-customer therapy session to repair our soured relationship and on talking he said, “sijui kuongea sana, mimi hujua shida za comp na simu, mambo ya kuongea izz not my gift”. This was the closest I was ever going to get as an apology. I am certain that only he can repair my laptop, so he still remains with it, I have told myself it’s like taking a patient to India, we wait until it gets better, but the compromise now is that every two days, he sends me an update.
This is growth.
A former governor of Nairobi publicly confessed to acts of terror, saying that he and others were allegedly involved in burning cars, inciting violence and flooding a public park with shit to prevent his adversaries from meeting there. He confessed to these acts that cost people their lives, property and dignity on live TV as proof that he was once a bad guy and part of the deep state. It was disturbing to see those around him cheering and laughing. He was arrested two weeks after this very public admission and doubled down, in his defence he claimed to not have done or said these things and his arrest is proof that the, Deep State is anti-free speech.
The common denominator to the two examples is a curious question of “What made us like this?” Was it a punitive colonial education system heavily based on excessive punishment? The headmaster-principle by which we are governed everywhere? Our Kenyan philosophy then really, was never peace, love and unity, but hakuna mahali utanipeleka, fanya vile uta fanya. It seems that right from birth Kenyan society indoctrinates us into not taking responsibility for our mistakes, instead we gaslight our victims until they froth at the mouth and lash out or we lose that job, person, opportunity we care about. It bothers me that Onyi, the tailor at Kenyatta Market, will behave exactly like our former Nairobi governor. It nowadays seems inevitable that our friends, service-providers, partners, clients will mess up and completely gaslight us when we ask simple questions as to why they let us down. It does not matter how calmly or clearly you explain, you will not get, a simple, “I am sorry and I missed the mark, this is what I will do moving forward”. At best it will be a ‘Sasa unataka kulia?’
I work at the intersection of the entertainment and advertising industries, and this year marks twenty years of doing it professionally. At the core of both is telling stories that convince our fans and customers that a product, service, brand, song, film, tv series or visual art will temporarily make them feel better about their dreary lives or at best give it some mystical meaning ….lol. (we do this for money or fame or both) These two industries come with the worst of people, publicly proclaimed geniuses that seem to have special horrible-permits because they are consistently able to churn out more dopamine hits. This is why these professions have the highest burn-out rates as the damage to mental health is astronomical if you have to work with rectums as colleagues , every day. Yet over time there has been a social shift from talent and title to simpler things like kindness, respect. We seem to be outgrowing public resumes in exchange for basic decency. CEOs , celebrities are losing their opportunities as secret recordings get leaked daily. An entire cottage industry has sprung up in recent years to leak such videos, chats, messages, based around the idea that what we claim to be publicly is not who we are privately.
Three weeks ago, my youngest son clicked under his breath, when I sent him on an errand upstairs, I casually mentioned that it was rude to click, to which he denied making any sound, and blamed his computer. What was meant to be a thirty-second conversation became a long drawn out, hour-plus conversation as even with two witnesses, he doubled down. We even ran simulations with his computer to prove there is no way that sound could be produced by typing on the keyboard, nevertheless in the face of science, he still completely denied clicking. This was worrying. As I thought about a punishment, his elder brother, the arbiter, said that whereas it is an undeniable fact that his brother clicked , the reality of this situation is that both of them inherited it from me, and that I click right through the day, for anything, good or bad. It might be possible that his brother doesn’t remember clicking coz it’s like breathing, a natural response that he has done since he was born. He finished it off by saying he gets confused as to why it is okay for adults to “click” or say “bad words” but he can’t because of an arbitrary thing called age i.e., he can automagically do it when he turns 18. His final coupe de grace was “Why do adults get special, bad - things permits, based on their titles”
I was dumbfounded. A Jedi mind trick from a preteen.
In the face of such a blow to my conscience and but still doubting my elder son’s theory, I devised a plan to learn responsibility and furthermore seeking a data guided solution to this issue. We created a system where anyone who clicked would buy the others a KDF (Mandazi.) My goal was to see if the data was correct, and who clicked most. Since then I owe them about 2000/= in Kdfs at the current 15/= KDF exchange rate, they both owe me under 300 bob in in KDFs. Clearly on this, I am the culprit. A new development is since the KDFs of Truth were introduced, both of them have started owning up to their little mistakes which is what this was always about.
‘I messed up, I am sorry”, such a simple phrase, it’s my hope that we can all use it, before it is too late.
Fin.
This is a really great article. You are good at explaining and telling a story.
Great article mzee. Love it