Horror of fireworks gone awry a fitting metaphor for our quack’s paradise 

Many Kenyans partook in the New Year festivities, but not everyone had a grand time.

After the customary feasting, spectacular fireworks displays have emerged as a much-coveted highlight of New Year celebrations. People go to great lengths to be present, at a decent vantage, to spectate these breathtaking pyrotechnic displays.

The more iconic fireworks in (mostly) Kenya’s urban centres are curated by veterans of that magnificently incendiary trade. Firms that specialise in mounting impressive pyrotechnic displays are well-reputed and highly sought after.

Naturally, they have captured a market share because they can be trusted to deploy low-explosive devices safely and dazzle captivated audiences. Inevitably, they charge a steep fee and assign highly experienced technicians to light the sky with sumptuous bursts of multifarious flames.

When a pyrotechnician knows her stuff, humanity changes for a moment into an earthbound colony of gaping moths, stirred deeply by the magic and majesty of magnificent outdoor flames, bursting across the night sky in booming blossoms of improbable colours and shapes.

Splendour on the cheap 

But this is Kenya, and there is a robust industry that promises splendour on the cheap, assuring yearning cheapskates with a suicidal affinity for shortcuts that the pricier pyrotechnicians are a vain indulgence of the indolent, ignorant, extravagant rich.

This industry operates within a well-established and highly efficient economy of negligence, where misers meet callous fraudsters ready to indulge the delusion that minimum standards are meaningless and that the most vulgar dog’s breakfast is just as good as the finest professional accomplishment.

In the case of fireworks, a host may have decided that it was time to make a killing over the festive season by using a spectacular novelty to entice revellers to his establishment. Obscene profit being the motive, and modest means being the salient attribute of his catchment, our host may have resolved to procure an ‘affordable’ pyrotechnician. This inevitably led him down the slippery path into a rabbit hole of sundry charlatans.

These clowns are typically brazen enough to attempt, with colossal confidence, dangerous undertakings of which they possess nothing other than abysmal ignorance. They will perhaps resort to Google for scanty elementary knowledge to enable them to look the part, and hastily proceed to make bold assurance of the supreme ease with which a monumental or inherently perilous task can be accomplished.

Our host, therefore, found a pyrotechnician at a fee he heartily approved, and hired him promptly. It is possible that the host, to cut costs, may have made a phone call to a nephew in the city to purchase items under the general heading of fireworks, or perhaps the affordable technician did. 

Emboldened by the blandishments of a fraudster, our miserly host resolved to “go big or go home”, and obtained fireworks in sufficient quantities to set the night sky alight for the better part of an hour, in order that sufficiently impressed citizens flock to his establishment in great numbers.

Whatever the case, the fact is that at the appointed hour, throngs of revellers, addled with unbearable anticipation, assembled for the countdown to a brand new year. We now know that at the stroke of midnight, the first boom, of a lengthy series of explosions rent the air, and it immediately became clear that something was amiss.

The charge, indeed, deployed, but its trajectory was perturbingly amok. As was the second. By the fourth unfortunate burst, terror-struck revellers were helter-skelter in flight, frightened witless by the menacing, horizontal, ground-level trajectory of explosives which thundered relentlessly, like mortars fired indiscriminately at a civilian population.

We saw a determined chap whose outer garments had vanished, perhaps shed after catching fire, breaking all manner of sprint records in his indigo trunks, as well as a despairing elder, seated on the rough earth, his back to a wall, sobbing pathetically while the nightmare of a thunderous rainbow pursued them relentlessly.

Economy of negligence 

A night that promised a festive spectacle of sound and colourful light transformed into a virtual terror attack. This cruel reversal and awfully traumatic violation of basic expectations is a typical feature of the economy of negligence. In the blink of an eye, highrise residential apartments entomb tenants, and joyful, healthy diners become spectral, cholera-ridden waifs at death’s door. 

Wealthy investors turn into bankrupt fugitives and innocent defendants find themselves in prison. In all these tragedies, the ignorant and arrogant disrespect professionals, disdain their standards and evade their fees. They plunge headlong into the arms of predatory quacks and charlatans who happily undercut professionals, thereby wresting clients and then fleecing them before destroying them.

Every field of endeavour in Kenya has its economy of negligence, where cynical dissemblers sell death, loss and other injury at highly attractive rates. Whenever you refuse to retain and pay a qualified professional to do your work, you have paid in full for the well-deserved disaster that awaits. Even pyrotechnicians. Perhaps even, especially pyrotechnicians.

Mr Ng’eno is an advocate of the High Court.