Do you remember Dembele from high school? Think back for a second. We all knew that one guy who had a supernatural talent for sneaking onto every single school bus. Science congress in Nakuru, drama festival in Kakamega, or just a random inter-school "funky" Dembele and his crew were always sitting in the back seats. They didn't care about the science projects or the stage plays. They just tagged along for the free ride, the noise, and the fun.
That mischievous high school routine hasn't vanished. It has simply moved to the highest corridors of power. The only difference today is that the school bus is a commercial airliner to New York, and the ticket is paid for by your sweat and blood.
When world leaders gathered at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, the contrast was brutal. Uganda sent five people. The UK sent six. Most nations kept their teams tight and disciplined, capping their delegates between five and ten.
Our government sent a staggering at least 80 people, according to some reports. Weep for your hard-earned taxes. Weep for every shilling drained from your pocket through digital taxes, Value-Added Tax, and inflated bills just to fund a bottomless pit.
If you walked down Fifth Avenue or Midtown Manhattan in the last few days, you would have spotted them: a bloated entourage of politicians, personal aides, children, and grandchildren. They were running around New York, taking photos in front of skyscrapers, desperately farming for "street aura" on social media.
Here is the ultimate joke: in the streets of New York, nobody knows who they are.
To the people walking past them in Manhattan, they are complete nobodies. No one turns a head. No one cares. No one bows. They are just anonymous tourists, wandering around on a vacation paid for by taxpayers from a country located thousands of miles away.
Yet look at what happens the moment these exact same people touch down at Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport.
Back home, they transform. They jump into dark-tinted fuel-guzzlers, switch on blaring sirens, and drive like gods among mortals. They overlap across lane dividers, push hard-working citizens into ditches, and aggressively cut off ambulances carrying dying patients, demanding that everyone clear the way for their passing. The same people who were invisible on the streets of New York come back home to terrorise ordinary Kenyans on the road. It is a sickening double standard. It isn't leadership.
And where is this money coming from? Remember, this is the same government that stood before us, looked us in the eye, and swore that the country's coffers were empty. Three-quarters of the people on that flight probably didn’t even know why they were in New York. They had no files to present, no meetings to attend, and no clue what diplomacy even means.
Meanwhile, back home, El Niño rains are fast approaching. Everyone knows the disaster that is coming, yet the government is predictably unprepared. There are no drainage systems cleared, no emergency funds set aside, and zero rescue plans in place. They are simply waiting for the rains to hit, waiting for the floods to wash poor people out of their homes, and waiting to deploy bulldozers to throw desperate families and their children out into the cold.
There is always zero money to protect poor Kenyans from drowning, but somehow, millions of shillings magically appear when it's time to book first-class flights and five-star hotel suites in New York.
We cannot justify sending such a big delegation to the United Nations General Assembly when public hospitals across Kenya are falling apart.
In many local public hospitals today, doctors are forced to work without basic medicine, broken machines sit gathering dust for months, and expectant mothers are forced to buy their own surgical gloves, cotton wool, and syringes before anyone will look at them. Meanwhile, mothers in labour end up sharing beds or giving birth on bare floors because there aren't enough resources.
Let this sink in: Every single shilling wasted on that bloated New York trip is a shilling denied to a mother in labour.
Every dollar spent on a luxury hotel in Manhattan is money denied for an underfunded clinic in Turkana, a school in Kilifi, or an unpaid nurse in Nairobi. It is money ripped directly out of the hands of citizens who are already suffocating under a crushing cost of living.
This is a moral outrage, not just government wastage. It shows us a ruling class that lives in a completely different world, immune to the daily struggles of the people who voted for them. They demand that you tighten your belt while they expand theirs on foreign trips.
We cannot keep quiet while our money is treated like free loot. The next time you see them zooming past you in traffic with sirens wailing, remember who paid for their New York vacation. And when the time comes, remember why we must vote for leaders who actually put Kenyans first.
