Eddy Ashioya: Is this the year I find love (and a sponsor)? Stay tuned...

If you are reading this, congratulations! That means you have successfully not been abducted. Which also means I have not been abducted. It’s no laughing matter. I was joking with my friend Douglas (not Kanja) about the fact that he should not come with his Subaru to my place anymore. We hushed and shushed and sshhed talks of he-who-shall-not-be-named, cognisant that this country could easily swing into Nyayo Days when even imagining the death of a president was considered treasonous. Fear, not justice, is the basis of power.

And this is the dispassionate eye of being a youth in Kenya and the ambivalent promise of the Kenyan Dream. I am in my most productive years—I think if people still owned slaves, I would be promoted to Senior Slave Intern quite fast—but in Kenya, this is a dream deferred, unless you are a politician, or a wheeler-dealer or a journeyman mercenary, sometimes they all conflate into one. I won’t bore you with lores of what I learned in 2024, which is, thanks for asking, that if you put avocado in the fridge, it will still go bad, and cold as hell. That aside, whoever is in charge of classifying wonders of the world should contact me, I have an entry: I wonder how Kenyans go through Kenya without going to therapy?

This country is a grand social experiment in how much self-flagellation one can take before the pain becomes a pleasure. Kenya on LinkedIn versus Kenya IRL—in real life. Why? Because the Kenyan dream is to leave Kenya. Because this country will let you down. Because Kenya’s economy is gliding on faith. Because Kenya’s economic policy is kuja tu hatuwezi kosana. Because in Kenya unless your father is somebody, then you cannot amount to anybody—just another nobody shunned by everybody.

To be fair, I thought of writing a more “positive” article—we are in a positive economy after all. I wanted to write about “My 2025 resolutions” and that beach body routine that “promises to give you the body of an Adonis and the core strength of a Japanese guru”—in just six weeks! But I don’t think I have ever seen a single Indian bodybuilder so I was suspicious.

Is that racist?  I don’t think so. What would be racist would be to say I have never seen a single Indian bodybuilder. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Syntax. Kizungu mingi. Alternative facts. I learned that from the government. 

I am choosing my words carefully because it’s the great writer Chinua Achebe who warned us that, ‘the death of a lion cannot be announced by a goat.’ But I must scream it from the mountaintop, lest there is no future for me, or my children, or my younger siblings.

These elderly men who are ruining our country, who have lived to their fill and are now just vestiges of the fat of their youthful days, and have no inclination to what is happening kwa ground—do they really know what they are doing? Every other day I see how bad governance can steal a future: youth who have been wrung dry out of every tinge of hope, left with nothing to look forward to, and that life without a desire is a form of living death.

Still, some are too smart to engage in politics, and they are punished by being governed by those who are dumber. We are approaching critical mass, where even public spaces we used to enjoy for free—when my father would take my mother to Uhuru Park back in the day, where they would drink soda madiaba, Fanta Orange for her, Stoney for him, while feeding each other House of Manji biscuits, the way lovers in romantic films would do while listening to that preacher preach about the end of days. Even those parks we can no longer access or access like we used to.

When such a thing happens, the lesson of history is that the story rarely gets a happy ending—a form of negative sacrament, bitter honey, a lively death. We are selling our father’s land to buy a trumpet, but where will we stand to blow it?

I have analysed the situation, thrown the bones to the ground and the oracle has spoken: I don’t think those in power have a plan on what to do with us. They are playing kalongolongo with our lives, and livelihoods. Same old faces with the same old ideas, saying it’s time for a “fresh start” then settling into a lull of elevated mediocrity, deeming themselves the “Mwamko Mpya”, akin to a janitor at NASA calling himself an astronaut.

I am not impressed. I used to think that this was an anomaly, growing pains, a passing fad. Not anymore. After all, what is more normal than a thing that keeps happening? Yet recycling politicians in professional positions and praying for a miracle is the equivalent of putting a monkey on a piano and hoping for Beethoven…maybe I am being harsh on the monkey.

I am here to urge every young man to make their voice count. Otherwise, we shall be remembered as the lost generation that let its future slip from its hands. And that is not my portion. You cannot close your ears, abi. What did the lizard tell the stone? “Even if you pretend that you have not heard, I have told you.”

What I am looking forward to in 2025

Kenya is an organised crime scene so please if you know someone who is into the laundry business, if you catch my drift, let me know (so I can pray for them, but also share their contacts to my email so I can make their prayer personal. It would be evil to do otherwise).

If you were cut off in 2024, you probably deserve it. Spare us the WhatsApp statuses. Hatuna data. Okay, we have data. But ni ya memes.

Finally, folks, sound the klaxon, this may be the year you get to see white smoke from my window. Ni kama nimepata jiko. This is it. I must take someone’s daughter for a boat ride while slipping sweet nothings into her ear at Uhuru Park, before they sell it too. Lazima i-work.

I almost went last year but the office of the girlfriend was severely underfunded on account of my complaints above, hence why I need to contact anyone in the laundry business. Anyway, she still left. The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away. But this year, we are implementing austerity measures. Like my phonebook, things are looking up. Msiniombee. Nitajiombea. You just say Amen. Amen?

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