If you ask me this in public, I will deny it, but in my first proper job, I used to sell awards. Yes, you read that right. Sell.
We would approach companies with a shoddy award scheme, say, “Best Entrepreneur Leading a Small-Scale Business of One Employee: Self-Employed Category”. Or, “Best Business Engineer in a non-business entity, President’s Award”.
Oh, they bought it, and I do mean, bought it. Turns out, people love to be recognised, which is why you hear men in clubs deferring to the one with money as Mkubwa, Bazu, Kiongos, Mhesh, Chief, Chairman. Especially Chairman.
Look, next to God, there is nothing that fills the heart of a Kenyan man with greater awe than the title “chairman”. God may be divine, but the chairman rules the temporal.
I digress. See, this was not a job I wanted—just a job I could get. A girl I used to do bad things with called me up and asked, “Do you want work?” Of course, I wanted work. Nairobi is a great stone desert, shamba la mawe, and most times, depending on who you ask, and when, the price of rent rivals one’s sense of self-worth.
To make it here, one requires to make Faustian bargains with the devil, and charismatic deceit—one must learn tact (as the rich call it) or boot-licking (as the rest call it), and align with issues one does not give a duck’s tail about. We know this. You know this. Ducks know this.
How it worked is I was working for a few CEOs. Well, sort of. The truth is, I was like one of those uncles from Murang’a whose operations remain unclear in the city and goes by the amorphous term of ‘broker.’ I was a CEO broker.
The money was good, and besides, it was either this or a life of crime. I’m an empath at heart so that was out of the question. I figured I’d survive. I was earning Sh1,500 per day sans transport, but with free lunch. Hand to God, I’d have done it for the free lunch, because Kenyan women have taught me there is no shame in eating lunch (and lunch fare).
What would happen is we would nominate a few industry leaders in the category of, say, “Most Improved CEO of the Year”, and ask them to pay gala fees, as a show of ‘support’ or ‘goodwill’. Then I would go off on a tangent, like those guys with brown envelopes at City Hall Way, telling you what you want—and need—to hear through cryptic pronouncements and elliptical explanations.
I was the CEO whisperer. Pillow talk, but for CEOs—but nobody needs to know that. That’s how I knew that money doesn’t care. It can pronounce juice as “juus,” and you’ll laugh. Oh, by the way, it’s juice.
However, you can only do that for so long before they figure you out. And they figured me out, pretty quickly. When the deck of cards came crashing down, I knew too many people, but not the right people.
See, being unemployed is dehumanising and especially as a man, having nothing to do, nowhere to go, no meaningful work. For men, work is the true Gideon, the belief—the faith, even—that work is not life’s product, but its currency. It’s the curse, and blessing of man to work.
I don’t think there is anything worse I have experienced than waking up in the morning and seeing all those hours and nothing to fill them with. Besides, it costs money to sit idly. There are only so many times you can rewatch SpongeBob Square Pants before your neighbours commit you to a psychiatric ward. Besides, SpongeBob Square Pants is on Nickelodeon, and Nickelodeon is on TV. TVs cost money.
It’s desperation, and people can smell desperation out of you. It’s like a scent in the water, but instead of the sharks slicing through the waves to devour you, they keep off, rounding the corner, crossing the streets, hanging up with the promissory, “I’ll call you back.” Nobody calls back an unemployed man. My people even have a saying for it, "A hyena that has eaten to its full calls a hungry hyena a glutton.”
The truth is, I didn’t even plan to write this article this way. I wanted to talk about how connections—it’s only corruption when it does not favour you—are what makes the world go round. How one should nurture their relationships, or to use the cliché term, your network equals your net worth. Access is success. But cliches are cliché for a reason. It’s a truism of society, banal yes, but true nonetheless.
But I realised that most of us don’t know how to handle our unemployed male friends. It doesn’t matter how many CVs or calls you make on their behalf if at the end of the day you treat them like a burden.
My call to arms is to treat them kindly. Extend grace. It is tough out here. Mental health issues are on overdrive. Men’s suicide rates are at an alarming rate, if not approaching a national crisis. There is a sense of world-weariness, a feeling of hopelessness and melancholy. The Germans have a word for it: Weltschmerz.
This is why the rising cases of wash wash boys, and young men in their early 20s making bucketloads of cash like its 1940s Chicago will only increase. Because society has taught men to live like this, that you are a success object, it doesn’t matter how you get it, get it how you can get it. What’s that they say? The ugliness of a man is in his pocket. And in Kanairo? Money is Jesus.
There is a line in Pepeta, a Kenyan show about football, drugs, crime—you know the shebang—that stuck with me. “Buda, vijana wanataka ganji,” said, Zeze, the gang leader, “Hii mtaa, ganji ndio inabonga. Kaa huna ganji, usibonge.”
You think real wealth is silent? I put it to you that poverty is deaf and mute. To that unemployed friend, hold on. One day, itajipa. To the rest, be kind to that man. That is the one thing that money cannot buy.
