Have you ever been in a situation where you were invited to a party that promised you the time of your life, including an elaborate feast and a constant flow of your favourite drinks only to arrive at the venue and realise that you were played? That it was all false advertisement even though the invitation card read – ‘come hungry!’?
What you find instead of the sumptuous buffet you had pictured in your mind featuring all those mouth-watering dishes you now eat once a year due to the rising cost of living are meals that even your thinning payslip, thanks to SHIF and ‘affordable housing’ deductions, can afford.
This scenario came to mind during a conversation I recently had with a colleague regarding the high expectations we had when the current government was voted into office. So many mouth-watering promises about how our lives would change for the better were made to us, the voters, during the campaign period, and we fell for it hook, line and sinker. We envisioned an affordable health system accessible to all, rich and poor, we envisioned a school curriculum that absorbed every school-going child in Kenya, no matter which part of the country this child came from. We also envisioned a time when there would be no slums in the country, where every home in Kenya would have running water, and electricity, thanks to the touted ‘affordable’ housing scheme and the promise of connecting every corner in Kenya to the grid. If I were to list all the promises made here that now show no promise of materialising, I would run out of my allocated space.
You live here, so I need not go into what the current situation is like. To sum it up, though, majority of Kenyans are struggling to make ends meet, and there is a lot of disillusionment and despondency all around. All signs say that the future looks bleak.
I want to talk about expectation and the disappointment it carries with it. I was introspecting and realised that whenever we invest in something, be it a business, a relationship, love, an employee, a child, even the politicians we vote for, we make the investment based on expectation, on what we hope to garner from our investment. The investment could be in the form of money, time, emotion...you could add onto this list.
When what we had envisioned or hoped for fails to materialise, the disappointment is palpable. We feel let down, we feel cheated, and we feel betrayed, for instance if it is a marriage that failed to live up to our expectations.
But what if we coached ourselves to go through life devoid of expectation? What if we allowed nature to take its course while we deal with the various outcomes as they unravel in this journey called life? There probably wouldn’t be divorce or separation because men and woman would not expect anything of each other. And if the child we thought would be a pilot reneges on his childhood dream and decides to become an ‘influencer’, rather than rant and rave, you will console yourself that as long as the job will pay enough to support himself, then that is all that matters. If we had no expectations towards our president and other politicians that we voted for, there would be no mothers mourning the deaths of their children who were shot down and killed by police during the protests against the Finance Bill 2024.
But we cannot go about life devoid of any expectations, because if we did, then we would live in a world where every injustice imaginable was allowed, where the poor had no voice and no hope of a better life for their children, and where the word ‘development’ would not exist, since we would all resign ourself to fate, the status quo, and allow ourselves to be at the mercy of politicians. With the country’s situation in mind, it may seem futile, but we cannot afford to give up our right to having expectation.
