Every man can identify with Zanji Mukenya’s situation. Every man has, at one point in their life, been in Zanji’s situation; and reached the end of the rope.
Hey, let me bring those living under Nzambani Rock up to speed. In a distressing and mentally triggering clip that went viral, Zanji, a freelancer at Standard Media Group, threatened to take his life at his employer's premises.
No “normal” man just wakes up one Monday morning and decides to either take matters into his hands or take his life. Before circumstances force him into this corner, things have been going wrong for a considerable amount of time.
One injurious wrong has been leading to another. He has been patient, but his patience has now been stretched thin. And it's now come to this unplanned distressing moment, in which - to quote WB Yeats - “the centre cannot hold and things fall apart.”
In some workplaces, the leadership is not in touch with what's happening to folks in the lower cadres. It's the sad reality of life, from politics to church, where leaders live in soundproof edifices, fitted with echo chambers. And they only get to hear what's happening to the common man when it's too late.
And, sometimes, it's too late for everyone. Too late to save the nation. Too late to save face. Too late to save reputations and institutions that have been painstakingly built over tons of gallons of blood, sweat, and tears.
If all our leaders cared, if they listened, if they were unselfish, then the Zanjis of this nation - builders who bear the brunt when fortunes of institutions plummet - would understand and work to turn around the situation.
Zanji’s is not an isolated case. It's happening to men all across this nation. It happened on our streets when men dared gun-toting trigger-happy cops to shoot them because they were tired of life.
There's nothing as dangerous as a man who has reached the end of his rope, and the only rope he has is a noose that he's tied around his neck. This is a man who has nothing to lose. He's already lost his life. Technically, he is already dead. And now he wants to actualise it by committing suicide by cop, or by the employer.
Men cry in secret or inwardly. But we are all missing it because we are looking at outward expressions of crying to determine the condition of a man's heart. Yet, men are crying in public. Zanji was crying in public. That's the only way we know how to cry in public without being labelled as weak or sissies.
Men cry out for different things. However, most times, our cries are misunderstood. People don't get it. Like many men, Zanji was not crying because of delayed dues, but, I reckon, because of deafness from his bosses. It was not about payment, but empathy.
Like most men in this country who are caught between crippling debts and a skyrocketing cost of living, this brother had not, as some people would think, lost his doggone mind; instead, he was mad at the situation.
Like Francis Imbuga so aptly put it in Betrayal in the City , “When the madness of an entire nation disturbs a solitary mind, it's not enough to say the man is mad.”
Sometimes the only way a man can swing to the next opportunity or the next phase of his life - or be who he was really created to be - is when he reaches the end of the rope, and he lets go and lets God.
