Started from the bottom now she’s here. True, sometimes she’s unusual. Often pushy with ideas she holds dear. And often jeopardises her career. She has fans and haters from front to the rear. In an IEBC officer’s nightmare she did appear.
That is a verse American rapper Drake should include if he ever considers reworking his 2013 song, Started from the Bottom. That way, he will be honouring the indefatigable lawyer Alice Wahome who started from the bottom at Karumu Primary School in Kandara, became a lawyer in 1985, Kandara MP in 2013 and 2017 and a champion of bottom-up economics in 2021.
And because she embarrassed herself on national TV recently, metaphorically landing face-first as she tried to explain the economic model championed by Deputy President William Ruto, musicians Trey Songz and Nicki Minaj might also consider adding a verse about Ms Wahome in the 2010 dance song Bottoms Up.
“It is working from the bottom down,” she told presenter Sam Gituku when asked to explain the bottom-up model as compared with the top-down one.
“Top-down?” the presenter asked, as if to rectify her because from bottom-down sounds like a route to discovering fossils, oil, rare minerals and magma.
“Yeah, from up to b-, you know, from top to bottom,” she continued, leaving confusion hanging in the air you might have thought it was a Greek lesson gone wrong. When such moments happen in court, lawyers ordinarily pause and tell the bench that they need to take further instructions from their clients.
But this was national TV, in the court of public opinion where blunders are snipped, mixed, published, tweeted and retweeted and laughed at. And so Ms Wahome became a laughing stock.
Had the opportunity presented itself, she might have played the lawyer card and explained the Latin expression “cuius est solum eius est usque ad coelum et ad infernos”, which is used to explain that whoever owns land owns it upwards all the way to heaven and downwards all the way to hell. That might be the way lawyer sees bottom-up.
As laughter emojis flew on social media, the bottom-up economic model championed by Dr Ruto became the target of attacks from all angles: Jubilee secretary-general Raphael Tuju (“what is bottoms up in Swahili?”) to ANC leader Musalia Mudavadi (“when you apply bottom-up on a bottle you’re drinking till it is empty”). We are yet to get to the bottom of the punches and counter-punches.
In Dr Ruto’s mind, though, bottom-up is a model in which investment is channelled to small businesses in the hope that more money will go to the bottom of the economic pyramid and change the livelihoods of millions more than the trickle-down model, which creates a few rich people among many poor ones.
“The conversation has changed,” he tweeted recently.
Charles Mwaniki tweeted on Thursday: “He has single-handedly changed the conversation in our politics from ethnic-based to economic issues.”
As for Ms Wahome, a staunch defender of the DP and lately a critic of President Uhuru Kenyatta, selling the Hustler economics championed by Dr Ruro is a matter of duty, and the tongue-twisting topsy-turvy may do little to deter the tigress from Murang’a.
