Five reasons why 2019 will be the year of our great country

My dog Sigmund and I are for the first time in many years agreed on a major issue: 2019 will be the best year for Kenyans so far, the national year of peremende (candy) all around. Because Sigmund is more serious with life than I can ever hope to be, I yield this space to him with a caveat. I am not responsible for what the dog tells you. Over to you, Sigmund!

Sigmund: (taking the mic, clearing his throat, and adjusting his military collar). Because of good leadership we continue to enjoy and its zero tolerance to corruption, everyone in Kenya will be as happy as a dog with a bone in 2019. All thieves in powerful positions will be handed long jail terms.

PRAYER BREAKFAST

In 2019, we’ll be addressing our leaders as “Peremende So-and-So” because of the overflowing sweetness of their magnanimity and wisdom. Our peremendes at the very top, popular as the chapatis they eat in dingy kiosks to mimic our downtrodden lives, showed a lot of decorum in 2018, something we expect them to display in 2019 and beyond.

According to a Unicef report, an estimated 482,882 Kenyan children required treatment for acute malnutrition at the beginning of the year, including 104,614 suffering from severe acute malnutrition.

All the same, in a year of many blessings, every day of 2019 should include a national prayer breakfast. Let’s see our leaders eating expensive meals at high-end hotels as they commune with the Almighty. We’ll eat with them vicariously as we watch the prayer meetings on TV, chewing and swallowing our saliva as the leaders eat the real food on our behalf. In the name of the Lord, let the cameraman zoom on whoever will be having my favourite breakfast: Poached eggs with tomato, Swiss chard, and chickpeas.

It will be heart-warming to see our leaders prayerful on TV before they take a break from their confessed faith to loot every government penny they can lay their hands on then give part of the loot to eager churches.

PORNOGRAPHY SITES

In 2019, we expect the Kenyan government to jail a few journalists to teach everyone a lesson on best behaviour. Dr Ezekiel Mutua of the Kenya Film Classification Board should also be ready to outlaw Adui, should Wanuri Kahiu produce a sequel to Rafiki that I suspect she is at work on. Dr Mutua did a good job in 2018 by putting us on the world map as a nation of intolerant homophobes when he banned Wanuri Kahiu’s film for presenting lesbian relationships sympathetically.

As Kenyan kids sat their national exams at the end of the year, the government suddenly realised that quite a number of the teens were pregnant. Education officials, the epitome of intellectual aptitude in the country, offered an excellent solution to the problem of teen pregnancies: Banning internet porn sites. I support this move. The girls were impregnated by porn stars, who jumped out of computers and phone screens to take advantage of our children.

According to a 2016 report by the Teenage Pregnancy Knowledge and Exchange at the University of Bedfordshire, UK, when Britain was hit by a similar teenage pregnancy crisis in the 1990s, it managed to cut by 60 per cent incidents of under-18 pregnancies in 10 years by, after thorough research, “making sex and relationship education compulsory in schools.”

But in Kenya we are so God-fearing we don’t want such a comprehensive approach to the problem facing children of the hoi polloi. Furthermore, teenage pregnancies are mostly reported in rural areas because that’s where kids watch most porn on expensive smart phones and computers the government has given them and thanks to internet coverage. Let’s just block porn sites and wait to see a drastic drop in teen pregnancies next year.

BURST SEWER

Towards the end of the year, the Education ministry flip-flopped on the implementation of a new curriculum like Diamond Platnumz performing his raunchy Mwanza video. We expect from the ministry more of this intellectual agility in 2019. Even if the pilot programme crashes because of lack of proper planning, it must be implemented to feed the cartels controlling the ministry.

Since Mr Polycarp Igathe abruptly left the Nairobi County administration on January 31, Governor Mike Mbuvi Sonko hasn’t appointed a deputy governor yet. The peremende governor is likely to do so in 2019. Such an officer’s main duty is to succeed his boss, should the latter pop off. He isn’t going anywhere, but Nairobi needs assurance that, in case of anything, Mr Sonko’s legacy and good leadership skills will flourish beyond him.

Therefore, as he chooses his deputy, Mr Sonko should remember that Nairobi is a Third World city with burst sewage pipes everywhere. The governor in waiting should have a mouth like an open sewer and spew all sorts of garbage at the slightest provocation. Mr Sonko has led from the front on this score. The insults should be recorded and broadcast on social media, because Nairobi must have leaders that are exactly like it.

One of the best-trained economists in the world, Kenya’s Dr David Ndii, was mean in the way he greeted Deputy President William Ruto’s admission to the secluded club of PhD holders earlier this month. I expected Dr Ndii to hug Dr Ruto and congratulate him in Latin like the truly refined Oxford-educated intellectual he is. Dr Ndii instead imputed that Ruto’s PhD wasn’t properly earned and that it served only as a credential in an obituary.

MILITARY PRECISION

Someone should remind Dr Ndii that Kenyan universities aren’t as stingy with degrees as an economist can be with cash. In 2019, we expect them to bring PhDs to the people and start one-year executive doctoral programmes in riparian architecture and narco-pharmacy.

Much of 2018 proved that ours are politicians who do everything with military precision. Ordinarily, a democratically inclined civilian leader does not wear military clothes or render the hand salute used by uniformed military personnel. But all democratic civilian leaders, including our own, should not only salute civilians (including their spouses), but they should spice up the comedy by raising the knee to the chin level and stomping the ground as they salute.

The force with which the foot comes to the ground will be symbolic of the energy with which our politicians are fighting corruption in high places. I’m sure western democracies would cheer civilian presidents like my friend Donald Trump if he paraded himself in a military uniform one of these days to remind his nation that he is so omnipotent he would wear clothes similar to God’s if he knew the Almighty’s wardrobe.

Let Trump and Vladimir Putin occasionally wear military uniforms as Omar Al-Bashir usually does. We don’t want such habits to appear like proclivities of Third World leaders drunk with power, a throwback to the era of Jean-Bédel Bokassa and Idi Amin Dada.

In anticipation of a year of sweetness for everyone, I, Sigmund — on behalf of Foolish Cow, who claims to own me, and on my own behalf — wish everyone a merry new year and a prosperous next Christmas.

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