Kenya, like a recklessly driven car, is about to get involved in a grisly accident

Countries are no different from cars. There are those, Like DR Congo, Somalia or South Sudan, which are driven straight from the showroom and smashed into an old truck parked by the roadside. Mechanics certify them a write off.

They are hauled from the accident scene to a police station, where agile operatives keep pinching bits and pieces.

Fifty years on, the gnarled carcasses remain, rotting in the sun. Then we have countries, like Nigeria, South Africa or Uganda, that are like the rusty second-hand cars an excited first timer buys. They have hidden massive defects, which the buyer only becomes aware of a week after.

They quickly become a source of smoking and rattling pain – long weekends wasted at the garage getting conned by mechanics, milked dry by cops at every roadblock, stuck in the mud every rainy night.

The worst, however, are those that look and feel fine, like Kenya, yet they literally hung on a cliff edge because when its owner hears a grinding noise, he ignores it.

Like men who wish away that nagging pain in the chest until something explodes and sends then directly into a grave, such countries keep tottering along, till a spot of post-election violence hurls them into a graveyard. Total engine failure. Write off.

When countries are headed in that direction, leaders are blamed – and rightfully so. But in the case of Kenya, maybe we get the leaders we deserve.

Written off

Last weekend, my old car, which is lots like Kenya, rattled to a stop three kilometres from Mlolongo on the Nairobi Mombasa highway. Puncture. But in the process of fixing that puncture, my jack malfunctioned.

I stood by the roadside waving down motorists for one hour. None stopped. Some even flashed their lights at me in that Kenyan motorist’s get-out-of-way-you-idiot way.

Perhaps they were afraid I was a gangster, but at 2pm, in broad daylight, on a busy highway with lots of human activity on the side of the road? Surely! The drivers could clearly see me wave, notice my hazard lights blinking but look straight ahead pretending to see nothing.

But as they drew abreast, they would steal a quick sideways glance and notice the flat tyre and the mangled jack. By then it would be too late so they sped on, I suspect, feeling a little ashamed. They were invariably middle class – a group that is the best educated and most individualistic around.

They drove past; wife in the passenger seat, cute kids in the backseat, fuel in the tank, money in the pocket. They didn’t stop because they were afraid or don’t care. Or maybe they had such confidence in their abilities to secure their little world and maintain their comforts that they couldn’t figure out why anyone would need help.

That avarice, the total disinterest in what goes on around them, the smug confidence that they can take care of themselves, is the reason we are led by a bunch of clowns who constantly court Kenya’s total engine failure.

With the General Election just around the corner and at the current rate where everything is a mess, the country is soon going to be involved in a grisly accident that may require it to be written off, Somali or South Sudan style.