By G Oguda
I am told Ngunjiri Wambugu wrote a spongy article in The Star linking Raila Odinga to the current mayhem in our schools. I did not want to comment without reading the thing first. I have since done so twice, just to be sure my eyes weren’t playing any tricks on me.
Let me tell you something.
There is a famous old saying that “…all leaders tend to be either hedgehogs or foxes. A hedgehog knows one thing very well, and a fox knows a little about everything.” If you were to pick one of the two wild animals to represent Ngunjiri Wambugu’s article in The Star today, you’d have to come up with a hybrid of a fox and some other animal, probably a vulture, because this man earns his keep as a shameless scavenger seeking to score cheap political points at every warped turn.
He analyses every topic under the sun, from gynaecology to La Liga, and he does not end his articles without mentioning Raila Odinga’s name, even if the subject had no pellets to be traced back to the statesman from Opoda Farm.
The Star prides itself in attracting smart readers, they hog ad boards in this city selling themselves as the one-stop-outlet for pedigree columnists who could sell a paper on its own. From the dangerously intelligent John Githongo, to the peerlessly witty Patrick Gathara. From the courageously wise Koigi Wamwere to the fountain of knowledge Prof. Yash Pal Ghai. If you lock these four think tanks into a laboratory, the air circulating in there could as well be packaged and sold on our supermarket shelves at an over-the-roof price for tribal bigots to benefit from.
But this brilliance has refused to rub itself off Ngunjiri Wambugu. It’s like my village madman, Adhiegra, who always insists on hiking the Ngere High School bus whenever it passes by Reru Market hoping to get the gist of thermodynamics and the burning of hydrocarbons. A million years later he doesn’t even know how to spell his name, leave alone hold a piece of graphite pencil. This is typical Ngunjiri Wambugu’s company.
When you decide to swim with the sharks, it would be unfair to be allowed to exist if you cannot raise your game in record time. Mauling of ideological weaklings, Charles Darwin prophesied, is the best gift any Philosopher King could give to this country to prevent it from churning jelly-fish columnists with the IQ of a rock.
Which makes you ask why The Star still offers refuge to such low-grade, gutter, columnists in the diminutive frame, and odd-ball shape, of Ngunjiri Wambugu. There must be a crude agenda he is advancing that pleases the editorial decision-makers at the high table of that limping publication, because the subject of Raila Odinga’s communique from London had no ulterior motive in it.
I rarely disagree with Raila Odinga, but he was way out of turn when he asked Uhuru Kenyatta to close down schools as a permanent solution was being sought. I disagreed with his stand, and he is not the only one who made the suggestion. KNUT boss Wilson Sossion was in that wagon, so were half the school administrators whose jobs were being arraigned on the line for failure to stop the rampant mayhem.
Raila Odinga did not speak for himself, he spoke for many parents and guardians who spent their days on the edge of their seats agonising whether their children’ school would be next; and this anxiety knew no political persuasion. Schools were being torched across the board. The hue and cry knew no political camp. Which begs the question why The Star editorial desk would allow such an pin-holed article slaughtering Raila Odinga to see the light of day.
They did not even bother to incorporate dissenting voices within the ODM Party who offered a different policy interpretation to the chaos bedevilling the schools.
You all have read Senator John Kerry’s deeply insightful masterpiece ‘A Call To Serve’. This is the book he wrote while launching his campaign for the US Presidency in 2004. The 200-paged masterpiece has nuggets of wisdom all around, but you will stop your eye on page 08 where he says, and I quote: “My fellow Democrats don’t agree on all of these issues or how exactly to resolve them, and that’s as it should be. I want my Party to be an open door for lively debate, not a mirror image of the narrow ideological sect that the Republicans are becoming…” End of quote.
That statement up there is what is wrong with Jubilee and the airheads they send to media stations to broadcast their propaganda. You all read what Kisumu Senator Prof. Peter Nyong’o said on the school fires. He was firmly behind the President and the CS Education on their gallant efforts to stop the rot. This was at variance with what Raila Odinga, his Party Leader, espoused in the communique from London.
That’s what democracy is all about. A Party where the Party Leader and it’s foremost thinkers can agree to disagree on policy matters is a mature political outfit. But because pinheads like Ngunjiri Wambugu aren’t used to national debates that require the activation of their brain cells, they will close their one eye on the Prof. Nyong’o statement while open their wide mouths on the Raila Odinga one.
Those who say Donald Trump’s mouth discharges raw sewage whenever he takes to the podium haven’t met Ngunjiri Wambugu and his harebrained cabal. This shameless act of political harlotry has to be stopped someday, if not by us, then by our children who we must teach to stand up and refuse to reside in the same space with enemies of national progress.
We cant have a country where a majority are working hard, and paying dearly, to school their children in the way of the Lord, while the others are busy sending their children to witchdoctors to indoctrinate them in the cult of Trump.
No, we won’t.
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