Donkey meat and Sakaja’s misplaced identity

Donkey meat is nowadays kosher in Kenya. With several slaughterhouses specializing in exclusively on turning donkeys into steak. While we are yet to see the flesh on mainstream supermarket shelves, the days of newspaper headlines screaming that we were being fed donkey meat by unscrupulous butchers seem to be over.

This is exactly the point with the ‘which tribe is Sakaja’ thing. Deception. People just do not like to be duped. It is one thing to buy beef, another to buy donkey meat and yet quite another to buy beef but be given donkey meat.

For the longest time, Sakaja has been a so called tribeless enterprising young man who has faithfully served his party. Trouble began when he decided to run for Governor of Nairobi. Alas! He was rudely shocked to find that there was a requirement to be from the correct community! The Mt. Kenya mafia considered him persona non grata as far as governorship was concerned. He relented and opted to run for the Senate, only to find that there too was a hurdle he was hard pressed to surmount: The seat had been earmarked for the ‘House of Mulembe’ by both Jubilee and NASA coalitions.

Ever industrious, the man set about branding himself as a luyha- with one problem: He was not a luyha. It is not that people had a problem with his heritage, but in these very specific and peculiar circumstances, he found it necessary to hoodwink Nairobians into the perception that he was a member of the Luyhia community. Like Jacob in the bible, he deceived and tricked the elderly Francis Atwoli into ‘blessing’ him as the first born son. His affinity to appear with Luhyia men in public sky rocketed. Any endorsement would do, even from pariahs like Ababu Namwamba. No less than the president of the republic attempted to pass him off as a Luyhia at a public rally.

Mr Koskei had however failed to account for the fact that pulling a sleight of hand on such a scale was unlikely to be executed flawlessly. Pictures of his old Identity card cropped up on social media. The man now going by the name of JOHNSON ARTHUR SAKAJA used to be JOHNSON KOSKEI SAKAJA.

Koskei’s response has been to trash the tribal issue and say it matters not. Herein comes the donkey meat analogy. The problem is not that he is a Sabaot, it is that he tried to lie to us about it. Mwacha mila ni mtumwa.