By Gab Oguda
There is a reason universities constitute a reviewer’s panel for every postgraduate student coming through their tube. You cannot have a Masters degree and still reason like my grandmother’s rake, Okuodo.
Aaron Cheruiyot, the Kericho Senator, has hijacked a tweet I called out Hassan Omar’s double-speak and called me all manner of things in there. I do not mind being called all manner of things. I have been called all manner of things before by people who are experts in all manner of things.
I have asked him whether I should feel privileged that I am being insulted by the Kericho Senator or whether I should ask the people of Kericho to come for their madman and keep him busy.
It is the least I could do.
If you have ever faced a panel of reviewers who tear into your manuscript like a pack of wolves and throw it back to you for reworking, you would never waste your time debating people whose only panel they have ever faced is those panel-beaters at the workshop where I take my saucepan each time it gets a leak.
You know when I defended my MPhil Thesis, at the University of Bergen, first in front of my international classmates, and then in a panel of reviewers drawn from the department, never did anyone in that whole feedback process bring through issues not related to my topic in attempt to clamp me down. Not that they were obliged to keep the discussion focused, but their level of exposure would never have allowed them to do anything less.
I am not surprised that a Kenyan parliamentarian, who represents no less than 800,000 people who badly need his parliamentary services, would spare time to come on social media and empty his vacuous brain in there for the world to see.
If these are the young people you keep parading everyday as the change this country needs, then I’d rather the people of Kericho asked me to loan them Bingo, my grandmother’s dog, who is a decade younger than Aaron Cheruiyot, but can tell between a warthog’s fibula from a goat’s tibia even in pitch darkness.
Bingo knows when to answer to a robber’s onslaught with a tame bark, and when to spray his bite in the softest of a robber’s vital organs. Bingo knows how to operate our rickety gate, and how to take shots from a loaded paint gun.
If Bingo were to be Kericho Senator today, he would have swiped his manicured paws and logged into Twitter, spilled his shampoo on Aaron Cheruiyot’s picture and wiped it with his towel to reveal the airhead that is buried underneath the flashy attire.
I made a lifetime commitment to myself never to debate people who use their brains as workshop helmets. Scientists in North Dakota are currently testing a new technology that could convert human stupidity into positive kinetic energy.
If they succeed, and they should succeed, Aaron Cheruiyot’s mummified brain will be sufficient to supply uninterrupted electricity to all our manufacturing factories for 100 years without blackout.
Every cloud has a silver lining.
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