Spare Me The Crocodile Tears, Prof Juma Was A Thankless Idiot
(By Comrade Albert Nyakundi Amenya aka The Banana Peddler)
I have seen Kenyans including local scholars, showering the late Professor Calestous Juma with a surplus of saintly accolades since he expired. When I scroll my Facebook and Twitter accounts, I see endless scrolls of accolades coupled with photos of an extra ordinary academic.
In fact, it reminds me of a South African conman Nelson Mandela, the man who never fought for anything but ended up harvesting where he did not sow. There are those who saw him as a secular saint because he made their own profession seem noble.
One thing I am certain, 90 per cent of those Kenyans praising the Prof Juma – including politicians – knew little or nothing about the Juma until his expiry date was pronounced.
Most of these Kenyans especially those on social media want to show their friends that they are well informed by mourningly narrating how the nigger was a great man. Interestingly, it is those never knew or heard of him that are authoritatively expounding how Calestous was a man of unique bravery and impeccable personality.
On the other hand, Gabriel Omolo, the real rhumba cognoscente that sang the hit “Lunch Time” is dead but Kenyans are carrying on as if nothing happened. It is certainly factual that Maestro Gabriel Omolo is among the few people who reach the so called saintliness and the otherworldliness of Professor Juma.
Through his famous hit “Lunch Time” Omolo glued together a nation torn asunder by tribal politics and authoritarianism. Besides being an accomplished scholar, what else did the polymath do for Kenyans?
For someone like Professor Wangari Maathai, there is no gainsaying she was richly deserving of her Nobel Prize. When my communication professor Okoth Okombo popped off, he was not mourned with the same zeal as this Harvard masquerade despite his immense academic contributions to our nation. What of Juma? Kenyans can be wildly wrong sometimes!
Contemporaneously, when I pull back the lens a bit, I countenance that I don’t recognize or esteem professor Juma just like I don’t respect Prof Ngugi Wa Thiongo. When I look at them with the lenses of a cognoscente, they are not worthy their onions. They are two idiots. They are accomplished cowards who do not deserve a halo. They are economic fugitives whose academic wizardry benefact foreigners who advanced them asylum.
Ngugi and Juma are enemies of Africans and their progress. To them, our atmosphere is irredeemably uncongenial. As far as African policy is concerned, they don’t give a damn.
I agree, before he gave up the ghost, the late Juma was one of the renowned professors of the practice in international development and chairman of the faculty of the innovation for Economic Development Executive Program at Harvard Kennedy School. Nevertheless, that is for Americans to celebrate. Not Kenyans.
The nigger was a typical American. He never exuded any pigheaded determination at a great personal cost, to liberate his motherland from the illegitimate regime that plunged the nation into the clutches of biting poverty.
This man was painfully slow to use his academic influence and denounce the squalid leadership back at his motherland. He ran away like a real coward. That is why I am bringing the knives out for him. The only string that attached him with Kenya was that of being birthed here albeit it became even looser when he got hitched to a white American woman and was assimilated to the white man’s culture. He does not deserve any of these cosmetic laurels being traded by morons. Just because he is deceased? Come on! Give me a break”
Indeed I am not snide of the fact that Juma was an internationally recognized authority in the application of science and technology to sustainable development worldwide. That however, is not enough to assoil him from the culpability of betraying his fellow compatriots by turning his back on them.
I refuse to celebrate him. He left us with nothing worthy being proud of. I celebrate Gabriel Omolo instead.
Why would I celebrate a man who upon sensing the backwardness and bankruptcy in his village, sought refuge in a foreign land? Why did he refuse to go back and rescue the gloomy faces he left from the biting poverty and frustration?
Why would I celebrate an American man who touched no life back in his motherland, the man who concentrated on his white wife and forgot about the people that made him he he was? Before I foolishly extol him, how did he positively impact the lives of the people in his village back in Port Victoria?
How many students did he sponsor to go and study abroad? Before I celebrate him, how many academic programmes did he found in his village to better the lives of locals?
Before you tell me to acknowledge him, how many schools, hospitals or churches did he help build back in the shores of Lake Victoria? How many times did he visit his motherland, let alone a country called Africa? How many times?
Why would I celebrate a highbrowed conman because he is an accomplished egghead? Why are Kenyans so credulous that they can confuse movement with action in broad daylight? Thankfully, I do not indulge his metaphorical academic tower.
Kenya should have rejected and resisted the body of this man. Of what use will you be to us when dead whereas you were useless while you were alive? Long story short, spare us the jokes, save our time and let the American Rest In Peace.
(albertamenya@yahoo.com)
The writer sells Bananas in the streets of Kisii town (Bosongo)
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