Comrades, just eat posho and forget milk donation
Lately, I have been inundated with messages from citizens wanting to know where the milk, eggs, vegetable cooking oil and such donations are going. “We’re only receiving posho and beans,” said one. “They’ve only removed the stigmatising branding ‘or vulnerable poor’ but it’s still the same posho and beans,” added another.
“I heard you work in a newspaper, can you ask these people where the milk is?” said a local leader at my village in Jinja.
I was bemused. For a long time now, someone has been talking about pricking needles in the masses and that most of them have been immunised. Yet here I was, being bombarded by people who still don’t understand that it’s easier to praise a State detective who spends Shs100b in one year to recover Shs1.7b.
Yes, that’s such a big achievement, especially if you also factor in things like the detective arresting so many people but hardly any ever getting convicted. Probably the low rate of conviction explains using a bullion van to deliver one dead mosquito.
These are the things the vulnerable poor are asking about milk and eggs as if boiling the beans and eating with posho isn’t enough. Why ask for cooking oil as well as if you don’t know that those at the frontline of fighting the virus have to be well oiled to avoid succumbing to stress and developing stress creases on their cheeks?
These people who are doing all the donkey’s work to ensure that you are safe from this galloping virus must not only stay healthy but also look the part. That way, the virus will be scared. That is why they arrested the other RDC when he started distributing posho and beans.
The thing is, the RDC is this scrawny, experts were wary that he would look so effete to the eyes of the marauding virus that it would encourage them to attack thinking we are easy targets. According to those who prepared the charge sheet, the RDC, in a bid to build some flesh and muscles, stole some eatables and drinks from a duuka.
Tell me, do you expect the RDC to eat posho and beans for vulnerable poor? How will he look by the time the lockdown is lifted if he was on such diet? That’s why we the wananchi must be content with posho and beans and stop thinking of eggs and uto.
We should limit our thought processes to simpler things like how theft of Shs10b should make even the one who stole trillions of shillings angry with the support of the smaller thieves, angry.
Do you understand? Not yet. I’m saying, if we absolutely must fume, let that be directed at the smaller bettors who tried to gamble with our Shs10b, not the masked rotund chap making away with trillions.
In Swahili, we urge you to ‘kula kawunga na maharagwe’ and forget trying to understand too much. An animal can only think as much. By all means, when you started asking why Orwell’s pigs fed on milk as the rest of the animals struggled to find pasture for vulnerable poor, then it can only mean you have reached your expiry.
What you can pray for is to get more posho and beans. Milk and eggs are for our great benefactors in this war on Covid-19.
