A short story on fighting graft: Hope is a dangerous thing, my friend, it can kill a man

What you need to know:

Hopeful. Those inside the palace are struggling to sleep because those in the ghetto are awake. One needs to keep those inside the palace happy and loyal, but one can no longer afford to ignore the songs of resistance wafting out of the ghettos through the night skies. What is a man – let alone a king – to do, except renew hope and promise that this time it will be different?

Veteran skeptics in third-world banana republics have, over the years, understood the need to manage their expectations. The plumber who is 15 minutes away is probably two hours out, if at all. That person “expecting some ka money” to pay a longstanding debt is lying. Meetings start, not at the scheduled time, but whenever the all-important chief guest eventually staggers into the room.

Few things are what they appear to be: Crime preventers can very easily be crime promoters; there are daily power cuts despite having a surplus of power generated; you have to look both ways when crossing a one-way street. Self-appointed prophets ask their folk to close their eyes and put their hands up, then prayerfully go through their pockets to reduce their carry-on weight for the flights to heaven.

You live through these lies, these empty promises, these fanciful facades and you slowly learn to take everything with a pinch of salt. Faith wanes. You lose trust and faith in people. You wrap yourself up in the robes of melancholy and walk into the peaceful darkness, away from all the fake cop lights, flash lights, spot lights, strobe lights, street lights – all of the lights!

Then, every so often, in a moment of weakness, you drop your guard. Change is coming, the court jesters say. The king has an important announcement to make. “This is the mother of all announcements,” the interpreters of royal dreams scream. “The empire is going to strike back,” the diviners proclaim, picking through the entrails of some recently deceased fowl. “We don’t want to hear ‘I didn’t hear, I didn’t know!’” say the town criers! “Be there or be square! Miss only if you must!”
You rouse yourself from the dark depths of cynicism. ‘You must learn to give people the benefit of the doubt,’ you hear a faraway voice saying, warm and reassuring from the days when you were young and optimistic – long before you bite into an empty meat samosa and learnt not to trust anyone, except your-goddamn-self!

You turn up the lights – extra bright, you want to see this – and sit down to listen. You suffer – stoically and silently – the puffery of the opening statements, the self-congratulatory balderdash, and the ‘pick me’ cries for attention. Then on comes the king.

You can still make out the handsome facial lines of a young charismatic man. The mind, enjoying a rare foray out of the its dark box, soars and you are taken back to a time when you hang onto every word, when you believed that he said what he meant and meant what he said.

The mouth is moving. Words are being said. You aren’t really listening but you feel a creeping sense of déjà vu. You pay more attention. The words are familiar. You’ve heard them several times before, some very recently. You check the corner of the television screen. The event is live. The king is repeating himself.

You watch the eyes. They still burn with that sharp intelligence, but the fatigue is unmistakable. The words begin to drone. It all sounds perfunctory; a lumbering trot down an intellectual cul de sac. The needle is stuck in the groove on the record player and the song blares endlessly in a ceaseless loop.

There is a dollop of excitement as questions are posed, but the king, a self-declared black belt in karate and a master of evasive manoeuvers, handles them effortlessly and with visible boredom: a kick here, a chop there, a guard there, and it is soon over. The subjects are dismissed to return to their nation-building, tax-paying ways.
Incredibly, you are left with a sense of sympathy for the king. How is one expected to do away with the very patronage that keeps the subjects loyal? You can hear the pitchfork-wielding barbarians at the palace gates, and the scurrying of feet in the ghetto darkness.

Those inside the palace are struggling to sleep because those in the ghetto are awake. One needs to keep those inside the palace happy and loyal, but one can no longer afford to ignore the songs of resistance wafting out of the ghettos through the night skies. What is a man – let alone a king – to do, except renew hope and promise that this time it will be different?

The skeptics return to their dimly-lit observation posts, quietly cursing themselves for dropping their guard and believing that this time was going to be different. As they step carefully over the sleeping forms of the long-resigned cynics, a voice calls out from the darkness: “It is the hope that kills you!”
* With apologies to Shawshank Redemption for murdering the plot line.

Mr Kalinaki is a journalist and a poor man’s freedom fighter. [email protected]
Twitter: @Kalinaki.