Fatted calves.

I won't deny it. You'd see through the hypocrisy if I did anyway. You can deny it if you want, but I know that you know that I know you're also full of it. I won't deny that I lay awake at night, confined to the four walls of my bedchamber, plotting and scheming and needling the Almighty for that telephone-number-length bank account balance. I will spout the banal homilies about my profession being a calling and how it is an honour to serve the cause of the rule of law, but in reality all I want is that bank balance and the option of putting down a deposit on an island in the southern Indian Ocean, like Richard Branson.

So I understand acutely what those unionised teachers who are unwilling to return to Mandera are feeling. Yes, they are teachers and yes, there is no chance that a Government of Kenya pay-cheque will elevate them to the leagues of the well off, the comfortably well-off or the Yesu-Kristo-I-am-Rich robber barons. But they too must lay awake at night plotting and scheming and wheedling the Almighty for a chance, any chance, to amass the kind of wealth they know commands respect. To exploit that chance, they don't want to be blown up by anyone with a religious, quasi-religious or political agenda.

I am old enough to know that the warnings about the evils of the pursuit of mammon quite likely fall in that space we have christened the Grey Area, where compromises are made and accommodations are offered or granted. Look at the compromises and accommodations that created Kenya's first landed gentry; massacres, enslavement, murders, betrayals, racism and casual violent corruption. All that before independence too. Kenya's post-independence landed gentry did the same, only on a grander scale and with more efficient means, like the Constitution, the courts and the national security apparatus.

Leaders lead by example, as another apt homily reminds us. All Kenyan leaders have shown the way. The people are there to be used, abused and misused. They are canon fodder for the compromises and accommodations that must be made in order for the leader to partake of the fatted calf. They are the human shields that shall protect the leader from the ill-judged attempts at judicial retribution. They are source of lucre and they must be squeezed until they squeal. The only way to escape their fate is to ascend to the ranks of the leaders. They can only do that by applying the same ruthless, amoral and hyperfocused methods that their leaders have demonstrated.

Why, therefore, should we order teachers to do that which would prevent them from becoming the porcine leadership of this nation? Why can't they sell their lesson plans to their students at a hefty post-Xeroxing mark-up? Why can't they sell straight As, whether deserved or not? Why can't they sell certificates of qualification when no employer really cares about them? Their leaders, no matter how many "genuine" qualifications they possess, have been doing the same thing for dogs' years, only on a grander lucrative scale.

Lying and cheating in the service of liars and cheaters, apparently, pays off in spades, and teachers are now joining the lying, cheating bandwagon on their way to leadership glory. However, some of us have been handicapped by middle-class moral sensibilities of little financial use: honesty, thrift, fairness, and justice. Jettisoning them after decades of inculcation is proving more difficult than ever; Gordon Gekko's greed-is-good mantra is proving difficult to muster. But slowly by slowly we are getting there.  I can see that more and more teachers are opening coaching academies, engaging the services of Xerox salesmen and turning a deaf ear to TSC threats to "report to duty in Mandera or else." Greed is good for the leaders so it must be good for the teachers.