Slow, but not an idiot.

Do you believe that the man who declared, "Hii pesa si ya mama yako!" has the intellectual surefootedness to lob zingers such as, "his unique talent for wallowing in the most preposterous inanities," or "his pitiful American-English tweng' generously burdened with layers of his native Kamba tongue exposes his wannabe underbelly?" I think not. Unfair as it might seem, the author of the misogyny surrounding public monies is the intellectual equivalent of a .22 calibre in .45 calibre world and anyone who believes he authored the latter zingers needs only go over footage of parliamentary proceedings when that worthy is declaiming before his honourable colleagues.

Propaganda is a wonderful political tool, but it must be deployed with intelligence if not wit. There is no doubt that the "mama yako" fellow is nobody's fool; he has somehow managed to survive in the murky world of Kenyan politics without getting embroiled in long-protracted investigations about his sources of wealth. But after the "mama yako fiasco" there is little doubt left in the minds of many that the good man has the ability to deploy such pithy gems as "virulent magma" or that this deployment was his idea to begin with.

There must be fear, in some quarters of note, that he is becoming the laughingstock of the political arena, and that it is not a good idea for a man of his station to be lampooned on a regular basis by a Kenyan of no fixed abode with a chip the size of Mt Rushmore on his shoulder. These quarters must have said, "Enough is enough! Basta!" and summoned the thick-skinned politician ordered him to take action. Ghost-writing is an honourable thing; it spares us the embarassment of knowing what one knows and it spares them the embarassment of letting us know what they know. But ghosting has rules; the first and most important never make it obvious that it is a ghosted work. Retain just enough elements of who you are that we know you had a large hand in its making.

The author of "virulent magma" is quite the writer; he knows just how to needle the object of his poisoned quill with snark that it is quite a pleasure to read and reread the diatribe. When he calls his target a "balloon of vanity" you can see that it has a large measure of truth.  His tweng', too, is quite atrocious; how is it that the man has lived among the walami for nigh on twenty years and still retained that thick Kamba tongue? I am not positing that he should have polished away all his rough edges; but if he was going to do so, he should have done a damn better job of it.

The author of the "mama yako" jibe is not. It shows in his public statements. It shows in the language he deploys in support of his betters. It is demonstrated every single day he stands in the agora and make his case for one political act or the other. It is demonstrated every time he plays the hatchet man, when his tongue runs faster than his patience and "mama yako" outbursts pour forth. No one, save for the most generously sycophantic. thinks that he is finally coming into his own, and taking on the merchants of punditry and snark on their on level. Kenyans are slow, frequently; we are not idiots.