Laughing through the rage.

Tell me you weren't just a little bit jealous that a fairy godmother wasn't stuffing millions of shillings in your bank account every year simply for driving (or flying) home? This "scandal" is delicious in so many ways, but in only the proper way is it truly delicious: nobody actually knows how much parliamentarians have stuffed down their trousers/skirts/whatever. Which is tragic. But still funny.

For a brief period when I wasn't busy hating my father and plotting to disown my mother, my father decreed that I would run a business. A small shop, it turned out. I hated that thing. It smelled funny and I couldn't just make off with the Sportsmans, which happened to be my favourites then. I had to account for every single damn thing in that shop, from the Big-G to the 1-litre Coca-cola, from the sachet Blue Band to the 50g tins of Simba Mbili Curry Powder, from the assorted BAT offerings to the KCC half-litre packs of long-life milk to the Akyda already going bad.

Every morning at the ass-crack of dawn, I would stand shivering on my father's front stoop - it was front-of-the-house-duka - and wait for the milk guy and the bread van. I'd hand over yesterday's crate; they handed me full crates. Then I would count everything, the milk or the bread and make sure that the expiry dates matched and that they weren't expiring today. Then, and only then, would I hand over the cash. Then I'd write all that down in the cash-bloody-fucking-book. tweny-four packets of milk. Sixteen loaves of bread. I must have had a psychotic break because I don't remember the unit cost. Every time some of my dad's pitiable neighbours bough something, I'd write it down in that damn book. Number of unites at the unit price (whip out calculator - because I kept getting Ds in math) and tot up the total. Every single transaction. I hated it. But I never lost money; and every now and then I'd make some on top.

Obviously the bunge cash office is busier - all those dwarf-planet-sized egos and hairdos looking to get first, fast service and they will be fucked if they stand around as if they are waiting to negotiate something delicate with the bursar or the bursar's assistant. But the same rule really does apply: this is the money I have in my hands. If I give you a cent, your name goes down, the amount next to it, and the security, if any, next to that. Bunge cash people say the don't really do that. It's like they keep getting held up every month by the same hoods. Don't tell me you don't see the funny? Then we find out - never mind how, mheshimiwa - wabunge get really, really upset. Not at the bunge cash office monkeys; they get upset at their Speaker!

The little shit called someone to help him keep track of things at the bunge cash office. What kind of idiot wants to reduce waste in bunge, the wabunge are asking. Kwani, does this guy hate money or something, they wonder. I mean, it's not as if anyone knew and even if they did, wabunge wako na Parliament Square and all the hoi polloi and their civil society shithead friends can't do jack shit about it. So why the fuck did the Speaker just expose their fat asses to ridicule like that? In other words, Nia yake ni nini?

That is the funny: the equivalent of highway bandits accusing their babe-in-the-woods leader of bad faith because he doesn't want to hold up people on the highway any more. Kenyans are being bullied into taking on more and more fiscal burdens in the name of austerity and sacrifice all the while the bullies are spending our taxes like drunken pirates on shore leave! It is tragic. But it is funny.