I have been staring at this official document for the better part of eighteen hours now. I am red-eyed, wired, tired and a little pissed off. It used to be that when I told you the job was done, it really was done. We did not do a back-and-forth to determine whether what you wanted me to do had, indeed, been done. We always, ALWAYS, sorted out our full instructions before legislative drafter put fingers to keyboard and gave you a legislative text.
These days, though, MFs think they can ice-skate uphill.
There is much to be appreciative of the Kibaki presidency. The spoors of his economic successes are plain to track. However, he seeded the policy-making ground with bad habits, the worst being the Facebook-ish move-fast-and-break-things mantra. Governments are not meant to make decisions with haste, except when the enemy is dropping bombs on citizens. In every other respect, the Government is supposed to think through the risks-versus-benefits checklist before making a decision, especially a decision that puts lives and national treasure in the frying pan.
Lawyers like me are supposed to be called in when all Government’s ducks are in a row.
The number of decisions needed to get from a policy idea to a legislative text is long, and complex, and highly technical. None of the steps is to be taken without a high degree of certainty. By the time I, or people like me, write a legislative sentence of any import, ten times more difficult technical work has been done to make sure that the policy, the politics, the law and the money have been thought about and sorted. Any change to the legislative text is akin to abruptly changing direction by a VLCC - Very Large Crude Carrier. In other words, it should not be done without good and sufficient cause.
So…back to what is becoming a common Sunday for the likes of me, these days.
My colleagues and I put down in writing about 34,000 words at the end of April. In my estimation (nevermind the various angry publics who were deeply unhappy by our legislative text), we did an excellent job. We followed the rules. We have absolutely no dog in whether or not the text is enacted in the form we released it to our client. We should have been done with this shit a month and a half ago! But 40 days later, we are tinkering with it because the policy assumptions from way back when are being revised, and those revisions are necessitating changes to our text, changes that are not based on any kind of logic than “I said so!” I feel like I am the last survivor on the Mary Celeste.
My life has taken a backseat; one of the reasons it fell apart in late 2019. I have not had a chance to properly mourn the passing of two women who meant more to me than any other woman except for my mum. Every now and then, when the clouds part and I have a free three minutes to sit with my thoughts, my mind, memories and soul are engulfed in the pain of the deaths of the woman who tended to my every need when I was a newborn child and the woman who got me my Bachelor of Laws degree (and the BA that came along with it). I have tried to cry, but I have found narcissistic work-related reasons not to.
And so…
I am going home. To eat food I won’t notice, and sleep for hours that will never be enough, in the hopes that my mind will quiet down long enough that I won’t feel like committing some dreadful crime. I want to rejoin what is left of my life. I don’t think my therapist and I have found the right language to tell my extremely sensitive ass that I can. Or should. Tomorrow is a new day. So long as I still a have the ability to see it as a fresh start, I will probably be OK.
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