What goes around, comes around

Toadies are an exhausting lot. There is one in the senate, and I won't say for whom he toadies, who's fat smug face arouses a deep and baleful rage that it is a wonder he has not been smothered in his bed by the woman he shares it with. There is another one in the National Assembly who speaks with cut-glass kizungu who does so much to remind the people why they hate her and hate her with a passion that it boggles the mind that her not-so-great wealth and power has so far managed to insulate her from the national bile she inspires.

These sorts of people can be found in all sorts of places. They all have the same qualities, though: they are just decently smart enough to be noticed but not so smart as to make anything meaningful of themselves. They are very good at sussing out the direction of the wind, even if the wind happens to be their patrons farting in their face. And because their noses are so finely tuned to wind-direction, they know when to lay supine for the boss's belly rub and when to push whoever happens to be in the vicinity into the path of their boss's inevitable rageful flip-out. And their bosses ragefully flip out a great many times.

They are excellent snitches and, in this day and social media age, expert snitch-taggers. The more successfully they toady, the more they are rewarded, and they usually turn these rewards into armies of 578/= snitch-tagging bloggers who do nothing but parrot the praise-singing of the toadies. They are also well acquainted with the use-and-dump philosophy; so long as it is in their masters' interest, they will use you, abuse you, and dump you faster than they dispose of the prophylactics they use during their more careful assignations. Yet, they forget, they too, are equally disposable.

This is, in fact, their defining characteristic. They assume airs and turn their noses up at the rest of us, believing that the boss would never turn on them. They step on toes and bury knives in so many rivals' backs, it is a wonder that don't notice the blood trails they leave behind wherever they go. This blindspot stays firmly in place until the day they are replaced by brand new toadies. When their usefulness ends, because they no longer pay attention to the task at hand, their fall from grace is so abrupt and so violent, many never recover.

A former chief justice cuts a pitiable sight these days. When he was at the height of his powers, members of the Bar and Bench feared him, and grown men and women quaked in their shoes in terror whenever he turned his attention to them. He wielded power with a brutal viciousness, all in the service of the man he served. He was pitiless. He was remorseless. He was relentless. He did it all to please his master. Then the end came. It was quick. It was brutal. One minute he was in in. The next minute he was a pariah.

Gone were the whispered silences whenever he entered a room; he no longer had rooms to enter. Gone were the furtive glances whenever he passed one by; now even children stare him dead in the eye without fear. Gone was the respectful attention with which people listened to his declamations; now he is lucky if a matatu kange notices he has asked for his thirty-bob change back. Toadies think that they will reign with their masters forever. And while karma doesn't exactly work that way, what goes around, comes around.