LAST WORD
“ The word sugar daddy has quietly been dropped in the Kenyan social lexicon and replaced by the apparently more respectable ‘ sponsor ’. It appears that the name slay queen is becoming the preferred synonym of the high end courtesan .”
movie version of his life or if he is engaged in a reality show as producer and main actor .
In episode one he charms the populace of a certain county and promises them machine gun economic development . The fact that one of the first things he did was to set up an impressive film production site should have warned the electorate that his administration was going to provide drama .
In episode two the star of the county realizes that he needs to cast for a suitable actress for the role of the first lady , a lady whose looks are consistent with the image of a chap chap economy . The social media informs us that a suitable slay queen has been identified and the rumor mill kicks off .
In episode three the real first lady is shocked to find out that her role has been filled by a pretender to the position and after an untidy but efficiently handled separation , the first lady is kicked out and the interloper becomes the new consort of the governor .
In no time a high level PR campaign is launched to legitimize the new first lady and she gets very busy with numerous charitable projects in keeping with the new broad strategy of development in a hurry and soon her looks are synonymous with the county and progress .
Ochieng imagines that playing the role of a focused and determined development initiator can become very boring and certainly not romantic and the first lady may have become a political widow , sadly realizing that she was mainly a cog in political machinery .
The same social media was at hand to kick off new rumors that associated the first lady in a romantic relationship not with the star of the county but with a musician . In Kenya where there is smoke there is always a blaze under the surface .
Ochieng thinks that it does not augur well for a lady to ditch the status of first lady and the title of your Excellency with all the security detail for the embrace of a musician . But then what goes around comes around and probably the star of the county is casting for a new first lady , they are a dime a dozen .
It is however most interesting to note that the now former first lady with her new beau are requesting Netizens to respect their choice to be a couple . If they were not on social media the world would not care less about their existence , the social media is not regulated by requests .
But it is not only the politicians that are behaving badly and sharing their bad behavior on social media but also media personalities who seem to believe that the best way to get likes and keep their jobs is to broadcast their misdeeds . They believe shocking news sells and keeps them relevant .
Add to this mix all the aspiring slay queens who believe their looks are a free ticket to luxury , they are all online posting suggestive and lascivious content in the hope of attracting the fake lives of ease and merry-making that their digital influencers depict .
It is noted that those involved in these exploits do not respect the sanctity of marriage and there has been numerous cases where marriages have broken because they could not survive the media onslaught highlighting the many infidelities .
One just has to look at the type of posts that are available on Tik-Tok and begin to worry about the direction the society is taking . The internet has become the new hunting ground for debauchery and degeneracy and it is totally unregulated .
The word sugar daddy has quietly been dropped in the Kenyan social lexicon and replaced by the apparently more respectable ‘ sponsor ’. It appears that the name slay queen is becoming the preferred synonym of the high end courtesan .
These subtle word changes disguise a relentless downward shift of the national moral values and are meant to sanitize a deep rot in the social behavior . What started as an uncomfortable joke soon becomes the accepted norm and we adopt the behavior as normal .
The saying was then that a child was not only brought up by the mother and immediate family but that it took the whole village to raise a child . Today one has the unwelcome help of the smartphone and the ubiquitous social media helping to undo what the village used to do .
During the USA elections of 2020 and through the Covid pandemic we have witnessed the devastating effects of misinformation through the social media and just how powerless the government is at regulating it , even for a powerful nation like the USA .
The impact is more pronounced in Kenya given that the older
generation is not tech savvy enough to appreciate the erosion of the morality caused by the unsupervised access to the internet . We used to worry about the television but the internet is a whole new and terrifying medium .
It is a given that the internet is not about to be regulated anytime soon and Ochieng sincerely hopes that the last word on the internet is not that we as a country have ceded control of how we raise our children and impart moral values to a faceless parent online .
The unscrupulous social manipulators have free reign on the internet and an unfortunate side effect of progress is the loss of control of how we raise our children . Parents are already victims of the internet , how do we expect them to navigate and guide their children ?
We are familiar with the political adage that power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely overlay this with the truth that the internet corrupts and total access to the internet corrupts totally and you have the recipe for a veritable and devastating moral Armageddon ! ■
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MAL 44 / 21 ISSUE