Last word
On Fools Gold
Ochieng remembers with nostalgia the good old days, yes, the past is by an unwritten convention, always good, when as high school students they meticulously planned the pranks that they would pull off on April fool’ s day.
One of his favorites is when he and a group of his schoolmates knocked on the door of one of their new single female teachers at six thirty in the morning and informed her that students had planned a riot and would attack teachers on that day.
Ochieng and his cohort of pranksters had recruited four layabouts from the village, armed them with all manner of crude arms and informed her that they would protect her and asked her to remain indoors as they stationed the‘ guards’ around the house.
They then proceeded to school as usual and at eight o’ clock a student informed another female teacher that she had met the‘ marooned’ teacher on the way to school and she had asked her to cover for her as she was passing through a dispensary to get medicine.
One of the reasons those days were called good is that the ubiquitous mobile phones did not exist so it wasn’ t possible to countercheck their claims and the unsuspecting teacher spent a fearful morning grateful for the protection of the concerned students.
At midday, yet another student went to the teacher’ s house to‘ innocently’ check why she had not come to school and since by then the‘ guards’ had disappeared and on inquiry learnt that there hadn’ t been any riot and school was in progress.
The teacher, realizing that she had been pranked took the whole matter in stride and Ochieng still wonders what would have transpired had the teacher been mean spirited and decided to escalate the matter. Those truly were the good old days.
In later years Ochieng was to experience this same spirit of pranks as the local newspapers used to craft elaborate hoax stories that were so convincing that it was
For a politician to stand on a podium and be heckled as a liar and people actually walk out on him is to begin the slow match to political death. The sobriquet of a liar is a death sentence to any politician, a peddler of lies hates being called out by name. only on the following day that the editors confessed to the pranks.
Again, those were the good old days when fake news was not in vogue and the newspaper was the final authority on news. Something was true because it was written and the best way to confirm anything was to produce written proof, usually a newspaper.
Times have changed and Ochieng imagines that if a Kenyan was to read in the papers on April fool’ s day that the president and his administration had resigned to take full responsibility for a scandal, they would all know it is a prank, nobody resigns in Kenya.
This should be an extremely sad state of affairs since Ochieng realizes that the reason no Kenyan would be fooled is that we expect so little from those in positions of power and definitely the word integrity is not in the lexicon of our leaders.
Of a more immediate concern is the fact that the editor of the newspaper that dared to publish such a story would be picked by the infamous Subaru squad even though it obviously was a prank and on April fool’ s day. Nerves are that raw.
A good indicator of a shift to totalitarianism is when the country exhibits a suppressive and intolerant attitude towards any criticism and dissenting voices are bombarded by a barrage of well-orchestrated verbal attacks by the leader’ s acolytes.
A recent group to be roundly castigated were the Catholic bishops who, as per
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