Maize prices are down, and so should political insults

Maize flour prices have finally started coming down from the branches where Russia and Ukraine lobbed them at, after a non-violent campaign between President Uhuru Kenyatta and flour millers in Kenya.

A 2kg packet of the white gold has now agreed to be thrown into the trolley by anyone who’ll have Sh100 – in some outlets, they’re even telling buyers to keep Sh1 change.

We thank the people of Sri Lanka for helping the heart of our leaders beat faster on this matter.

The next time our leaders are given per diem and they want to find cheaper ways of staying awake all night, they shall replay the clips of Sri Lanka protesters taking turns bouncing off the President’s royal mattress and cleansing the State House pool with organic urea at no cost to their fleeing government.

Since the drastic drop on Wednesday evening, local weather reports have been flooded with claims of political athletes lining up at podiums asking to be given medals for bringing home the ten-ton sigh of relief.

Those selling wheelbarrows at a noise pollution centre near you insist that the revolutionary move couldn’t have come without them shedding chicken blood at press conferences, and miles of jet fuel to go shed crocodile tears for our sake.

The blue corner has no time to fact-check this claim, as they’re busy throwing names of those lining up to serve in the next government, hoping to pick those who’ll stick.

Scoring political points 

There are many effective ways of scoring political points – like going back to the university to finish your degree, returning the public purse to the crime scene you were last spotted at, or successfully regulating the thermostat that beats under your tongue – but taking credit for the low food prices isn’t one of them.

Food is on the ballot in this election. If it wasn’t, chapati disks wouldn’t be flying at campaign rallies as businesses that weren’t on the State House parade threatened to expose those benefitting from the maize flour subsidy.

There’s little doubt that starving Kenyans wouldn’t care less whose friends get to cruise on the Nairobi Expressway from the subsidy money.

All they want is the one-dollar lifesaving packet – they will pay attention to the details when their stomachs stop beating drums of war.

Politics, by design, should be a solution-oriented profession.

When you watch Kenyans running for public office tear into each other for sport, you’d be forgiven to think it’s our natural selection routine that packs in only those fit to change government policy at the end of the juice extractor.

Only that our selection process is one that defies the laws of gravity.

For a country that no longer recycles virtues, it doesn’t come as a surprise when the national conversation about food subsidy degenerates into a contest on who has the choicest adjectives to mark the foreheads of their political opponents with.

Our politics is still disappointingly floating down with the sewer algae.

Canine biologists claim it’s a mark of countries that have gone to the dogs, but the dogs have since requested us to check elsewhere as they’re also concerned with the crassness with which we treat those whom we disagree with.

Food scientists are back from the lab with some groundbreaking news.

They say they’ve been trying to test the calorific content of insults against other food specimens, and the results show that their pilot run was a waste of precious time.

Not only aren’t insults food, but they also don’t have the kinetic energy to jump up the bar and lower the rising cost of living.

If they were, they’d have won the gold medal in the men’s high jump at the World Championships ending tomorrow in the Pacific Northwest.

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