When political maths won’t add up

My maths skills are breathtakingly bad, even for a journalist. It is not a matter of nationality or age, those who make a living out of banging copy can’t add, it is a very well known fact. 

I got a text from the bank informing me that minimum payment for the card is due. I have grown uneasy in the company of credit cards, especially when it comes to the small matter of settling the debt.

Credit cards can smell when you have some money. Many are times when you have a little extra income and you are making arrangements to do something out of the ordinary, then your card autopays. And you move from having a lot of money to being debt-free. 

There are two things about me and credit cards: I don’t like the idea of all my money going into settling my debt in one fell swoop. Two, I am incapable of changing the instructions to the bank to anything other than recovery of the full amount. I suppose this comes from the same place as the maths thing; it is irrational. 

However, as credit card debt ages, the rate of interest creeps towards the Shylockian stratosphere, which is not a place you want to be. Full recovery keeps Mr Shylock at bay and maintains some level of discipline.

I have been known, in a previous life, to take extreme measures to protect a tidy lumpsum from the card. In the days when bonuses were paid out routinely in the news business, I remember one day going to the bank on the 29th and withdrawing a tidy sum and locking it up in my glove compartment to protect it from the auto-pay element. 

KDF Theorem

Around the 3rd, I went back and re-deposited the entire sum, confident that at least I’d see a large amount of my money in the account for a while. Hours later, the phone chimed cheerfully; a text had rocked in. Thank you for your credit card payment.... The element had been lying in wait, undercover.

I was recently having a sort of out-of-body experience after getting that familiar text that minimum payment so and so is due and I was trying to calculate, with some disquiet, the total debt from the minimum payment demanded, by solving a simple equation, with my tongue clenched between my teeth, my eyes looking at each other fixedly, a wet brow and an escalating pulse. 

Eventually, I gave up and applied the KDF Theorem. 

The KDF Theorem provides as follows: If you have three Al-Shabaab terrorists on the second floor of a mall, they have a machine gun, a sniper rifle and a counterfeit AK-47 assault rifle and they are using suppressing fire to prevent you from running up the stairs and shooting them dead, what do you do?

You bring an RPG and fire at the columns supporting the third floor, bring it down and sandwich the terrorists between two floors, thereby killing them. QED. 

Applying this method to credit card debt, you ask yourself, if five per cent is Sh50, how much is 20 per cent? And you work your way up to 100 per cent. If you are having a bad day, you can can go up to 120, — 130 per cent even.

Good leaders

I am trying to apply the KDF Theorem to the 2022 presidential race. If you haven’t figured it out yet, presidential politics in Kenya is deceptive. There is hedging, double hedging, even triple hedging: A supports B, but also supports C, just in case B does not work out, and D, in the unlikely event that B and C go belly-up — or rogue. 

It is impossible to tell who genuinely supports whom, because politicians don’t do genuine support. They support candidates who best serve their interests, and candidates who serve their interests if their first-choice candidates make a meal of things, and so on and so forth.

As I have already demonstrated, my mathematical credibility leaves a lot to be desired and I have been known, on the rare occasion, to take important decisions on the basis of formulae rather than reason. 

However, I want to recommend that as the presidential race narrows and the election draws closer, flirt with the KDF algorithm. But don’t apply it at the top; apply it from the bottom all the way up (pun intended). 

Ask yourself, does this fellow represent my values, does he think like me? Secondly, does this fellow’s agenda serve my interests and those of our village/estate or is he just going on and on in the service of his own stomach?

Always remember that the X-Factor in Kenya’s under-development is not our laziness or lack of imagination: It is our failure to grow good leaders who can lead us with honesty and dedication. So, why complicate the decision-making process when you can approach it like a good soldier — simply and directly?

If the maths does not work (add up?) don’t blame me. I’m bad at it. 

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