Benefiting from our collective misfortune is senseless, satanic

 “Water, Mr Rango, water. Without it there is nothing but dust. But with water, there is life. Some desperate to live, they will follow it anywhere. That is the immutable law of the desert. Control the water, and you control everything.”

Those words from the mouth of a tyrant are staggeringly loaded with unchecked capitalist hubris. When uttered amid the groans of human suffering, they signify the depth to which human conscience, bloated by the flatulence of excessive power, can sink during times of collective misfortunes.

These are the words of the Mayor of the town of Dirt, in a 2011 computer-animated comedy film titled Rango, written by John Logan and directed by Gore Verbinski.

Rango is a dystopian film in an outpost town named Dirt, which is on the verge of collapse under the weight of corruption, lawlessness and hoarding of essential goods, especially its most precious natural resource – water.

The town is populated by the desert’s most whimsical creatures, gun-slinging and deathly; there is no water and trouble is brewing from all corners. The leaders, notably the Mayor, with the help of a motley crew of his spanner boys, the likes of Bad Bill and rattlesnake Jakes, ride roughshod on the back of the desert's pandemic – dehydration – to swindle the town's residents of their land. The residents are so dehydrated they can see their insides.

The Mayor, a garrulous tortoise on a wheelchair, a wheeler-dealer and unscrupulous putrid reprobate is determined to use dehydration to make a profit.

He is an ogre on the prowl. However, inside the persona of this Mayor, I see a reflection of the few Kenyans who are ravenously devouring money for containing Covid-19 with abandon.

Yes, there are some people, and some institutions, too, who have strategically positioned themselves to profit handsomely from human suffering.

When you hear stories of some people benefiting from the funds intended to buy protective gear and reagents during the current world pandemic, the town of Dirt comes to mind.

Gearing up for a corruption spree as hardworking citizens loss jobs, and patriotic heath workers work 24 hours trying to push this invisible enemy out of our borders is not only saddening but grotesquely sickening.

These are the likes of the Mayor in this film, who, armed with unbridled impunity, dump the much-needed water in the desert cunningly planning to bring it back to the town when he has bought all the land. Of course, he does this with the help of his foot soldiers.

When our economy is groaning under the weight of this enemy on the prowl, it is not the time to thrive in a collective misfortune. It is tempting fate.

Public coffers

What happened to our ubuntu; I am because you are? Where did we get these vulture-like talons that are always ready to ravenously devour our public coffers whenever there is a misfortune, and especially now when our economy is suffering?

Just like what happens in this fictional land of Dirt, blackmailing peasants into selling their lands as wastelands because there is no water, a few of us are using the virus to make a killing.

Starting with the ones selling to us bogus face masks and faulty thermo guns, to those getting paid by the government for supplying nothing. We are slowly becoming a nation where acts of blatant corruption are getting normalised, passing as working smart.

Equally evil is to pretend that you are doing all of us a favour; that yours is an act of goodness, philanthropy when in reality you are milking us dry.

Corruption will significantly undermine the response to the pandemic, and it may take a millennium to flatten the curve.