This is a fictitious story about a day in the life of a faking Kenyan. Let’s give him a fake name in keeping with all the fakes in his life.
His name is Al Haji Paul Kamau Kipchumba arap Onyango. Sounds fake enough for the purpose.
In the morning, he wakes up after a sleepless night and brushes his teeth using contraband toothpaste. He puts on his new mutumba suit, douses his armpits with a fake, radioactive deodorant and applies dye on his graying hair, making him look 20 years younger.
His girlfriend, folds of cascading tummy a radical shift from the firm control shaper supported flat tummy that originally caught his eye, serves him tea made largely from a mixture of water and formaldehyde, a chemical used to preserve bodies in the mortuary, which is added to the milk from real cows to increase the quantity.
She tosses a sugar bowl full of the recently imported, poisonous sugar. As he adds a spoonful into his tea, he notices that the sugar is darker, and the granules appear to be moving.
The observation quickly exits his mind, for what could really go wrong with a body like the Kenya Bureau of Standards (KBS), a whole Anti-Counterfeit Agency and the National Police Service in place to protect us?
He gives his girlfriend a fake kiss, a favour she returns with equally fraudulent enthusiasm, jumps into his imported second-hand car held together with imitation spare parts, bought with an expensive loan to keep up appearances, and drives, on adulterated fuel, to work using the driving license he bought from a deregistered but still operative driving school.
At the gate, he waves to the sham guards from the private security firm contracted to man access to the gated community. This is their part-time gig; their day job is spying on residents on behalf of professional hoodlums.
On the way, he sees Kenyans scurrying around, many pretending to be going to work.
For most of them, work consists in looking for work, complete with a lunch break, during which they sit in a park and eat air burgers with a side dish of dust, which they down with the spittle from street preachers and civil society activists with bulging veins on their foreheads.
The Kenyans complain a lot about poor leadership but absolve themselves from blame despite voting for their incapable fast-talking fellow tribesmen swindlers, known drug dealers, criminal gang lords, comedians, musicians and deejays.
For Kamau Onyango, work consists of selling fake bottled water. Water is drawn from the broth of pollutants that is Nairobi River, which is forever being “cleaned” with huge budget allocations, percolated through a gravel and charcoal filter at night and packed in recycled bottles before a fake KBS sticker, emanating from the KBS headquarters no less, is affixed.
This work has its professional hazards. There was a time a group of serious-looking policemen gave them a real scare when they noisily arrived at the “factory” and confiscated the charcoal filter, a contraption vital for their business.
With his partner, they “talked nicely” to the policemen, meaning they gave a genuinely painful bribe of Ksh.10, 000.
They narrated the escapade to their buddy, Mohamed Bonaya Kilonzo, leading manufacturer of fake paints guaranteed to turn into white dust after a year, who told them that the policemen were actually imposters.
Kilonzo came to know this after they “arrested” him, appropriately holding him by the seat of his pants while waving a fake walkie-talkie made of wood that had been painted black. While walking him to the police station, they encountered real policemen and run away.
The real policemen, who appeared fake, for that is how every policeman appears when fake ones are allowed to roam free, demanded that he produce the fake policemen who had arrested him.
They frisked him and took away his wallet, with its contents of a paltry Ksh. 2000, a water bill for his home, which had received not a drop of water for two years, and a fake parking disc which he uses to access a private parking space in town.
Fake water is the only job Kamau Onyango can do. His fake degree, printed in Kirinyaga Road, has completely refused to yield a decent job for him.
Which shows bad luck is real, considering that his friend Mwenda Ogendi’s fake medical degree landed him a job in a county referral hospital where he now cuts up and stitches people, prescribes medication and is about to marry a beautiful nurse with fake eye lashes.
During lunch, he eats artificially coloured green mukimo, served with donkey meat masquerading as beef, sourced from Naivasha.
The dessert is a banana, ripened with calcium carbide, and an imported apple preserved with daminozide, both dangerous cancer-causing chemicals.
In the evening, Kamau Onyango passes by the pharmacy to buy some medicine for his woman. The pharmacist sells him the best “generic” meds whose main ingredient is diatomite (chalk).
Before going home, he stops by his Local to consume his favourite brandy, which he has no idea is produced artificially with HIV anti-viral medications.
It has a quality assurance label and it says don’t consume if seal is broken. He always makes sure he breaks the seal himself. It has a taste that is a little sour, which he hardly notices after the first sip.
A bevy of ladies enter. They are donning the longest hair female Brazilian corpses can give up, and high heels stolen by night runners from other people’s doorsteps.
A young man with false, steroid biceps and sunken red eyes and a fake American accent has ordered clear vodka made from ethanol for his friends. They will all probably be blind in a few hours. To put it differently, they will have fake eyesight.
Some senior government official has issued a genuine counterfeit threat of his own to the manufacturers and dealers of these entire fake products.
Which is fine because even our own nation’s name, if you investigate its origins properly, is fake. It could have been Kirinyaga, but was “fakelized” to “Kenya.”
If the smile on your face is not fake, thank you for laughing over a very serious matter.
By Muiru Ngugi
Source-medium.com
Fake Kenyan: Faking It All the Way In Kenya
Fake Kenyan: Faking It All the Way In Kenya
Fake Kenyan: Faking It All the Way In Kenya
