Sucking dick for relevance is a pandemic in a society where a genuine skill-based economy has been deliberately suppressed and elevation comes almost exclusively through shameless self-promotion, cronyism, nepotism, tribalism, and similar forms of degradation.
And unfortunately, to justify your stay in an unearned position, you constantly have to reduce yourself to doing demeaning and self-disrespecting assignments.
We joke about the men sent to the car to get a jacket, but it actually happens. And it always stems from a position of profound weakness and insecurity.
To see a Prime Cabinet Secretary like Musalia Mudavadi reduced to photographing his boss is quite shocking and unfortunate. Now his wife and children know exactly what shameful things their father has to do to afford the high-class life and helicopter ownership.
He had a choice. He could have retired gracefully and started a legitimate lucrative business enterprise with all the Goldenberg money and Mahindra tenders he stole during the Moi era. But this is the thing with dick-sucking – it becomes an addiction. Once you taste that life of proximity to power, you can’t do anything else.
Now here is the funny part: Mudavadi was Finance Minister in 1993 when William Ruto was still a goon in the Youth for KANU ‘92, because Ruto was first elected as Eldoret North MP in 1997. Imagine that.
And the worst part is that it never ends well for this misguided lot. Joseph “JJ” Kamotho was always put through the public humiliation ritual of kneeling before dictator Daniel Arap Moi. Despite all that public display of servitude, he still died broke, his family is stuck in protracted succession battles, and a section of Karura Forest that he had grabbed was eventually repossessed.
So all that dick-sucking was an exercise in complete futility.
In Kenya, sucking dick has become a full-time career for many. Starting from the very top, William Ruto himself has to suck colonial dick. There’s a white person he kneels and reports to, because that white man controls the levers and holds leverage over him.
The examples are far and wide – it is impossible to even elaborate the entire chain. But the truth remains: the few who refuse to embark on this self-defeatist undertaking are the real heroes.
The 0.001% who opt out of the temporary benefits and perks of this demeaning condemnation may suffer in the interim, but they will secure legacies that their children can actually be proud of.
