News just in Nyamakima folks rejoice as Baba writes own epitaph in Addis Ababa

“Hayaaaaaaaaa!” a man grunts, before imitating a newscaster: “Habari za hivi punde…” News just in, Mahmoud Ali Yousouff is the new African Union Commission chair,” the street broadcaster says, before wailing “Kimeibio, kirudio!”

The latter, a colloquial quip insinuating that the polls have been rigged, and so must be repeated, is a leitmotif that defined Raila Odinga aka Baba, the former opposition leader who recently contested and lost in his quest for African Union leadership.

Baba had spent the better part of the recent months celebrating what seemed like inevitable victory—a record 40 MPs reportedly flew to Addis, drumming and dancing and gyrating— before Baba was shown kivumbi by the candidate from Djibouti.

I am making my forays in Nyamakima when the news from Addis is delivered on TV screens, to a gleeful reception from mainly townspeople hustling to conclude business before closing for the night. Nyamakima is fabled to have altered the outcome of the last presidential polls as the smouldering ruins of counterfeits worth billions of shillings were turned into a campaign issue by former DP Rigathi Gachagua aka Riggy G.

Never again, Riggy G swore, would small businesses be sabotaged by the government they had helped install, a jibe that was directed at former Prezzo Uhuru Kenyatta, whose efforts to mop up counterfeits was weaponised as “economic sabotage.”

That feels like such a long time. Since then, Riggy G has been hounded out of town and many Nyamakima traders have since closed shop and left town, reportedly weeping with one eye shut because of tightening taxation on imports. Hardly the outcome they had anticipated.

And since the Addis results were far from what Baba had anticipated, he was so shell-shocked he was barely audible when he rose to speak, thanking Prezzo Bill Ruto, and exonerating him. The decision to run, he insisted, was solely his, not Prezzo’s.

And how did the two get conjoined? That’s the question Baba could not answer, providing a powerful epitaph of the great political emasculation of our time that, thankfully, was self-inflicted, pre-meditated and ultimately, irreversible.