By the Idler-in-Chief
There are phrases here in Nyagenke that sound harmless until they are followed by catastrophe.
Here, when a wife tells her husband, “Sit down, we need to talk,” the man immediately begins remembering all the goats he converted into beer before the year of Korondovirus arrived.
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Now Nyagenke has discovered another dangerous phrase: “With all due respect…”
My kinsmen encountered this linguistic grenade during the great Fuel Strike drama, when the Minister for Pawa, one Gepiyo Andai, marched before television cameras with the confidence of a man who had already seen tomorrow’s newspaper headlines.
Flanked by transport representatives standing behind him like reluctant choir members, the minister declared that they now had a deal.
But then something unusual happened as one of the transport representatives suddenly developed the courage of a Nyagenke grandmother chasing a chicken from her millet farm.
The man stepped forward as the cameras continued rolling and opened his statement with the famous words:
“With all due respect…”
My kinsmen immediately knew metaphorical blood was about to spill because in politricks nowadays we use microphones instead of pangas.
Indeed, what followed was a televised below the nose attack delivered in broad daylight.
The guy calmly informed Nyagenke that no agreement had been reached and that negotiations were still ongoing.
In short, he overturned the minister’s statement the way Nyagenke wind overturns umbrellas of Mama Vegetables in the market during rainy season.
The Nyagenke nation could not sleep.
Within minutes, social media was flooded with memes.
One showed a man carrying a chair with the caption: “With all due respect,” while another showed a wife standing over burnt ugali saying, “With all due respect, eat.”
A barber reportedly chased a customer from his kiosk while declaring: “With all due respect, your beard is beyond rehabilitation.”
You can now see that the phrase spread faster than gossip at a rural funeral but beneath the laughter lies an important lesson.
For many years, my kinsmen have perfected the art of nodding and clapping while (mis)leaders manufacture reality in front of cameras.
A minister says fertilizer has arrived when farmers are planting stones, while another says roads are complete yet buses disappear inside potholes like hippopotamuses entering River Nyagenke.
In Nyagenke and beyond, truth is so endangered that if someone tells it loudly in the market, women selling bananas stop counting change just to stare at the person.
What made the confrontation handsome was not the anger but the timing.
The man did not wait to issue a correction three weeks later through a blurry Facebook post written in capital letters but tackled the falsehood right there, before it could mature into official truth.
That is the kind of courage Nyagenke requires.
So let historians record that during the great Fuel Strike season, the Nyagenke nation learned an important democratic principle: whenever somebody says “with all due respect,” it is wise to tighten your seatbelt, because respect has officially ended and the hard tackle is approaching.
— The Idler-in-Chief
