I think Raila Odinga could do with some
help when it comes to letter writing. Since he wrote to the President a
week ago, he has been waiting for a reply. The signs are not good.
So Mr Odinga decided to do something different; he demanded a reply. I can see why.
It
is not as if it was a love letter or contained a PIN number for some
bank account. It was full of criticism of the President’s one-year
reign.
If your girlfriend wrote a letter telling you
how useless you were, I doubt you would be in a hurry to reply even if
she demanded that you “be a man and reply”.
Letter writing flew out the window alongside dungarees. PS: If you have no clue what a dungaree is, you have not lived.
I
used to be the king of letter writing in high school. I had many
friends who happened to be girls (had to phrase that carefully for the
sake of peace) and we loved writing to one another.
Stamps
were super expensive and that is where toothpaste came in handy. Now, I
have no idea who the first person was who, when brushing his/her teeth
thought, “Wait a minute, I can use this to remove the post office rubber
stamp on the stamp.”
Whoever he or she is, that person
deserves to be honoured as a Kenyan hero and the good toothpaste maker
deserves special mention in our history books.
When it
came to finding sweet nothings to jot down, I was the undisputed best
and even charged a fee to write letters for my mates, who would then
send them to their girlfriends.
A letter did not just
start with a “Hi”. No! It deserved creativity. You either went with the
template… “I am grateful at this moment as I dirtify (sic) this Webuye
product to write this missive…” If you do not know about Webuye Paper
Mills, my heart bleeds for you.
Before you wrote that
letter to your girlfriend, you first drafted it in an exercise book
before you transferred those thoughts to a writing pad that had fancy
graphics and even flowers — we were the real McCoy people.
One
fancy writing pad went for about Sh5, which was a lot of money then.
You see, it cost about as much as a quarter loaf of bread and if you
were in my high school, a loaf of bread was as important to you as it
was to the 5,000 people who followed Jesus to a mountainside in
Bethsaida.
Once you were through with your letter, you
would turn the page and dedicate two or three love songs. Somehow that
worked even when you dedicated the wrong song, like Atlantic Starr’s
Secret Lovers.
There are those who even perfumed the
letter so that the recipient’s nose buds would just be as happy as she
was at that moment. The girls went a step further and even added their
teardrops to the letter, and that was supposed to be a romantic gesture!
Now, I think it is really disturbing.
After you were
through with your dedications, you would take your crisp white envelope
to the class calligraphy expert so that he could write her name and
school and make a name like Mwihoko DEB Secondary School or Theodesia
look cool (nothing personal, Theodesia).
At the back,
you would, of course, remind your 15-year-old heartthrob (I was also 15,
so calm down) to open it with a smile. Do not forget that you already
had her attention with the classic “Zoom Zoom it to…” preceding her
name.
So, I think one Raila might need some letter
writing skills. Start off by saying something nice like, “Your eyes
remind me of ripe tomatoes,” or “Seeing your smile whenever I walk into
any building in town thrills my heart.”
The President
has talked about how much he loves UB40, so Raila should have mentioned
that in the “Dedication” section and also, and this is crucial, included
a stamp with the letter so that State House does not have to incur any
expenses when replying.
So, for these two BFFs who are
mostly out of, rather than in love, I wish you all the best. Whatever
you do, feel free to burn each other’s letters but not the country. Now
that is not asking for too much, is it?
@Mwanikih
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