Raila Odinga needs help with letter writing

Raila Odinga signs a document in his car in August 2007. Cord leader Raila Odinga wrote to President Uhuru Kenyatta on June 20, 2014, assuring him that he is not interested in grabbing power.  Photo | FILE | WILLIAM OERI

By Philip Mwaniki
More by this Author

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