My senior colleague, one Uhuru Kenyatta, must be missing his night life. I know how you are wondering how he has become my colleague. Well, he and I work in the same outfit, only that he is up there in the stratosphere and I am down here among the walala hoi.

How we became colleagues and whether he remembers that a fellow such as Yours Truly exists is a story for another day.

I was telling you about how the fellow is apparently missing his night life. When he took on the job of Chief Executive of a country called Kenya, he must have overlooked that he would unable to saunter to his favourite haunt and order his favourite drink.

I mean, those days when he could park his Probox outside some well patronised haunt in Kilimani, pump high fives among excited friends and peers and proceed to a favourite corner to thank himself for a day’s job.

Those were the good old days.

Nowadays, he cannot do that. Not without a horde of highly trained VIP guards coming along in tow. You know those folks.

The mean-faced GSU guys who are said to be able to shoot backwards at a target while scanning the front and taking note of the goings on. Simultaneously.

But we digress.

I was telling you how life on the house on the hill, must be getting a bit tedious for Uhuru.

So much so that just last week, he decided to find out how the street named after his father looks like at night. He must have forgotten.

Stretch limbs

So what did he do? He took Chairman, also known as jakom, for the trip. I mean he asked Jakom to go with him as he took his car for a walk.

Of course, in the absence of the cacophony of loud music blaring from a thousand-watt speakers from all the night joints in town, there was little to see save for street lights and quiet, almost lonely buildings that made Nairobi by night a ghost city. 

But it was a sight to behold to see the son of Jomo stretching his limbs and looking up and down the street.

I could almost hear him asking: “Is this really Nairobi?” It was a rare sight.

Not the ghostly Nairobi but Uhuru in the streets at night. I am almost certain his mother was worried. 

Meanwhile, the Probox followed him from a safe distance. If you think I am talking about a Probox, like literally, think again.

Like I was telling you, he and Jakom took his car for a walk. Walk? You ask. Yes.

You see, a few decades ago, a bufoon called Idi Amin dada, Conqueror of the British Empire (CBE, as he called himself) also the President of Uganda became (in)famous for making chaps disappear.

I am trying to say that if you differed with him, you could vanish from the face of the earth, without as much as a trace. Whoosh! And you are gone.

One day a man of the cloth, Archbishop Janan Luwum disappeared. Amin was the first suspect.

Media asked him if he knew what had happened. He said the man of God had an accident and died when he took his car for a walk.

So, there you are. A man can take his car for a walk, just like Uhuru did. 

The fact that he took Chairman with him means that Raila was taken for a ride. Not the way you are thinking. I mean, do not read between the lines. I mean the literal sense.

A similar thing happened to some friends of mine in Kampala, not so long ago.

Plead case

Four of us had travelled to Uganda on some assignment. In the evening, two of us ventured to sample the night life but forgot where our hotel was.

They hired some boda boda chaps to bring them back. The hotel was not really far but after the effects of a few beers, well, the sense of direction can vanish.

So, the boda boda guy took my friends round and round a few blocks before finally “arriving” at our hotel. The charges were a bit steep, considering they had not been very far.

But the boda boda chap was adamant the trip was long. The guys called me downstairs to help plead their case. 

In the end they paid up. I told them, with some air of finality that they had just been taken for a ride.

As you can see, there are many ways of being taken for a ride. Just like Uhuru and I know. – The writer is Special Projects Editor, People Daily