Mixed Up Priorities

Last night while I was sitting on my couch watching the news I realized that Kenyans have the most uncanny behaviour. We simply love to completely sideline the most important 'national issues' and focus on the ones that don't really matter. “How?” I hear you asking. Well, let me use this past weekend as an example.

Rants and raves by Mojoh Sojoh

When you ask random teeniez what happened on the weekend of 10^th/11^th October, you are most likely to hear the same answers… that is “MAMAs and Project Fame 3 finals”. Ok, I don’t dispute that these are perfectly relevant topics but I’ll tell you what happened this past weekend that you probably either have no idea about or heard about and decided to brush aside like something that doesn’t really matter.

1. We lost our hopes of going for the Africa Cup of Nations (we were never going to the World Cup) when we lost 0-1 to Tunisia. This amidst calls that Coach Antoine Hey was the wrong man for the job in the first place.
2. Athlete Samuel Wanjiru broke the Chicago Marathon record by running a time of 2:05:40 and in the process bagging himself 17 million bob for the effort. At 22, Wanjiru rapidly is turning into the greatest men's marathoner in history: He has won four of his first five marathons, including the 2008 Olympic title in a course record; only one person, Ethiopia's Haile Gebrselassie, has a faster average for his five best marathons (2:04:57) than Wanjiru (2:05:53); no one has run faster in his first five than Wanjiru; and the winning time Sunday, fastest ever run in the Americas, was only Wanjiru's third fastest.
3. The Kenya Society for the mentally handicapped had a walk that took place on the 10^th of October and flopped seriously.

Now these three things tell us a lot about being Kenyan at the moment and especially the fact that they went almost unnoticed. I mean Wanjiru is on the verge of accomplishing what Paul Tergat didn’t…beating Haile Gebresalassie in anything!

The saddest of them all is to think that the mentally handicapped citizens of Kenya got almost no backing from us in their time of need because (and we all know this is true) people were gearing up for the MAMAs that were scheduled to happen that evening. While we were all preparing our dinner gowns and after party gear and splashing make up on ourselves someone

who would have used that money in a far better way.