Anya

THE QUIET FUNERAL OF CENTRAL KENYA We have a big problem and nobody is talking about it. Not in church. Not in the county assembly. Not at the barber shop. Nowhere. Let me tell you how I found out. This year I needed to hire people. A driver. A shamba boy. A gardener. A farmhand for my goats in Kingeero. Simple jobs. Honest jobs. Jobs our fathers did with pride. I am now on my TENTH driver. Tenth. And it is barely August. I am not quoting a government survey. I am not quoting NACADA. I am quoting my own payroll. Driver number one disappeared on a Tuesday. Found Thursday. Driver number four came to work smelling like a distillery with a birth certificate. Driver number seven asked for an advance on Monday and a funeral on Friday, his own liver was writing the eulogy in advance. As I write this, my current driver is sitting in a police station. Arrested for drunk driving. From a MORNING assignment. Not a night out. Not a wedding. A morning assignment I sent him. The sun had barely cleared Ngong Hills and this man was already gone.😕 Walk through any shopping centre in Central Kenya at 6am and count the men leaning on verandas waiting for the den to open. Men aged 25 to 45. The exact men who should be marrying, building, planting, carrying coffins of the OLD, not filling them. These are working alcoholics. They show up. They function. Barely. They drive your matatu. They wire your house. They handle your goats. And every shilling they touch goes through a keg tap before it reaches home. And here is the part that breaks me. Go to the villages. The shambas are being run by women. The chamas are women. The church is women. The funerals committee is women. The boys are at the base. An entire generation of Kikuyu men is quietly drinking itself out of history, and we are watching it happen through our car windows on the way to work. Who will marry the girls? I am serious. Our daughters are graduating, working, buying plots and looking around at a marriage market of men who cannot pass a breathalyser at 8am. We keep asking why our girls are single at 35. The answer is staggering home right now from a den in Wangige. Who will cry for the boy child? Everyone laughed when that phrase started. Nobody is laughing in Central Kenya. We buried the boy child a long time ago. We just haven’t held the funeral, because the men who should carry the casket are drunk. And the funerals themselves, have you noticed? A 34-year-old dies and the eulogy says “after a short illness.” No. Name the illness. The illness is sold in a 300ml bottle for fifty bob behind the market. The illness has a distributor, a supply chain, and protection. We are the region of coffee. Of tea. Of hustle. Of men who walked from Kingeero to Nairobi barefoot and built empires. And their grandsons cannot walk from the den to the gate. So I am asking, honestly, painfully, with ten drivers worth of evidence: Who will talk about this? The politicians won’t the dens are voters. The church whispers about it once a year. The families hide it out of shame. We have a problem. It is not coming. It is here. It has a police OB number and it is sitting in a cell wearing my company’s uniform. Central Kenya is not dying of poverty. Central Kenya is dying of thirst and it keeps drinking the wrong thing.

I spoke to my old friend Mitch McConnell this morning, the senior Senator from Kentucky. He’s still recovering in the hospital. We talked for just shy of 20 minutes … about IRAN, UKRAINE, the unfolding situation in MAINE, my visit to the TR Presidential Library, and even a little bit of Senate history. I told him we want to see him back at work as soon as possible.