By Jerome Ogola
Facebook is like a madman. You elope with someone discreetly, only for it to start shouting notifications to all and sundry that so and so got married
Away from that, but still on madness, did you know that every flyover in Kenya has a madman/woman living below it? The saying that every market worth it’s name, is entitled to one mad man,should be amended to accommodate this new development
That was the dessert and now we are on the main meal. This is the final day of 2018, and we are about to sing luwere to it. In school, we had a rite known as “kufunga shule”
This entailed, randomly picking any weakling around, without consulting them, and announcing it to them, that you will be closing school with them
Before they give their views on the same, you pounce on them with a vicious attack, pumping blows everywhere on their faces and head, to showcase your latest acquisition of tactics from Bruce Lee movie, you gathered from the open air cinema that visits the market once every month
After beating someone, unprovoked, as your fellow fools cheer, you then leave the scene, walking with pride and a feeling of importance like that of a certain polygamous govenor, while arriving for a funeral
It is time to close the year. I have carefully scrutinized the my list of enemies and arrived on Safaricom for the third year running. I will “funga mwaka” with this cellular phone service provider
My choice isn’t as unprovoked as was the case of what we did in Primary. I have settled on Safaricom for a litany of grievances
To begin, you are a necessary irritant, like a torn blanket, which I am uncomfortable with, but discarding isn’t an option because I’ll freeze to death
You reward loyalty through a program called bonga points. For every ten shillings one use in your service, you reward them one point. They are supposed to accumulate such points to tens of thousands for them to qualify for a cellphone worth a few thousands
For example, one should have 50k bonga points, which they spent 500k shillings to acquire, to be rewarded with a not so expensive phone. I find this ridiculous, as rewarding PK chewing gum for every purchase of a Mercedes Benz, Is that really a reward?
Bwana Safaricom, sometimes this year,your data network went on a safari, for a whole day. Most Kenyans browse the internet from daily subscription of your bundles. By the time your network came back from the safari, these daily subscriptions had expired, meaning you took money, probably in hundreds of millions for services you never delivered
You are a scam
For every 200 shillings a broke Kenyan sends to a more broke relative, you sneak in your filthy hands in the traction to to steal 43 shillings. This is around 25% of amount transacted
This to me, is robbery. The cost of such a transaction shouldn’t be more than 5%. Your data SMS data tariffs are even more crazy. You sell someone 1GB of data, at 99 bob, because you know too well, with normal usage, a cellphone won’t consume such in a day
You also give 150MB of data at 19 bob, and cleverly, you attach to it a one hour lifespan. All these programs expire within the stipulated period and aren’t transferable
This is like living someone four hooves of a mature male jumbo and forcing them to eat it alone, in one hour. Is that a favour or a mockery?
In the days gloomy to us, those that don’t go so well,I always visit Mama Mwangi the local grocer, stay behind, let everyone jump the queue, then when everyone is gone, I request that I be given, a quarter of a quarter of a kilogram of sugar, also called sukari ndogo, an invention that happened during Jubilee regime, which remains their only achievement
When I go to pay the debt a few days later, I am never charged a cent beyond the normal selling price of the commodity I had taken on credit. Why do you charge 10 shilling for every one hundred shillings airtime which one requests in your platform
Is it a loan to attract an interest? This amounts to being insensitive enough to prey on your clients during hard times to make a kill from them
The list of complaints is endless, but let me end it here for now. I hope you change with the new year
Lest you forget, I had discarded your line for a sojourn in Airtel, when our baba advised us to do so, but sadly, after defecting with drama, I sneaked back incognito to Safaricom because the former’s network is as slow as that of an expectant snail
You seen to have taken advantage of this monopoly to terrorize us more
Now I only have one prayer. That Collymore goes back to his country Guyana, so that a local ie Kirubi can be tasked with this giant blue chip’s management so that he can KENATCO it to death in a record time to create room for its dwarfing competitors to tall up
For those who may’ve forgotten, Guyana is that that country described by someone as a “mosquito-laden humid swamp in a suffocating rainforest whose natives are short ugly looking Indian folk who eat monkeys and swamprats and have been inbreeding forever”
I wish all my fellow hoof eaters a wonderful new year 2019
LUWERE 2018. WANYONYI AKHULINDE!!
