LIFE ON FAKELAND

Fake is the trendy word in Kenya today.  This trend began with mobile phones and slowly moved on to toothpaste and now is on us human beings.  The way it started with human beings, there came a fake miracle baby Pastor. Then the faking bug moved from London where the fake Pastor lives and moved to the IDP camps where people, who had never owned a piece of land the size of a handkerchief were clamouring for land that the government was distributing to displaced persons. 

Others left their farms and joined the two and a quarter acre gravy train. Before the country recovered from that fake shockwave, a fake policeman was found for the police, in the police by the police.  I had expected the PPO’s look alike dummy that probably the police hanged at the door or made sit on the PPO’s seat because, it is almost too good to be true that a real walking breathing human being can take charge of a police station and not even the police are aware that he has never ever seen the Kiganjo Police College’s gate (it has police colours).

We were shocked for a good national average of two seconds.  Then a fake doctor was smoked out. We moved from shocked to afraid for another two seconds each. The hospital administration wanted us to believe that the fake doctor walked through the hospital gate one morning and assigned himself a room at the hospital and began seeing patients.  If the hospitals were not the gated communities they are today, that tale would have sold for billions.  We were told that he used to creep into other doctors’ offices and copy diagnoses which he later dished out to patients on a first come first served basis. 

On the day he was found out, he gave an old man the diagnosis of a pregnant woman. The woman had been admitted earlier at the throws of delivering her baby and a real doctor filled in the necessary sheets for her.  The nurse who was to care for the old man asked him to go back to the ‘doctor’ and get the right copy of his diagnosis sheet.  The ‘doctor’ feigned busyness and frisked through other notes and second time round he fished out the medical notes of a deceased person who had already started doing time at the morgue. That sealed it for the ‘doctor’. 

We’ll never know how many other old men were treated for pregnancy and for being deceased before the hospital administration found out after zealous investigations that the guy had never seen a medical school with his two eyeballs.  

Good gracious! Who will take the next fake title of the year? Think of a pilot.  Up there in the skies, the intercom comes through in that fake cheery voice of a hostess, “Attention passengers, we are pleased to inform you that we’ve just discovered that the pilot is fake.  Kindly fasten your seat belts as we laaan……’’ KABOOM!