Kenyan as indeed really people of peculiar habits.
Look at tourism for instance. We know the difficulty of trying to raise our tourist arrivals to the 1m mark having tried for so many donkey years, yet when one of our sons – an MP no less – decides, in empathy with a foreign tourist board no doubt faced with similar challenges - to be a tourist himself and visit…wait a minute, The Hague, we are quick to throw muddy brickbats at him by associating him with all manner of riff raff who are being held at The Hague.
Why, the MP was even kind enough to let 2 other Kenyans tag along on his tourist visit so that they also get a chance to see the world! Did you hear that? He’s paying their airfare, meals, accommodation, everything! Very touching, very kind guy and nice guy really. Call such an act of anything other than someone imbibing from the deep well of kindness and I will tell you to immediately stop drinking busaa in the Nbi CBD, which is for whisky-drinkers who can pay 300/= parking fees and have a 2,500/= plate lunch at Serena bila matata. You can now understand therefore why after reading so much disinformation about Ruto’s simple visit to The Hague, I have altogether given up on reading. Never before has a tour by so few Kenyans elicited so much misinformation in so short a time as this 3’s has done. We clearly don’t understand tourism and must expand it to mean more that just going to our shags and at most, to Mombasa. I really hope the new katiba closes this gap.

I mean, everybody has been talking about The Hague in the last 2 years. Wouldn’t you want to go to The Hague to satisfy your curiosity and get a first-hand eye-witness account of the place so many millions of Kenyans (who have never been there nor can even trace it on an atlas), keep talking about it? For heaven’s sake, there are even matatus and kangaroo courts called The Hague! Wouldn’t you want to know the how the original Hague looks like, given it inspires so many people, and also makes other perspire even more? This is exactly why Ruto choose to tour The Hague, and tellingly during the high tourist season of the end of the year no less! Really, what more proof do people need that he’s a simple tourist endeared to Netherlands the way old European women fall for our real and fake morans?

You know, when you come to think about it it’s downright unfair – you save up painfully after meeting your constituents’ funeral & other harambee expenses and visit a famous place and people start labeling you all sorts of nasty things associated with the place. Now you understand why I have personally been unwilling to be a tourist to South Africa (a country with very high crime and rape rates). Because idlers will start saying I am a criminal who also rapes his victims. Or I have gone there to get an additional wife. Can you imagine that? Of course those who know me well will say its because of a severe, sustained and almost likely permanent lack of finances due to rising parking rates, rents, fuel, rising beer prices, a deep allergy to save, and so on, but ah, don’t believe such idlers. By the way, that also puts paid to my intention of visiting Swaziland, which is a dirt-cheap tourist destination really, lest idle people tell my busaa-drinking boo that my tour has something, or everything, to do with the many bare-chested girls especially those gracing a certain annual festival.

I imagine after The Hague, the MP and his friend Keter (no he was not there for any marathon) and his learned friend, would all have visited Philips Inc., the global electronics giant. Now he won’t. Which makes you wonder - why would any sincere person begrudge someone who has recently been bitten by the travel bug, from visiting such a global corporate icon? The Hague is only the 3rd largest city of Netherlands (after Amsterdam and Rotterdam), and I fear because of all this porojo, pang’ang’a, pararira, vuvuzela-like noises he may not even visit these 2 great cities at all. Really, he will not even get to visit Amsterdam’s famous red light district at all! That’s inexcusable for most Kenyans given that most of us would want to FIRST visit this red light county, then if at all, Rotterdam and The Hague as a by-the-way!
Why visit such misery on a simple tourist from Kenya?

All this because of gossip, idle gossip by people, idle gossip by newspapers keen to push their circulation levels to the stratosphere at all costs and half-baked journalists who carelessly use the MP’s name and the words ‘PEV suspect’ in the same sentence without giving a hoot in the world.
Suspect? What suspect?! Saying such an MP needs to be a state guest at The Hague is absurd – that place belongs to very warped minds and not such a valiant son of kenya who did a sterling job in agriculture ministry causing fertilizer prices to come crushing down like a ton of bricks. And in Higher education, didn’t he rightfully pinpoint sciences as the vehicle that will lead us to the hallowed gates of Vision 2030? And who can forget this son of Kenya’s efforts in assisting KANU develop this country, through the YK 92? How then can idle gossipers and idle editors reconcile his great development record to those macabre and bizarre PEV things he is said to have done?
Are they suggesting he has multiple personalities, a schizophrenic, a real Jekyll and Hyde character?
Really now all you idlers!!