ASPIRATIONS: NEED TO MAKE CONSTANT REVISIONS

With the current Bear run at the NSE causing the not so brave hearts unending jolts, and having to watch our portfolio values getting eroded by the day, I would wish to momentarily veer off from the intentioned content of this blog and share some experience.

I recently had to go bury my uncle who in my tradition should be more accurately be referred to as my "Elder Father". This was happening at place about 300 kilometers from the capital. About 200 Kilometers of this was on good road taking up 2 hours of the 7 for the whole journey. The final part is a mere 95 Km but the torturous road condition, which took the remaining 5 hours made me understand why infrastructure is so key to a modern economy

I have made three trips to this place in my life time. The first one was when I was quite young, at Primary 2. The trip made in the company of my brother and Dad is clearly etched in my memory. Just like us, my uncle's sons were young and in the innocence of youth, time spent with them, playing funny games in the fields was enthralling. My uncle was then an enterprising man with successful businesses in the "foreign" land. He had this Zeal about him and had so much hope in his young Family and the future. Since we made the journey overnight, in the morning, on our way back home, the taste of the tea and the toast, coated with a generous layer of margarine, known as "bandika" in our local lingua, taken at some hotel at the then "Machakos airport" bus station was so relishing to my young mouth, that to this day, I still remember it, but I digress.

Fast forward, my second trip was around ten years later. I was on holiday waiting to get admitted to a higher institution of learning. By this time, the economy had under the hands of one D T Moi, been taking a serious beating. The hitherto thriving businesses in that area were visibly struggling. Most of my cousins had dropped from formal schooling with their father taking advantage of them as unpaid or cheap labor in his then apparently ailing businesses. Being adolescents, we still had a lot of bonding interests, like "hunting" for beautiful lasses who made our raging hormones go hyper.

Over the years, though, I never went back there again; I became a constant SOS target to both my uncle and cousins for some unending problems about this and that

My latest trip back there was an unfortunate one. After persevering a long stressful period of having to see what he had acquired in his younger days go to waste, with some of his charged properties to a Farmers credit source, AFC, being threatened with auction, while in other properties, having being invaded by squatters, who even armed with eviction court orders but with no financial capacity to effect, refused to budge from the land, and with most of his sons village idlers and visible abusers of substances; alcohol or more potent stuff, he had decided that some pesticides were not only made for annoying pests like rats or bedbugs but could be turned to some other uses like ending his life. So determined to die was he such that, some stuff he vomited was so potent that as I was told, ten domestic fowls, which unfortunately in a quest to get nourishment, on the place the vomit landed, met early death

So here I was, along with my kin, having to make the torturous journey just to throw a handful of soil into his grave and hence participate in burying him. Sometimes when I think about the amount of resources we spend, both financial and time so as to conform with our cultural norms, I wonder whether this "Africaness" of ours is worth it, but again I digress.

The moral of this sad story is that we must keep reassessing our ambitions and aspirations, constantly modifying them along the way, otherwise we might just end up like my uncle; frustrated, disillusioned and tired with life