Although other factors might have contributed to our break-up – I would kill to know them – I do squarely blame it on politics. I mean there has to be someone to take the blame.
You see, I am the proverbial good guy; loyal to a fault, faithful, never unnecessarily quarrelled, never laid my hands on her, and took care of her when I could, when I couldn’t I can say at least I tried. There was no reason as to why she would leave me. We hadn’t talked about marriage though, but we were headed there by virtue of the length of time we had dated.
Like typical lovers, we’d talk late at night, even though we never had anything, really, to talk about. Then we’d punctuate the night with all the lovey-dovey stuff, and drift off to sleep. Did I dream about her? No. She was my dream.
One night we are talking about politics. I remember Josephine (her name) talking about how Zedekiah Kiprop Buzeki had thrown a hell of a bash for the youth, and they were (then) singing about him all day. She said she had promised free wifi to the youth.
"He is a great guy, he should be our governor," I thought to myself. I supported Buzeki not because of the free booze or any other progressive policy he had – I don’t remember any even – but because of the hotly contested gubernatorial race in Uasin Gishu during the last general election. The race pitting the incumbent Jackson Mandago against Buzeki was a hotly contested one.
Every candidate was trying everything he could to win. Divide and rule of course came into play. At some point, it was against the Keiyos and the Nandis, allegedly, vying to control the town. Because I supported Buzeki, they said he was an outsider, by virtue of having married a Kikuyu.
I couldn’t believe when Josephine told me all these stuff, which I countered, telling her it was not going to affect my stand. I think I said something close to "you do not even own the land you piss on and you are talking about Eldoret being sold". From that moment on everything became Buzeki this, Buzeki that. She would say ‘enda kwa Buzeki wako’ and I would counter ‘unadhani mandago atadistribute pesa kwenu.’ It was a real quarrel we ever had since we met in 2010.
It wasn’t exactly a model relationship, what with it’s on and off thing. Everything she didn’t agree would always degenerate into a Buzeki-Mandago affair. Then one day she wouldn’t take my phone anymore. I had travelled from Nairobi to cast my vote. On Monday morning, a day before the elections, she sent me a text that we weren’t compatible anymore, that she was tired of all the quarrels.
There might be other things, but I do blame politics. I mean we are from the same tribe, speaking the same Kalenjin dialect. I mean what’s the big difference between Keiyos and Nandis?
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