Should we go back to pre-pandemic normal?
To:
- weddings with 500 guests that cost Sh.5m
- destination weddings with 50 guests that cost Sh.50m
- 3 day funerals with 3 hour church service, across 3 towns like a mega-city rock concert; feeding 1000 people at a total cost Sh.5m?

- CEOs, Govt officials, NGOists and every shade of wanna-be that used to spend 15 days in every month at 37,000 feet; slept in their own beds no more than 5 days a month and spent sums of money that we can never tally accurately...?

Meanwhile, millions live in windowless hovels and dark 5-storey flats with no cupboards, and no grass or trees in sight to clear their lungs of toxic fumes.

At dawn, they are packed in contraptions called Nissans - the misnomer we call public transport - to work 14-hour shifts.

We remember them with our Charity Olympics - those one off donations from the high and mighty, mislabelling CDF and other public funds to look like their personal magnanimity - when what we need are systems.
Piped water.
Functional free healthcare.
Education that liberates.

Everything about the way we lived, the “normal”, was vulgar and excessive and expensive and heartless and unnecessary

(May Ndingi’s funeral next week establish a new norm for burying dignitaries)

We can’t go back.
We mustn’t go back to that pre-COVID life of obscene indulgence

The obscene indulgence of a few - most of them leaders, living large and reckless on public funds - surrounded by the neglect and want of the majority.

We can’t go back there.
We mustn’t go back there.