“But why don’t all these Kenyans, if they are so miserable, go back home?” she asked.“Pride. You have been here only a few months, and you hate it, but if I asked you to go back, would you?”“Of course not,” she said curtly. “Europe may not be all that, but it is better than being stuck in Mukuru kwa Reuben. At least now, I can send my mother enough money to get her off the daily, punishing market grind.”It was hard to explain how she could hate London so much, yet have no desire to return home. It was like refusing to walk out on an abusive relationship.

It was a job at the reception, in a company that sold land. Nothing to do with what she had spent too much of Mr Muthama’s money studying. She hated the job on the first day, and every day after that. Within a couple of months, she started to seriously consider leaving the country. To America. So she started saving money for a passport, for a visa application, to improve her bank account.She had been ill-equipped for the interview, and it had taken the immigration officer at the American Embassy less than a minute to decide she was a flight risk.A friend had advised her to get another passport under a different name, which she did with no qualms once she realised she would not be the first, nor the last. Biometric technology had not made a global mark, 9/11 had not happened, thus the world was not as suspicious.

In September, I wouldn’t be going to City Hall as the new legislative councillor from Nairobi West, but to the “Twin Towers” of Kimathi Street as the new arts editor of the Weekly Review magazine. On Sunday, I would pay Danny Boy and his crew to undo everything we had done over the past couple of months—take posters off the street walls, get the banners off the roads, and so on. In short, I would be doing “the Lord’s work” in the eyes of my rivals, some of whom had already been doing it for themselves (Satan also helps those who help themselves, as I have come to learn in this lifetime).But first, I had one last commitment to keep.

Esther had been told, now and then, that she had a beautiful smile, but it was not often that she found a reason to smile. As she looked at her passport, she knew that not only had Lady Luck smiled upon her, she had, for good measure, also thrown in a happy giggle. In her little palms, she held her passage to the United Kingdom – wealth and good life were beckoning. She thought about how it would be like to not live in poverty, which had stalked her life like a shadow. It was the same poverty that had stalked generations before her. 

The first item on the menu for any politician, big or small, is printing costs: posters, flyers, banners, caps, T-shirts, and even motorcycle reflector jackets for the boda-boda riders so they recognize your name early. I will tell you more about the posters and reflectors—the tortuous processes and the “colourful” characters and low-down weasels who inhabit these spaces—in the next chapter. Suffice it to say that, thanks to a Communist Party comrade, I was able to find a good man called Maxwell deep in the bowels of River Road. In his dusty, third-floor office with a window facing smoggy skies, we bargained for posters, flyers, and banners for Ksh85,046.

For whatever reason, Maendeleo Chap Chap hadn’t materialized. My friend and fellow EPL football fanatic, Mwingi West MP Charles Ngana Ngusya (CNN), assured me that if I wanted a Wiper nomination for Nairobi West, he could get it for me. But with his party leader, Stephen Kalonzo Musyoka, being a bitter foe of my great friend Governor Alfred Mutua, Wiper was as attractive as keeping a viper as a house pet. I briefly considered the Muungano Party, whose chair was then Governor Kivutha Kibwana, a humble man and healthcare champion who had taught me jurisprudence at the Parklands Law Campus, University of Nairobi, at the turn of the millennium. But unable to reach him on his personal phone that week, I dropped that option.