It is cool for presidential aides to crawl around him on live TV

My dog Sigmund is excited to note that Kenyans have finally realised the benefits of walking on all fours like him.

One of President Uhuru Kenyatta’s handlers was towards the New Year’s Eve caught on camera crawling, exactly like Sigmund, as the Head of State gave a live TV interview in State House, Mombasa.

“It wasn’t a Mombasa jinn,” Sigmund reassures his fans, some of whom are still hysterical that an Indian Ocean spirit might have been pretending to be a crawling woman to seduce the all-male panel of journalists that Friday night.

“I urge the public to remain calm on this matter,” says Sigmund in a statement. “It’s only that Kenyans have evolved to the advanced stage of adopting my walking style.”

He recommends aides who crawl across a room that way should, like him, frequently raise a hind leg in the air and mark their territory.

An occasional loud bark would scare journalists from pestering the boss with unnecessary questions.

TASK

Those without a clue what the aide was up to think that she was trying to avoid the glare of the cameras and that the camera crew filmed her by accident as she moved from the right side of the President to the left.

One theory claims that the woman was supposed to perform an unexpected task that required her to cross to the other side of the room when the cameras were focused away from her pathway.

The cameras resumed focus in her direction by mistake, according to this thesis attributed to State House Spokesperson Kanze Dena.

Sigmund only partially agrees with this explanation. “Indeed, with such high-powered equipment the cameramen were using to beam the most powerful man in Kenya to our homes, you still needed to crawl like me even when the walk across the room was supposed to be outside the choreographed camera view,” repeated the celebrity dog in a whirlwind of media appearances following the much-discussed crawl.

Do working-class female aides have to crawl their way around State House in such a supplicant’s posture to keep their jobs?

GENDER PARITY

Sigmund defends State House against accusations of bias against women, who rarely appear in pictures at presidential functions in spite of the President’s Strategic Communication Unit (PSCU) head being a woman.

On the interview panel, there were no female journalists, not because PSCU is haunted by patriarchy; rather, it was because of Ms Dena’s, and by extension State House’s, commitment to the welfare of the boy child.

In this arrangement, only male journalists should be interviewing the President on important issues like his signature Big Four Agenda, corruption, and the building bridges initiative.

According to Sigmund, women are best suited to read scripts written and edited by men and to crawl behind flags like cockroaches in live interviews.

The President has the best trained journalists in his communications team such as Dennis Itumbi, and gaffes are impossible in a State House media round table.

These officials hold advanced degrees in political communication and can think on their feet, not crawl around like clueless clowns.

SIMILARITY

Sigmund, who claims to be well-connected in presidential media circles, says that the woman’s crawl was part of the script to show the authenticity of the President’s rare live TV interview.

Sigmund goes so far to recommend that the President should get himself a dog to crawl behind him during such interviews because an adult human being doing so looks a little bit like an unidentifiable crawling object.

Given that there were no curtains in the set and the camera crew could see the crawling woman outside their frame, it is likely they just wanted to humiliate her by not cutting to someone else as she slithered past the President.

Sigmund heatedly disagrees with this theory, but without offering any reason for his stand.

Some detractors may argue that the crawler mimicked a drunkard trying to get home after over-indulging in Mombasa’s mnazi brew.

However, that movement style serves to highlight, through contrast, the interviewee’s sobriety, eloquence, and focus on issues.

The crawl also has nothing to do with the economy, stupid. Kenya is making great strides in all the key economic sectors, argues Sigmund.

ECONOMY

Enjoying a steadily rising debt of 43.32 billion US dollars (57 percent of the GDP) and close to eight percent inflation, we can’t be said to be suffering a crawling economy.

In the interview, the President inadvertently understated Japan’s indebtedness by putting the Asian country’s debt at “over 100” of the GDP (it is 253 percent).

But unlike in Kenya, most of Japan’s borrowed money goes into the private pockets of corrupt cartels.

Our trains and roads are far better than Japan’s. The crawler may actually have been mimicking the Japanese trains compared to our state-of-the-art fleet.

Sigmund suggests that we borrow more from anybody who can lend and reach 500 percent of the GDP soon to make Kenya a developed nation like Japan.

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Considering that the Commission for University Education now requires PhD candidates to publish their research in peer-reviewed journals before they are awarded their doctorates, Sigmund, for reasons only known to himself, has been scouring academic search engines for Dr William Ruto’s published works.

Let the dog continue his search, including in the Vasco da Gama Journal of Non-Existent Research. Good luck, Sigmund.

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