And run you must from this social ill- just run away from it, I implore you!

I have dined with the high and the mighty so have I with lowly placed members of the society, I’m neither rich nor poor but I know what it feels like to be any of them none the less. Lately I have been engrossed in these two worlds, analyzing and evaluating them.

Poverty is capable of depriving a man of all spirit and virtue, it can compel you to take very many unnecessary risks with your life that if you had an option you wouldn’t, poverty dehumanizes, humiliates and limits an individual a great deal, and poverty as Mahatma Gandhi puts it, is the worst form of Violence.

The rich and the poor have different worries all together: when you are busy surfing the internet for scholarships to further your education, they are surfing the internet for all the different reasons- to read the profile of the best collages in the world where their kids can study, fee of course is never an issue.

While you waste your precious time in a restaurant mentally computing the total amount that you will part with after taking that meal, that is none of their worry, when they feel like having a proper meal, they check in a hotel and order that food without worrying about the price, later they swipe and just go their way.

While you are worried about going blind by taking an illegal lethal brew a.k.a Yokozuna, they start with tonic water as they order their favorite brands

While you are worried of whether  your makeshift house built on top of petroleum pipeline will catch fire due to some leakage or whether  the city askaris will demolish it while you are asleep because it is built on a road reserve or that it is near the railway line or whether the faulty power lines crisscrossing your  makeshift  in a slum will set your house ablaze, they are busy thinking of how to enlarge their dining room, how to bring in new imported furniture but more importantly they are thinking of how to get rid of you within their neighborhood.

No, they never worry about stray bullets, diseases like cholera, dysentery etc they just wonder why and how they still exist, malnutrition and hunger is almost an extinct vocabulary to them. They have better things to worry about than whether matatu touts have gone on strike.

When you are poor, you become so susceptible to so many things, not only diseases but also to ideas, just about everything is able to sway you, for instance you are the first person to reach KICC  or Nyayo Stadium for Pastor Ojigbani’s husband/ wife prayers, you believe without questioning Loliondo’s medicines, and you easily jump to any church promising instant wealth only to realize later that actually they are the ones milking you dry- just because you let them and partly because they understand your psychology and know just which buttons to press to manipulate you.

If you can (and you have the ability to) please, just run and run very fast- just run away from poverty run and find your freedom, coz with this freedom you will never be any politician’s puppet, you will be in a better position to demand accountability and transparency from your leaders, you will be in a position to say no to committing most crimes but above all you will never have to worry about risking your life unnecessarily just because you do not have an option, so dear brethren-RUN!