The Daily Nation of this Wednesday past carried two front-page stories that, on the face of it, appeared to have no other connection except that they were both about Kenya.

The first was printed under a 48-point banner headline telling us that church leaders were offering to mediate in the dispute pitting the two main political rivals – read Uhuru and Raila – over the contentious issue of the so-called Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission, or IEBC.

The second one was a (I guess) 18-point single-column silencer whispering to readers that 11 million Kenyans were bound to develop mental illness of one kind or other. It was the disparity in the importance accorded the two stories that was the story for me.

A whole quarter of Kenyans are about to go crazy – to varied degrees, to be sure, but crazy all the same – and you think that clergy trying to bring the warring political tribes together is more important news-wise? You must be crazy yourself. After all, Kenyan churchmen – like churchmen in all our countries – have been doing that kind of thing all the time, simply because it is their job.

But it is not the job of a quarter of Kenyans to go mad, and therein lies the newsworthiness of that story. It may be that the banner headline is one of the causes of the subject of the smaller story, in the sense that we fail to prioritise even the most glaring and frightening phenomena in our midst.

It reminds me of a Serbian adage, “The whole village is burning and the old hag is scratching her backside!” Presumably because that’s where she’s itching.

But no, seriously, the mental illness story is a shocker. However, since they say that misery loves company, our neighbours need not fear loneliness if the story should prove true in the fullness of time. Whatever will have afflicted them, they may rest assured, will have afflicted a good part of the region, if not the whole of Africa.

As a young man in the 1970s, I was in love with London and Paris T-shirts carrying catchy inscriptions. One I bought in London had this to say: “Madness is hereditary, you get it from your kids.” I thought it was funny. That is, until I started talking to couples that had had run-ins with their own children.

Still, I do not think that only your offspring have the capability to send you howling mad.

There are other agents too, such as the “miasma” that comes from inhaling foul air from all the burning filth around us, noxious chemicals that our governments do not mind if other countries’ industries dump in our water and land; or the ineffectual drugs that fatten rather than kill mosquitoes; or the expired foods that we consume and the corrosive cosmetics we use to bleach our skins and the sheep wool we wear for hair, in search of a spurious “beauty” that makes monkeys of a good section of our female friends.

Above all this, sits the most maddening agent of all, the African politician, the Homo Politicus Africanus. This is a species that has eluded all the characterisations of the Leakeys and all the other palaeontologists and anthropologists, but they exist in our midst with the sole aim of driving all of us up the wall, as howling, stark, raving mad zombies doing their bidding.

It is the (HPA), Homo Politicus Africanus, who caused the last flare-up in Kenya some 10 years ago and now seems hell-bent on causing another one, come early next year.

It is the HPA that caused the madness in Rwanda in 1994. It is the HPA that is running riot all over the continent, riding roughshod over citizens’ rights, beating, maiming and killing all those he doesn’t like or cannot buy.

The madness reported in that news story will not be confined to Kenya. We are all thoroughly contaminated by the “miasma” I referred to earlier, and I believe that rather than place our faith in the prelates in Nairobi, who in all fairness may be meaning well, we need to do a serious pathological analysis of HPA and see how we can counteract the deadly virus they are constantly breathing into our body politic, and have it exorcised.

Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: [email protected]