Electors' Roundtable

Mr. Mheshimiwa,
Bwana Mkubwa,
are you as honourable
as your title suggests?
Would you readily pick up

your spear and shield to
defend the downtrodden and forgotten?
Do you keep your word, Mheshimiwa?
Do you build schools and hospitals,
do you provide services for taxpayers?

Are you a taxpayer, Mr Change Bringer?
Are you familiar with guilt and grief?
Does the injustice of your voters' poverty -
their hungry wails and worn rags-
turn your insides with guilt-induced acidity?

How much do you pay your hauzi, Bwana Mkubwa?
Do the laws you pass apply to you?
Would you rape a 17 year old girl,
leave her with a swollen belly and HIV
and walk away scot free?

Is justice partial to you, Mr Law Maker?
Would you kill a man,
if you could get away with it?
Have you ever killed a man?
Would you steal a woman's land,

raze her house to the ground?
Would you displace a family,
a clan, an entire nation?
How many wives do you have, Mheshimiwa,
how many boyfriends?

Would you demonize homosexuality in public
but keep a secret love nest for your male lover?
Were you ever a child?
Did you wet your bed, Mheshimiwa?
Did you climb trees, graze cattle,

lie on the grass to stare at the clouds?
Did you spend hours in the bathtub
dreaming of being a scientist,
of that one discovery
that would change the world?

Did you bring your mother joy
and your father pride?
Did your family genuinely
like you before you had money?
Did you have friends

before you had sycophants?
Did you ever make a fool of
yourself over a woman, Bwana Mkubwa?
Have you ever been in heart-wrenching,
spine-tingling, insomnia-causing love?

Did you ever employ
seduction instead of force?
Did you ever know how to love,
how to laugh, how to dance?
Did you think your life

would turn out this way?
Are your eyes hard and

dry like the desert

or do you shed tears 

when no one is watching?

Were you a different person in your past life -

were you gentle, were you kind, 

were you human?

Or have you always been
this empty, cold-blooded shell?

                                             N.L. 2010 (c)