Esther, F.O.G, Hell On Raila

Prime Minister Raila Amolo Odinga must be seething with rage. The skin around the scar on his left temple must be stretched almost to breaking point. Because on a week that he in all fairness should have hogged all the headlines, a Jazz saxophonist and a former TV personality somehow connived to rob him of the spotlight.

Kenyans are an extremely sadistic lot. It is almost in our psychological make-up revel in scandal, and when the Prime Minister chose Valentines' day to announce that his romantic relationship with the President was headed for the rocks, he was giving us exactly what we wanted and surely must have counted on nothing less than our complete and undivided attention.

But unfortunately for him, it was round about this time that whispers of a very shady relationship between human-thesaurus-cum-jazz-saxophonist [and-apparently-also-preacher] Joseph Hellon and stunning media personality Esther Arunga left the grapevines for the headlines, and as far as sensational goes, the Premier's marital war chants might as well have been the bleating of a lost mountain goat somewhere in Bondo. We iced him out of our attention so fast, Usain Bolt would have screamed with envy.

Which was quite ironic, considering that while the PM was evidently playing for the headlines, the last thing Hellon and [especially] Esther would have wanted was to be a topic of nationwide discussion. So while the PM's lieutenants kept giving interview after interview to the press in a bid to keep him in the limelight, Esther and Hellon called a press conference and told all and sundry to keep the hell out of their private lives.

And this begs the question; should we stay the hell out of these two good people's private lives?

In my opinion, I think we shouldn't stay the hell out of their private lives. In fact, I believe we should hound them to the very gates of hell if that will keep them on the straight and narrow.

From my perspective, Esther gave up her right to enjoy the privacy of any nondescript citizen the moment she picked up a news script and allowed her lascivious figure to be beamed into our living rooms. The same goes for Hellon, who ceased to be a private citizen and became a public figure from the very first time he sat down in front of a paying public and  played his saxophone.

As public figures, a lot is expected of our celebrities. These are the people our children would like to emulate when they grow up, and not scrutinizing what they get up to when the cameras are not on them is tantamount to criminal negligence. We let Tiger Woods have his privacy, and seventeen marital infidelities later, we now know what a horribly bad idea that was.

Esther won a CHAT [Chaguo la Teeniez] award a couple of years ago, which means a large number of young people think she is cool. Hellon's classy demeanor and mastery of the English language during his stint as a teacher of TPF3 left a lot of young people mesmerized and won him a host of fans . Therefore, it isn't beyond the scope of anyone's imagination to assume that these two people's theatrics, be it the distance between their respective beds when they sleep at night or the bizarre aspects of their spirituality, is likely to influence a lot of young people who look up to them and may want to copy them.

The Finger Of God church, which Hellon apparently heads, may or may not be a cult. However, we have the right to ask questions, and not only for the sake of our impressionable younger generation. We also have the right to ask questions because you don't just pluck a TV anchor that half of the male TV-watching population of Kenya would like to sleep with from our TV screens and expect us not to ask questions. And when you convince the said TV anchor to dump her fiancee and distances herself from her family in the process, we will not hesitate to ask even more questions, such as what kind of psychological hold you really have on her.