KAIKAI'S KICKER: Prayer? Give me breakfast!

Ostensibly brought together by well-meaning religious intention, political leaders proceeded as if nothing had happened. This, hours after they all knew of a school dormitory fire that had killed more than 10 girls.

The so-called prayers made no mention of the incident, its victims or distressed families that were still making their way to Gilgil. I watched in utter shock as speaker after speaker went on about their prayer breakfast business, making no mention of the Gilgil incident.

So much for a prayer gathering.

I hope this is not too harsh; this was Kenya’s most heartless gathering in recent times.

This gathering lacked humanity. This gathering failed the most basic human test of empathy; that basic instinct of one human being feeling the pain of another. Those were heartless people, all of them.

They did not care about the feelings of the parents of 16 innocent school girls lying in cold ashes in the aftermath of the fire. I presume they were too distant for them to relate with. They did not know who they were. Clearly, none of them was a daughter of any of them, just some obscure girls of some public school.

These were anonymous little souls not big enough to interfere with the grand flow of breakfast and a prayer.

I waited for any of the speakers to show just a little trace of humanity. There was nothing.

When President William Ruto finally spoke about the incident, he could not even get the name of the school right. And this he did at the tail end of the function. In fact, he had finished making his long address that detailed his record in office. The Utumishi fire incident came as a near afterthought during the photography session.

This was truly cold of the entire leadership that gathered for the National Prayer Breakfast today.

Yet all the while, they afforded to crack jokes about football, specifically Arsenal. The Members of Parliament, on their part, sustained the habit of making a comedy of their singing. They joked about their voices and their lack of practice, and generally about how poor some of them were in singing. They laughed about it before proceeding to leave the joke.

Then there were a couple of prayers from the podium, none of them making any reference to the people that really needed prayers today; the parents and relatives of Utumishi school girls.

Again, the National Prayer Breakfast will be remembered for the spiritual disaster it was today.

Tonight, critics of this annual ritual are vindicated. The National Prayer Breakfast is not about prayers, it is just another political spectacle.

For a keynote speaker this year, organisers drafted in Ugandan presidential advisor Chris Rwakasisi, to share his life story as an illustration of the theme of this year’s prayers, which is forgiveness and reconciliation.

The guest of honour, who was a former powerful security minister in President Milton Obote’s government, explained how he was pardoned by President Museveni and released from prison after 24 years.

Unfortunately, there were no local illustrations of forgiveness and reconciliation in a prayer breakfast that did not have representatives from the Kenyan political opposition.

All that, in my view, was overshadowed by the callous handling of the Utumishi school tragedy.

Again, that was a heartless National Prayer Breakfast.

That is my kicker.