In a few weeks, Justin Muturi should be replaying Martha Mwaipaja’s Nifundishe Kunyamaza, blasting it on his radio until his eardrums hurt.

The statement bears some degree of certainty given a man’s nature to initially celebrate a break-up only to sulk when the reality of loneliness and the feeling of a loss sink in.

Justin Bedan, or JB (no relation to the hard stuff that comes in a green bottle), may boast to his friends that he has acquired a new name, ‘Just-Out’, and celebrate his exit from a ‘toxic’ relationship, where he bore pet names like “incompetent”.

Time, and possibly endless gulps of some of the aforementioned hard stuff, should bring Muturi to the realisation of just how much he has lost. In the current economy where jobs are hard to come by, JB relieved himself of one many would consider “plum”.

His unemployment has everything to do with his mouth. Forced against reading President William Ruto’s speech at a funeral service in Embu in early January, JB sent the first signal that there was trouble in paradise.

“Nisome nisisome?” JB posed to the crowd, which delivered an emphatic “Hapana!”

Little birdies have whispered to many an ear that the former Public Service Waziri earned a scolding for acting as though he had a choice about whether he could follow his boss’s instructions. All he had to do was to read, jeers or not.

During the service, Muturi would speak out against State-sanctioned abductions. Days later, he would remember that his son had fallen victim to the hide-and-seek-playing security agencies at the height of the Generation Z protests.

In perhaps his most stinging statements, JB claimed that the National Intelligence Services had abducted Leslie, his son. At the time, many thought that he had grown tired of flying a bendera on his car.

JB had openly challenged his boss, enough to earn him a sacking. And he would get into the nerves of Bwana Mkuu’s close allies, such as Kikuyu Mheshimiwa Kimani Ichung’wa.

Aware that a statement would not cut it, Muturi planned for the next assault. This time around, he chose the City Mortuary as the venue where he would launch fresh missiles. He should have taken the hint from the morgue’s occupants and kept mum, but his throat itched too much. He scratched the itch with his hoarse voice, making demands on TV to a man he previously said he could show up on unannounced.

“The buck must stop somewhere. In this case, the President, the head of government and Commander-in-Chief of all Defence Forces. Therefore, Mr President, I am calling upon you now to order an end to these abductions and extrajudicial killings as you promised,” JB said two months ago.

Like a husband who ignores the rantings of a nagging wife, Ruto paid little attention to Muturi. Three months earlier, Hustler had parted ways with his former deputy, Rigathi Gachagua, and was not ready to go through a similar episode that soon.

JB went on begging for the sack, skipping Cabinet meetings. He eventually took the hint and went under, before resurfacing in a recent TV interview. Muturi lamented about his stint as Attorney-General and had the guts to reveal he was receiving a salary for nothing. All the legal advice he printed out, JB implied, probably ended up in some dust bin.

His recent outburst seems to have been the deal-breaker for Hustler, who fired Muturi as Waziri on Wednesday. The man from Mbeere had successfully stayed silent for months, which kept him in his job. Keeping JB silent may not be plausible, considering the man identified as a speaker for 10 years. He spent most of this time playing puppet to former President Uhuru Kenyatta before later calling him out for dictatorial actions of purging Ruto’s allies in Bunge. Before his brief stint in the Executive, Muturi had a failed career in being Mount Kenya’s kingpin, despite the sacrifices he had to endure at the Njuri Ncheke shrines in 2021, which may have included the company of a member of the fairer gender.

He has also been a magistrate, a mheshimiwa for Siakago and a loser in the Mbeere North parliamentary election. [email protected]

It is hard to say he left a mark in his former jobs. Maybe if he had asked the Lord to teach him to keep his mouth shut, perhaps JB would have stayed in his former job long enough to earn some sort of legacy.