There is a particular motion every Kenyan has watched a thousand times and none of us has ever fully explained. A woman at a market stall picks up a tomato not to weigh it, not really to look at it either and holds it, turning it slightly between two fingers, while her eyes drift somewhere past the mama mboga’s shoulder, into the middle distance, as if consulting an authority only she can see. She is not reading the tomato. She is listening for something. Ask her what she is checking for and she will tell you, with total confidence, something that cannot be written down and was never taught in words at all.
Fathers do a version of the same thing at the butchery, except there is nothing faraway about it. The gaze narrows. The eyes fix hard on the cut, unblinking, as though the meat has personally challenged him to a duel he intends to win. He requests the butcher to turn it slightly, weighing it with his eyes alone, and chooses with the quiet, immovable certainty of a man who has never once been wrong about beef and does not intend to start today.
We do a version of this with money too, and it is the one that costs us actual minutes, in an actual queue, in front of actual people who nod along because they have done the same thing themselves. Standing at a counter, most of us first move money from the bank wallet into the mobile money wallet, and only then complete the payment we came to make, one transfer waiting on another before either reaches the till. The queue understands. Nobody sighs. This is simply how it is done.
It no longer needs to be, the straighter route has been sitting beside the queue the whole time, the way the stairs sit beside the lift while ten people wait patiently to travel the distance of a single flight.
Instinct is inherited whole. Nobody hands down a way of doing something and remembers to mention the shortcuts that opened up since. We keep choosing the long way, not out of loyalty to the distance, but out of loyalty to whoever taught us the route in the first place. And this is not Common Cents!
The tomato test is still worth doing. The beef stare, too some instincts deserve to stay exactly as they are. But the next time you reach for that second wallet before paying a till, stop. it’s time to apply some common cents. Use the KCB Mobile Banking Platform, via the KCB App or 522# and pay directly from your account. One trip. No stopover. No queue behind you nodding at a habit that never needed to exist and pay directly. That’s common cents!
