So how do you know that you have been away from your native country for way too long. Never fear, I am here to give you the warning signs that you have lost touch with the motherland.

1) Communication is Lacking: You go to your native countrymen to have a conversation and the only word you understand of a language that you used to think was yours, is the greeting. This particularly applies to creole or ever-evolving languages such as sheng.
2) Everyone Talks to You in English (or French): Even though you grew up speaking the local languages, as soon as people see you, they change from natives to Rhode Scholars.
3) You wear a Kenya/Ghana/South Africa T-shirt IN Kenya/Ghana/South Africa: Short of special events, most people don’t wear shirts proudly declaring their citizenship while they live there. Clearly you have missed the place.
4) You Pay Higher Prices for Everything: As far as shopkeepers are concerned, you are a tourist and so should be treated as such.
5) Your Family Members Don’t Recognize You: Maybe it’s the weird curly kit hairdo (both men and women), maybe it’s the excess of baggy clothes, maybe it’s the weird walk and the even weirder accent. Either way, when your aunties look at you, they are actually looking through you searching for the young person they sent abroad.
6) You Expect Everything to be on time and efficient: You complain to anyone around you that passports shouldn’t take this long to process/ buses shouldn’t be four hours late/ the police should actually live to serve people.
These complaints are almost always taken as a spoiled cry-baby trying to tell everyone what to do.

7) You are on time FOR EVERYTHING: If you find yourself being punctual for everything, occupational functions AND social functions, then clearly your concept of “African time” is gone and you have been abroad too long.
Off the top of my head I can think of a few more but I will leave for the floor open for y’all to share with me some of the signs you have noticed of this deadly disease.
From one member of the diaspora to another,
Mwangi
Barely a day after the swearing in of the Grand Coalition Cabinet, President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga told Kenyans to “stop the stupidity and shut up” if they wanted the two leaders to loosen the firm grip they have on the country. The president accused Kenyans of hypocrisy for criticizing him and Raila for forming a bloated Cabinet.
“Kenyans asked Raila and I to stop killing poor people and we did,” the president said, obviously agitated. “They told us to form a Grand Coalition Government and we have. So where is all this stupidity coming from?”
Images of malnourished children will no longer be the face of starvation. We will instead see food labelled with extraordinarily exorbitant prices, shortages that force even the wealthy into long queues for food and total anarchy as countries in different parts of the world spiral out of control as the hungry demand that they be sated.
Read more from Brian Mogaka here.