A prerequisite is a thing that is required as a prior condition for something else to happen or exist. Hypocrisy refers to a situation in which someone pretends to believe something that they do not really believe, or that is the opposite of what they do or say at another time. Having made a keen observation of how hypocrisy has entangled the society, I decided to come up with its six prerequisites, the behaviours practiced by the society which give a vast room for hypocrisy to exist and thrive from generation to generation.

The first prerequisite of hypocrisy is greetings. One day, as I was walking on the earth road linking my motherland Kimu village and other adjacent village on the upper part of Kyuso ward, I met a woman crying. Her face had bruises and her eyes were as red as a cherry. She seemed to have had a horrific night or probably a horrible beginning of the day. It was in the morning, just a few minutes after the sunrise, whose rays aimed at her bruised face with an incandescent light as if to make her situation known to everyone in the village. To my astonishment, when I greeted that woman, How are you?' in my mother tongue, she replied 'Am fine!' and brushed past me with tears still flowing from her eyes. You will agree with me that the woman was not fine at all. If she was to be sincere enough, she would have said 'I am not fine'. However, I cannot pin the full blame on her. The woman was practicing what she had been taught from childhood, on how to respond to greetings. She had witnessed it herself from the time she was clever enough to understand the cannons of language; greetings should not have a negative response. That is where the line of hypocrisy crosses. It might seem to be a thin line in its existence, but what matters is that it is there. The woman saying that she was fine was a lie in obedience to the dictation of how people should respond to greetings. The scenario exists everywhere round this multicultural globe. In every society, there are...