Let us stop pretending that things can be made better with the flick of a switch or the snapping of fingers. We are, after all, not children or mentally infirm. We are adults and as adults we know the truth. If we broke our leg, it would not take a kiss from mommy to set the bone or to heal the break. It would take a team of doctors and nurses and pharmacists to get the leg healed and useable again.
Think of Kenya as a human body with multiple organ failure. Nairobi is the heart of the nation; if it has an arrhythmia, the rest of the body's organs are bound to feel the aftershocks. If this nation is to make a stab at moving away from ten generations of governmental mistakes, it is in Nairobi that the necessary change must begin. Uhuru Kenyatta inherited a bloated public service that had been stuffed by the mediocre and the uninspired, hired by successive mediocre and uninspired regimes. Not even Mwai Kibaki, economist par excellence, could resist the urge of packing the rank-and-file with nonentities from great beyond.
But it was in the local authorities that this lunacy reigned supreme. Nairobi City had it the worst. When "ghost" ranks of employees were exposed, the problem was simply covered up. Ministers of Local Government proved to be the weak link; taking money from the grateful hands of local authority bosses, they were not prepared to rock the boat and the tumor of the bloated wage bill became the size of the organ itself.
Nairobi has been cursed to have been left in the hands of the selfish and the greedy for far too long. Mayors treated it as a personal cash cow, milking it for all they could. Its municipal facilities are in the shitter. Garbage collection is an intricate extortion racket. Public transport is an intricate extortion racket. Street lighting is an intricate...You get the point, I hope. And the idiots who think that Evans Kidero is a magician had better get their sippy cups, their bibs and put on their nappies, because we are sending them back to nursery school. Where they belong.
Serious people know that before things get better, Mr Kidero will have to demolish a corruption infrastructure that has survived three presidents, including one who hang around for twenty-four years; it has survived reforms, bankruptcy, dissolution, and civil war. It requires patience and intelligence to circumvent its decrepitude. I do not know if Dr Kidero is the answer to Nairobi's many challenges, but I know he does not have partners in the national government and his party is treating him as if he is transmitting the Ebola virus. If he achieves anything, it will be despite the sabotage by the National Government, especially the Senator and the Woman Representative, and it will be despite the backstabbing obsessive pettiness of the Coalition for Reforms and Democracy's petty internal paranoia that sees conspiracies against Baba in every corner.
Before Mr Kidero can do anything, he needs money. Hundreds of billions of shillings. Billions to rebuild sewer and drainage systems, county dispensaries and clinics, county primary schools, county social halls, county sports grounds, county street lights, county by-lanes and main roads, county emergency services...Dr Kidero cannot do this if the only budgets that will be approved by the county assembly are those that see its members traipsing off to Italy to study "how wine is grown" when the motherfuckers can barely pronounce in vino veritas.
We know this, because none of us is a child easily persuaded by saccharine words spoken by unctuously oily adults. We have the ability to think. We have the ability to think clearly. It is time we started acting like it. Unless we are really hankering for that sippy cup, bib, nappy and nap-time at three p.m. sharp.
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