Mkokoteni dignity.

The Constitution mentions "dignity" twelve times. (Yes, I counted. I'm obsessive that way.) It is a word loaded with meaning, if one cares to look.  It is one of the few words in the Constitution that is treated with utter contempt. I had opportunity to observe the casual way in which indignity is visited on the little people today. I believe that the lead taken by our leaders, especially the celebrity ones, has contributed to how we treat our fellowman as we go about our affairs. (By celebrity, I am not limiting our leaders to the members of the music or "local content" industries; I also include celebrity preachers and politicians.)

That I am a commuter comes as no surprise to you, my dear reader. By habit, commuting is an opportunity to scroll through all those unsavory emails from total strangers wishing to either borrow goodly sums from me or to sell me concoctions of dubious provenance guaranteed to enhance certain preferred appendages. But because of the rank failure of the Government of Nairobi City County, I find my eyes staring out of the bus window when we approach that mad house that is the City Stadium bus stage along Jogoo Road, take the roundabout and join Landhies Road which terminates at the Retail Market.

There is a hierarchy to traffic on Nairobi's roads. Bigwigs with sirens, outriders and chase cars are at the top. Then come those with fat enough wallets to purchase what the print journalists refer delicately as top-of-the-range cars, which range from that outrageously gorgeous Ferrari 599M I saw in Westlands last week to the Nissan Pathfinder, provided it is still in good nick. Then come the hordes who have somehow managed to persuade their bank managers that Nairobi ticks because everyone lives beyond their means and have secured credit facilities that permit them to acquire the seemingly hundreds of thousands of Toyotas, Nissans, Subarus, Mazdas and Hondas that seem to crawl from every arterial road in Nairobi.

The bottom of the hierarchy is dominated by Large Capacity Buses, then the twenty-nine-seaters, then the twenty-five-seaters, then the fourteen-seaters and then the nduthis and boda bodas. At the absolute bottom are the mikokoteni. What persuaded me that life of the mkokoteni-puller is one of  continual fear and danger of violent death, and solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, was the utter contempt and hostility with which he was treated, especially by the nduthi rider and the matatu/bus driver. 

There are men who have pulled mikokoteni for decades; it shows in the lines in their faces and the set-in-cement callouses on their hands and feet. Theirs is a piteous existence; yet they have not turned to a life of crime and they have founded families of their own, educated their children and kept a roof over their families' heads. Life has conspired to render them desperate, but they do not live lives of desperation. Like everyone else in this city, that's their hustle and they will make of it what they will.

Despite the sometimes quiet dignity in their faces, from their county government on up or on down, they are viewed with hostility. From the mbeberu, to the minister for Local Government to the Governor to the motorist to the matatu/bus driver to the nduthi rider - but especially the nduthi rider, the hand of their fellowman is unremittingly turned against them. The city wants to banish them to the outer reaches of its precincts - and its psyche. We live in denial that if it was not for the subsidies provided by these hard-suffering men, Nairobi's cost of food would skyrocket overnight. And so we tolerate them with contempt writ large on our faces.

Today I saw a nduthi rider, with casual cruel violence, ram his cut-rate nduthi into a mkokoteni, nearly sending its middle-aged puller spilling in front of an oncoming Citi Hoppa and my rage almost boiled over. I blamed Evans Kidero and I cursed the day he was elected the Governor of Nairobi City and I cursed twice over the day the Supreme Court said he could keep his seat. The manner in which the nduthi rider's cruelty went unremarked is the same way that the casual neglect of the working classes is being done by the Government of Nairobi City County. It is not the rich who need civic services; it is the working poor like the mikokoteni-pullers of Nairobi, for whom the right to earn a living is being treated as a privilege by their own government and fellow road users who are more a menace than a blessing.

We have been conditioned by the rich and the beautiful to sneer with contempt at the poor, the scarred, the malformed and the smelly because they do not meet our standards as we believe them to be from our idealised view of wazungus of all shades. In Tennessee, during the Jim Crow Era, the State issued permits to hunt Black men. In Kenya, in Nairobi, we are slowly building up to the day when it will be open season on mikokoteni-pullers: if they are ever the victims of road traffic fatalities, the Government will turn a blind eye. If you think this is in jest, simply ask of Governor Kidero whether he has any statistics on the deaths and injuries of mikokoteni-pullers in his city, or whether he has any programmes to integrate them in the city's physical infrastructure as seeing that we will never get rid of them. (That is, if you care.)