Thursday, December 11, 2014

What a disappointment.

In order to stay well clear of the strictures of the law on slander, libel and defamation, I will choose the adjective "disappointing" to describe the Government of Nairobi City County. We elected the Governor partly on his track record as a record-beating manager at the various firms he headed. His leadership of the Government of Nairobi City has been a great disappointment to the people of this hard suffering city.

His lofty promises have been exposed for the political hot air they have turned out to be. On one area alone, this county government has been an abject failure. I don't know how the company in charge of solid waste management in the Central Business District won the tender to do so, but it has done a piss poor job. The CBD is filthier than it ever was under the perfidiously corrupt City Council of Nairobi. The mounds of garbage in the loss glossy parts of the CBD are an indictment of the priorities of this county government. They expose, starkly, the ineptitude of its political skills and the casual disregard it has for the unpolished and unwashed masses.

The governor made promises about public transport and traffic. He has failed on both counts. The CBD is more chaotic than ever before. The traffic is a mess. One wonders whether the billions the county government spent on traffic lights and traffic light cameras was worth the frustration commuters and motorists alike experience very time they set out for the CBD. All main arteries into the city, including the much-ballyhooed Thika Highway are a mess.

On street lighting, the county governement is merely reinventing the wheel invented by Adop-A-Light and making a hash of it. Pedestrian walkways (pavements) have been dug up, ostensibly to lay down the wiring for these facilities, and yet the lights remain dark. On public sanitation in drains and sewers, the overflowing drains in the CBD and elsewhere in the city are an indictment of the sloth engendered by this county government.

We were willing to wait for the governor and his team to get up to speed on the problems bedevilling Nairobi City. That honeymoon was over long before the governor and Nairobi City's Woman Representative had their ugly altercation in City Hall. Since then the governor has spent a great deal of time travelling overseas and to Nyanza, neglecting the good people of Nairobi and their depredations. It is tie someone whispered in his ear that if he cannot govern Nairobi effectively, we will not be trusting him to govern Kenya any time soon.

The governor can demonstrate his commitment to this city by sorting out all our pavements once and for all. It is time he freed them from the clutches of buses, matatus, boda bodas and the overflow from sewers and drains. He must ensure they are all paved. He must take back the ones grabbed by hawkers, and rather biliously, an overzealous National Police Service, National treasury, Herufi House, Harambee House, Harambee House Annex, Jogoo House "A", Hilton Hotel, Parliament, Kenya Commercial Bank, Central Bank of Kenya, Times Tower and his very own City Hall. All these characters already have robust fences; roping off what belongs to the pedestrians in the name of security is one of the stupidest decisions that he national and county governments have engaged in since they both came to power.

We have given up on the rubbish. We have given up on the street lights. We have given up on traffic, traffic lights and traffic cameras. We have given up, generally, on public safety. All the governor needs to do is give us one thing: pedestrian walkways free from hassle and harassment. If we can't walk from place to place in relative peace, he should not bother wooing the good people of Nyanza; he will disappoint them too. And he definitely should give up higher ambitions. After decades, Kenyans are unwilling to elect another failure to high office.

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