Don't let stupidity prevail.

I don't love animals. I don't love watching them. I don't love playing with them. I don't love talking about them. Don't even get me started about "nature", a place where snakes and poisonous fruits abound, designed to kill me in divinely inventively cruelly painful ways. But just because I am not nature's greatest fan doesn't mean I want it paved over and those hideous chicken-coops we call apartments put up.

It is because of nature that I have drinking water, the occasional thunderstorm to cleanse the city's palate and wonderful pictures of sunsets that I can put on my laptop/tablet/smartphone as a screensaver, making Her go, "Awww..."

Therefore, I don't just not not love "private developers" paving over portions of Nairobi National Park, I hate them. I hope that the lions and elephants they are displacing in service to their avarice eventually make their way to their gated communities and either (a) maul them, the lions, that is, or (b) sit on them, the elephants, that is. Everyone and his mother knows that the kind of urban sprawl these construction heathens are engaging in alienates people from each other, makes enemies where none existed and deadens the soul of the nation. Nairobi - nay, Kenya - doesn't need to become a caricature of Los Angeles or Las Vegas.

The synergy between the private developer and the poacher is disturbing. I may revile rhinos and have nothing but contempt for elephants, but their value to the culture of my peoples cannot be gainsaid. My peoples have a history with the wildlife, a rich cultural history that has given us a vocabulary and a literature that the pale faces from the industrialised north or the slant-eyed Johhny-come-latelys from the industrialising east can only salivate over. That culture, that history has value to us as a nation, both monetary and non-monetary and it is time its destruction by the concrete-minded among us ceased.

Culture. We have it in spades.

We need the wildlife. We need it more than we need a golf resort accessible only to the moneyed elite. We need it more than we need a gated community for faith-challenged swindling men of the cloth and their clandestine lovers. We may not realise it today, but the future of our peoples' health lies in the wildlife being decimated at a rate that will boggle the mind. The days of accidental penicillin are almost over but those of bio-engineering are just beginning and in our wildlife are the molecules we will need to engineer our species' survival. Destruction of our biomes in order to build apartments has to be one of the stupidest policy decisions in a generation. Stupidity is not in short supply but hopefully it shall not be allowed to prevail.