Our true selves.

Arlington, Virginia, has invisible drains. Arlington is massive; there is no way a boy from Nairobi can walk the entire hood in fourteen days and discover its many pleasures. But it was quite clear everywhere I went that Arlington has invisible drains. When it snowed on Friday, and the snow melted, and started to flow down the road, it...disappeared. Like some kind of architectural, civic engineering juju, the drains and the apertures that let in surface runoff are disguised and invisible and unless you are in on the magic, the water simply disappears. That and the broad and magically empty public sidewalks on which the mechanised transport allowed is the bicycle are a miracle of civic planning.

The week that the Governor of Nairobi City County made a spectacle of himself walking to the five-star Kempinsky from the CBD, I marveled at the sidewalk along Arlington Boulevard that, despite the rain and the melting snow was not muddy or flooded with water from blocked drains. Had it rained the day the Governor decided to go walkabout along Waiyaki Way he would have needed gumboots and raincoats because he would have slogged through shin-deep mud and he would have been splashed with water from Nairobi's incredibly hostile motorists. But I suspect he would have found a way to bully other road users off his path on his way to his Very Important Meeting.

It rained last night and this morning I wished I was back in three-degrees-Celsius Arlington, my ass frozen to a Popsicle because all that is wrong with the Governor's priorities came flooding back, literally. Drains were blocked. Sewers overflowed. Motorists made a sport of splashing hapless pedestrians with muddy water at every opportunity. What few paved footpaths there are were commandeered by the ballooning swarm of boda boda riders determined to rival the late great Evel Knievel in motorcycle stunts.

Our governor thinks that the solution is the incredibly expensive, and stupid, idea of doing away with roundabouts and replacing them with traffic-light-controlled four-way intersections. If motorists have refused to obey the rather helpful rules of the Highway Code when it comes to roundabouts, what makes the governor think that four-way intersections will work out any better? This whole project has a whiff of the let-us-spend-billions-for-the-sake-of-it about it. Some fatcat is about get fatter from the tender to flatten the roundabouts and fatter still when he wins the tender to rebuild them.

The billions that the Governor is about to pour into this harebrained scheme should go to expanding paved footpaths, clearing out drains, unblocking sewers and putting up street lights. But those billions will not be spent on things that make the lives of the walking public better. The billions will be spent to make motorists more miserable and hostile than ever. Because that is how we do. We are a wash-rinse-repeat kind of people, and our government appeals to our true selves more and more every day.