Welcome to 2023

It pays to pay attention to what politicians do and say, even as it is increasingly exhausting to do so. Many of the decisions made by government officials are affected by what elected politicians do or say, decisions that affect our day-to-day lives in large and small ways. Take the miffed bad-tempered reactions by the many, many men in the Meru county assembly for example. One worthy was so offended by the Meru Governor's vindication by the Senate that he declared on public television that he was no longer available to listen, or deal with, the complaints from his constituents. Instead, he sniffily announced, the aggrieved residents of the county should take their troubles to the Governor as he and his colleagues would only be available for weddings, funerals and birthdays.

This kind of performative stupidity affects the Government, and the governed, in profound ways. In Nairobi, a Nyeri senator has threatened to bring a motion of impeachment against the Nairobi Governor because the Governor has disrespected the Deputy President and "businessman from Mt Kenya region". Nairobi is plagued by many problems, one of which is the seemingly law-unto-itself behaviour of the matatu industry. Nairobi's Governor has made proposals on how to deal with some of the problems caused by the matatu industry. The Deputy President has attempted to intervene in the matter, invoking the claim that it will adversely affect business people from Mt Kenya region. The Nairobi Governor has, quite rightly, told him to mind his own national business and leave the county government to its rightful leadership. The Nyeri senator, feigning umbrage and pique, has chimed in with his two cents and acted like the senatorial toddler he is by threatening impeachment for the governor who is doing the job for which he was elected.

When Makueni county assembly members attempted to intimidate Governor Kivutha Kibwana, he stood his ground, and asked for the county government to be dissolved. The crisis was only resolved when the national government intervened. The voters sent all the members oof the assembly, save one, home at the next general election. It would behoove the nutters in Peru and Nyeri to take heed of their power and not allow the kinds of wasteful shenanigans engaged in by their elected representatives.

We enter 2023 faced with serious economic challenges that require sobriety and intelligence to resolve. The challenges will take longer to address if elected representatives are stupidly flexing their non-existent legislative muscles to bully and intimidate state officials charged with making life-altering decisions regarding the challenges. Tabloids like the Daily Nation and the Standard do not help by amplifying asinine political contests that do legislative and administrative harm instead of doing what the first drafters of history are supposed to do: hold the Government to account by telling truth to power.

But because of the domestic economic troubles many of us face, the lack of a credible Fourth Estate, the amplification of salacious spectacle over reasoned examination of state power, we are hard-pressed to pay attention to what needs paying attention to. School curricula, and the economic interests that favour one curriculum design over all others, are examined only by committed educationists and whose voices are smothered and suppressed. Electricity policy is a murky place where secret contracts with shady off-shore companies and inexplicable tax policies ensure that no Kenyan home is quite certain whether the electricity they are paying for isn't actually some form of poverty-inducing programme designed to keep them in penury for all eternity. Organised labour continues to suffer from sclerotic union leadership, where geriatrics gallivant to international bacchanalias and abandon any form of collective action to beef up paycheques for their members. The lunacies of the Meru county assembly members, and the news media amplification of those lunacies, are signs of coming terrible times for Kenyans. Something needs to give before we are overwhelmed and resort to extreme measures to force changes at the top.

Small men, big consequences

In the middle of drafting a pretty difficult statutory instrument, I made the fatal error of watching the former deputy governor of Nairobi City debate the City's senator. The two deeply flawed candidates hurled accusations (and shade) with unpractised unease, stumbling over memorised zingers and forgetting practiced put-downs. Both tried, and failed, to paint themselves as the City's Second Coming. We deserve so much better.

Let us begin with the former deputy governor. In March 2017, according to him, he made the conscious decision to stand in the general elections as Mike Sonko's running mate. After they were elected, he only served for six months before quitting. He claims it is because Mr Sonko refused to give him work and, consequently, his conscience could not allow him to continue earning a public salary for no work done. 

What he doesn't say is that after he resigned, and it became clear that Mr Sonko would not be impeached as swiftly as his rivals had hoped, an unseemly campaign was launched to declare his "resignation" as anything but a resignation so hat he could be brought back into public service so that when Mr Sonko was finally pushed out the door, the former deputy governor could step into the breech. That plan was swiftly abandoned when someone read the constitution and pointed out that as the former deputy governor had already taken up new employment, he could not legitimately claim that he had not resigned, and therefore his path to the governor's office must, of necessity, pass through a fresh election. No one wanted that.

The former deputy governor's political antics recalled the fiasco that was his appointment as the chairperson of the board of the then Anti-Counterfeit Agency. His appointment was challenged in court. It was declared to have been unlawful. Even then, it appeared that he did not know what he was getting into when he took up the appointment and when controversy followed the appointment, he did not have the professional or technical skills to tamp down the flats and he eventually left the job under a cloud.

The candidacy of the senator is not without its own dramatic turns. He has struggled to put to rest rumours that the does not possess the statutorily-required university degree, trying to obfuscate the matter by alleging state-sponsored machinations in the imbroglio. He offers no proof of the hand of senior state officers in his tribulations.

One recalls when, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, when the state was cracking down hard on violators of Covid-19 rules, the senator was found to be involution and, rather than tae his lumps, he attempted to use his high office (including as chair of a Covid-19 oversight committee in the senate) to avoid responsibility. He made threats. He claimed support from the same high state officers allegedly persecuting him today. Whatever integrity he claims today was missing when he was clearly in the wrong.

His record as senator is not as rosy as he paints it. While he has been quite active in senate business, it is not reflected in the way the city's county government has been overseen. The senate's role includes protecting the interests of counties and county governments. As the city's senator, when it became clear that the governor and deputy governor were incapable of governing effectively, it was his responsibility to lead the charge in having them removed from office. Instead, he claims that a senate convention prevented him from doing so - that he would be accused of conflict of interest in supporting the impeachment of the governor. Even if that were true, as part of the city's political leadership, he should have intervened to ensure that the county government was governed, and overseen, effectively such that it would not require the intervention of the national government or the appointment of a military officer to undertake municipal services.

Nairobi will get the election it doesn't want between candidates it can't stand. That has been the tragedy since the advent of devolution. None of the City Fathers have covered themselves in glory. While we pray for the best, on the basis of history and current shenanigans, I fear that we must prepare for the absolute worst.

Badi-nage was not the solution

My father once owned a Citroën DS 19. The one with the directional headlights and green hydraulic fluid. The one that sat on its haunches after it had been switched off. The one that had an armrest in the rear seat that could be lifted to make space for a third passenger. The one that flew like the wind when we travelled "up-country" to see the really old people who plowed us with ridiculously stringy, yet tasty, mangos.  I absolutely loved that car.

I especially liked riding in it on those frequent occasions when he had to drive me to the doctor. We would leave home at the crack of dawn so that we would be among the first to be seen by the doctor. Then afterwards, whether or not there were syringes and injections involved, he'd buy me a snack, get me a storybook, leave me in his office as he taught his mid-morning lectures. That early in the morning, we'd come past Marigiti as the road was being washed. Yes, they washed the roads in those olden days.

This is my point: for a brief moment, after the perfidious City Council had been fired and the City Commission appointed, Nairobi City was the Green City in the Sun, where municipal services functioned, the roads were swept and washed, the kamero collected the garbage on Tuesday and Saturday, Marigiti was the place to find your freshest veggies, and Gikomba and Kariokor the place to find your kienyeji chicken and tilapia. State-sponsored schools were clean and cost-sharing hadn't yet become a burden for parents. You'd shop at Uchumi and use the brown bags to cover your textbooks which were bought from Savanis. Nairobi, for a glorious moment in time, was good even for the working classes.

Nairobi has fallen a long way from its heights in the 1980s. From the day the Sunbeam Supermarket on Tom Mboya Street collapsed, a succession of mayors and governors have bequeathed us a city that has become harder and harder to live in, even for the wealthy elite in their leafy suburbs. The streets are no longer washed, let alone swept. The kamero long ago stopped running; mountains of garbage mark the boundaries of different "zones". Yes, even the leafy suburbs can be identified by the mountains of garbage right outside their gates. Marigiti, Kariokor and Gikomba are places you venture into with trepidation. After all, who can remember that amazing year when Uhuru Kenyatta was the Minister of Local Government and six hundred tonnes of garbage were trucked out of Marigiti? Or the tens of thousands of rats that fled soon thereafter?

In the early days of the pandemic, President Uhuru Kenyatta engineered the transfer of certain municipal services from the wildly incompetent city administration of Mike Mbuvi Sonko to the martial-oriented Maj. Gen. Mohamed Abdalla Badi and his Nairobi Metropolitan Services. The General came into office with a lot of goodwill in his back. Nairobians - indeed, Kenyans - were tired with the erratic behaviour of their governor and many were confident that a man who has overseen combat missions for the '82 Air Force was just the one to sort out the problems of the benighted no-longer-green City in the Sun. 

It is apparent that the confidence was misplaced. We know and appreciate that the challenges bedevilling the planning department require root-and-branch reforms and our patience will only start to run thin if more buildings "collapse" during construction. But the fact that the General and his precious NMS continue to allow the festering problem of garbage collection to exist is unfathomable and unforgivable. Everywhere you turn, mountains of garbage moulder malodorously on roadsides - and roads. Garbage clogs surface drains and sewers. Marigiti is langusihing beneath a new six-hundred-tonne mountain of its own while Kariokor has been swarmed by motorcycle taxis and ramshackle vibanda. All the good general can show for his time in office are coloured cabro bricks in the CBD and strategically-installed water tanks in a few markets.

An example of his failures is to be seen along Landhies Road. The General has surrounded Muthurwa Marpket, built during Uhuru Kenyatta's tenure in Local Government, with a high wall. But the pavement along Landhies Road has been turned into an obstacle course and now, with the rains, is unpassable unless one is prepared to get to their destination resembling an active pig. Little care has been taken to take care of the pedestrians of Landhies Road and none seems to be forthcoming. Indeed, the area East of Moi Avenue has been allowed to get worse and worse since he took office. The secrecy of his plans and his operations does not inspire confidence. I have no confidence that he will do anything more than build beautiful infrastructure in places that need it the least and put up barriers to ensure the Landhies Road pedestrians never cross to the shiny side of town. General Badi is neither the hero we wanted nor needed. He is, at the end of the day, the martial incarnation of Mike Mbuvi Sonko and his predecessors.