Valuable lessons Kenya learnt in 10 years

On this day 10 years ago, Nakoulem Esekon, 4, was eaten by hyenas. Weak with hunger, her mother had left the starving child resting under a tree as she went to look for water and forage for food in her famine-ravaged Turkana home.

In the wastelands of the North, where human suffering is endemic and even the seasons are a monotonous harshness of dry heat, time can seem to flow like mud: nothing changes.

But a decade is actually a long time. Had that child been living today, her chances of attending free school — and being served a free plate of boiled beans and maize —would be a lot higher.

Progress, for some, is measured by the number, and size, of cars in the garage. For the Nakoulems of Kenya, it is measured by the distance between the tree and the nearest school, and therefore, a free meal.

This decade, with its tumultuous embarrassments, has taught Kenyans that true development is equality of access to opportunity. To those at the base of the pyramid, that access sometimes makes the difference between life and death.

This same day 10 years ago, Wangari Maathai, the environmentalist, had a swollen jaw. She had been beaten by private guards at Karura Forest, where she had gone to plant trees. The watchmen said they were guarding it because it was “private” property.

Today, corruption has lost its brazen notoriety, but it is no less immoral. The wholesale invasion of public spaces has ended: but the reclamation of those on which the survival of the nation depends, such as Mau Forest, has not even started.

On December 24, 1999, Mr Francis Lotodo, now dead, was in the Cabinet and had given orders to Marakwets to leave West Pokot District forthwith.

The traditional, tribal warmonger, with a cartoon beer belly and an imperfect grasp of reality, is now extinct. His place has been taken by a more suave Western-educated reptile, with access to e-mail, SMS and hate radio.

First woman PC

Ten years ago, President Moi appointed Kenya’s first woman PC, Mrs Philomena Koech. It was an occasion of such moment that Mr Moi had forewarned the Kanu National Delegates Conference of the impending appointment.

Kanu, for 40 years the party of Kenyan dictators, is nearly dead and a local woman has won the Nobel Peace Prize.

The Nairobi of a decade ago was an urban wasteland, where human suffering was no less endemic than in its rural polar opposite, Turkana, and where the danger of being eaten by hyenas, albeit in the human form, was no less real. The crowds of street people, their excrement caking the pavements, the muggings and shootings and the potholes, which were more consistent in their population that the few stretches of smooth tarmac, were metaphors of a desolate, beaten society.

Kenya is in the tight hug of the before-the-election-violence and after-the-election-violence polarity, a piece of shallow but vicious analytical malfeasance, which has wrestled history to the ground, torn it into two contrasting pieces, and pegged it down like wet skin, with the antics of the political elite writ large, in blood.

This polarity ignores the fact that one big mistake may have defined the decade, but it was neither alone, nor was it the only event with influence on the future. The stealing of elections, the chopping off of heads and burning of houses reveals a great deal about society, as does that plate of beans in Turkana.