Something went missing from the ‘Green City in the Sun’ this year

Well maintained grass on Uhuru highway, Nairobi, on December 28, 2015. Maintaining the grass requires a commitment to continue working daily to water them, weed, and replant. PHOTO | JAMES EKWAM | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • When some years ago John Gakuo was town clerk of Nairobi, he started pimping up the city and within two or so years, there was a new green pleasantness about most parts of it.
  • US President Barack Obama came to town, Pope Francis dropped in and spread good feeling and joy, Kenya had its best hunting season in international sport, topping the medals table at the Beijing World Athletics Championships.
  • In hindsight, the post-election violence of 2008 seems to have cleared heads and got people engaged about important things.

It might be nothing and I am just seeing things that are not there, but I sense that this Christmas season was very different from the many I have known in Nairobi.

Nairobi has always been East Africa’s most hungry capital.

People dispersed for Christmas and on December 27, the rat race and madness was fully back on.

Not so this year. By December 21, the city was already emptying — too early.

By December 23, the infuriating traffic jams were gone.

By December 29, Westlands, where our office is, was still a ghost town, and by December 30 you could still find parking on Kimathi Avenue at 11am!

What the hell is going on? This is the way South Africa holidays.

From about December 10 to January 10 of the next year, most things shut down and doing anything with folks down there over this period can drive you round the bend.

The country is beginning to pay for those habits, with an anaemic economy and what some claim is general decline.

There have been small signs to make one concerned.

A colleague who drove around Nairobi’s central business district on December 28 reported that he was surprised by just how many small potholes were around the place.

Up to two years ago there was what you might call “creative law-breaking” in Nairobi, when activists like Boniface Mwangi would roam the city painting those wonderful graffiti at ungodly hours.

COMMITMENT LEVEL

There were even the pig protests that started in 2013 and were picked up in other parts of Africa.

Protests continued yes, but they lacked that salt-of-the-earth imagination.

When some years ago John Gakuo was town clerk of Nairobi, he started pimping up the city and within two or so years, there was a new green pleasantness about most parts of it.

Most of the work he did was simple — painting, filling potholes, but mostly planting trees, shrubs, and flowers.

Today, along Uhuru Highway, a lot of money has been spent to create a more permanent solution — cement and stone.

On the face of it, this seems like the right thing to do.

But it also reveals a certain mindset.

Having flower gardens and lawns requires a commitment to continue working daily to water them, weed, and replant.

Pouring concrete where you used to have a flower bed means you do not have to do that, and from an economic point of view you will stop incurring the cost.

But it also acknowledges that you lack the discipline and focus for the daily chore of keeping a garden looking beautiful.

In the part of the city where I live, we used to have water shortages during dry seasons.

YEAR OF POLITICS

In other words the lack of water was not the fault of humans — except to the extent that we contribute to climate change.

But these days, we have most water outages during the rains, suggesting that the shortage is a result of human failing.

These things are connected and if we do not know yet where they come from, at least we can speculate.

One of the things about 2015 in Kenya was that it looked an election year.

There was a lot of political nastiness and polarisation.

It felt like a mass lynching. Perhaps at the end of the year many people wanted to escape to the quiet of the countryside and recover their sanity.

This was remarkable, considering that it was otherwise one of Nairobi’s best years.

US President Barack Obama came to town, Pope Francis dropped in and spread good feeling and joy, Kenya had its best hunting season in international sport, topping the medals table at the Beijing World Athletics Championships, and despite the outrageous attack by Al-Shabaab at Garissa University College in April, overall terrorism incidents were sharply down over previous years.

2016, ANY DIFFERENT?

In hindsight, the post-election violence of 2008 seems to have cleared heads and got people engaged about important things.

Then followed the constitution-making exercise and the referendum of 2010.

Then the ICC case against President Uhuru Kenyatta and his deputy, Mr William Ruto, and a heated debate about what it meant for justice and the sovereignty of the country.

Wherever you stood, these were big issues and opened doors for smart people to enter the contest intelligently, as much as they provided fodder for the flame throwers.

So perhaps the country has arrived at another fork in the road. 2016 might be very interesting, after all.