Sonko’s rise signals revolt of the poor against arrogant ruling elites

Many on social media reacted to the victories of Mike Sonko and Ferdinand Waititu in the ongoing party primaries with jokes.

Sonko chewed Peter Kenneth like PK gum, some mused, while others made cracks about Waititu’s struggles with spoken English.

Yes, one wag said, he won but can he pronounce the word parallelogram?

Jokes aside, the emergence of Sonko and Waititu and candidates like them says something serious about Kenyan society.

Sonko’s success, in particular, signals the rise of the role of class and inequality in politics in a country where ethnicity has been the name of the game for a long time.

BEST PLACES

Nairobi is one of the best places to live on earth – if you have the money to buy a comfortable lifestyle.

A diplomat friend from a Western European country surprised me when he made the point that when civil servants at his Foreign ministry are given a choice as to where they would like to be posted, Nairobi, not Washington DC, Beijing, Brussels or other key global power centres, ranked number one.

In Nairobi, you have the perfect weather, a well-educated population that supports a good service industry and first rate amenities.

Nairobi is one of the few places in Africa you can trust the hospitals enough to allow your wife to give birth rather than fly her back home when pregnant, as one foreign journalist put it.

UPPER MIDDLE CLASS

The problem is that there are two Nairobis. The upper middle class and expatriates lead a charmed existence in one while the vast majority endure a nightmare.

Kenya’s capital is a city of dramatic inequalities which is why there is so much crime.

In his memoirs, the journalist Richard Dowden said there are two types of cities in Africa.

“Windows down” places, like Dakar and Gaborone in Botswana where crime rates are low and you can drive without looking around for robbers and “windows up” ones like Nairobi and Johannesburg.

SHARP INEQUALITY

The sharp inequality in the city is what has made Sonko a hero in the slums.

He may not have any well thought-out platform on how to change the situation (just like Donald Trump who campaigned on a promise to save the poor and then surrounded himself with rich bankers once in office) but he speaks a language the masses understand.

Sixty per cent of Nairobi’s population lives in slums which occupy less than five per cent of the land mass of the capital, according to UN-Habitat.

Thirty per cent of Nairobi’s water is consumed by the 11-12 per cent of the population in the upper income strata.

 “Nairobi has some of the most dense, unsanitary and insecure slums in the world,” the UN said in unusually stark language in one report.

BIGGEST ECONOMY

Why is it that the fourth biggest economy in Sub-Saharan Africa allows its people to live in conditions that are far worse than those in many other countries on the continent?

Elites will be in trouble when voters stop voting along ethnic lines and start asking such sharp questions.

I remain an optimist about Kenya’s future. The population will continue to grow better educated and better connected and it’s hard to see how tomorrow can be worse than yesterday.

But Kenya’s continued progress depends on sorting out its contradictions. There are few stable societies in which just a few live so comfortably while the majority suffer.

Kenya will only know stability if those in government focus on ensuring the national cake is shared more widely and that policies are made with an eye to making the lives of the poor majority better.

IMPROVE LIVES

Failure to do this will result in the multiplication of populists who talk the right talk but may not have the ideas needed to improve people’s lives.

The best platform I have seen on how to make Nairobi a better place, for example, has emerged from Miguna Miguna who is running on a radical anti-graft platform and has articulated a well thought- out vision for improving the capital.

We’ll see how he fares and the Sonko vs Kidero battle will be interesting as well.

If Sonko wins, he will be a beneficiary of the years of criminal neglect of the poor which is now being articulated in support for grassroots mobilisers like Sonko and Waititu – and the rejection of comfortable elites who run a rigged economy.

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This will be my last column on this space for a while. It has been an immense privilege writing every week for a newspaper I grew up reading obsessively but I need to take a break to recharge my batteries. Thanks for your support over the years, dear readers.

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