Kisumu shows us full effect of Kibaki’s ‘Tosha levy’

Kisumu city. PHOTO | TONNY OMONDI | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • As a county, Kisumu is plagued by some of the same corruption that others in Kenya are weighed down with, although it is not among the worst.
  • The best thing that happened to the place is that the good old man Mwai Kibaki cheated Raila Odinga.

I just did a swing through Kisumu again, after nearly four years. I was very surprised.

The last time I was there, the big Mwai Kibakiera “Grand Coalition” government projects were in full swing. Now they are done and “devolution capital” has also been poured, and the place is, well, relatively impressive.

Together with Mwanza in Tanzania, my sense is that Kisumu (together perhaps with Fort Portal in western Uganda), are the towns in East Africa that most look like Kigali’s cousins.

They have quite a bit of the same crispness that the Rwandan capital has become famous for.

Considering everything else, Kisumu is an unlikely candidate for its present fortune. As a county, it is plagued by some of the same corruption that others in Kenya are weighed down with, although it is not among the worst.

SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY

So what happened? For starters, I am told that Kisumu proves that self-fulfilling prophecies are possible.

A small lakeside town that took itself very seriously as “Kisumu City”, is becoming one because it believed it was.

Then the Kibaki government “Tosha levy” is beginning to bear fruit.

The defining moment for Kibaki’s resounding victory at the head of the opposition Narc is commonly seen as the point when Cord leader Raila Odinga put aside his own ambitions, and in 2002, in a surprise move, declared “Kibaki tosha (is enough)”.

Shortly after, Odinga and his side of the old opposition felt robbed by Kibaki, who didn’t dole out to them their share of the political spoils.

The discontent is partly what informed the post-election violence following the December 2007 vote.

In response, Kibaki and his strategists, while not wanting to give more power to Raila, did collectively bribe his radical base with public goodies that include Kisumu International Airport.

What Kisumu shows us is what happens when the national political elite resolve a contest for power at the centre by bribing the periphery.

CHEATED RAILA

For Kisumu, then, the best thing that happened to it is that the good old man Kibaki cheated Raila!

Generally too, because the political class will usually have migrated to Nairobi to fight for the national cake there, they usually leave behind what you might call the bureaucratic elite.

In parts of Kenya where this bureaucratic elite that stayed behind was fairly large, as in Kisumu, they will more effectively convert the bribes from Nairobi into local development.

Three other things are playing in favour of Kisumu and other towns in Kenya where one witnesses these trends. One of them is the striking number of young people in the “city”.

These young people have come to most big Kenyan towns as a result of the explosion of new university campuses. They are supplying towns with young people renting housing, spending money, and creating exciting social dynamics that these towns could never supply from their own pool of, often, unemployed youth.

Also in Kisumu, and a few other towns in the country, one notices fewer scruffy citizens.

NEW LOCAL ELITE

There are many women in the company of young people and children with rounded faces, wearing loud-coloured clothes, and heavily oiled with whatever the fashionable jelly of the area is.

A wag whispered to me that these are often the families of members of the county assembly (MCAs), a group that didn’t exist before the new Constitution.

The MCAs are part of the new local elite that is chopping off some of the butter that is coming to the counties in devolution funds, and they are spreading the joy around, including on their children’s cheeks.

There are many MCA-level housing developments in the outskirts of Kisumu too. This is one of the most intriguing aspects of devolution in Kenya.

In the Kenyan highlands, the lands were first expropriated by colonial settlers. Then, after independence, by the “nationalist capitalists” and their allies, who turned into a big new landed class.

In the highlands today, people like MCAs have limited opportunities to spend their cut of devolution funds on land, but in areas that were spared colonial land grabs like in the western parts of the country, they have room to invest in the land.

In general, then, the tea leaves suggest that the parts of Kenya that are free of colonial-era and post-independence land grabs and disputes are the ones that are going to grow rich from devolution in future.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is publisher, Africapedia.com and Roguechiefs.com.

Twitter: @cobbo3