Residents must not agree to lose their city again

It is premature to hop, skip and dance in glee at last week’s dramatic neutering of Nairobi Governor Mike Sonko. The national government has never been an exemplary example of foresighted leadership. In many ways, it has been abysmal.

County residents should just take temporary solace in the fact that President Kenyatta’s action relieves them the histrionics and chaos of Sonko’s City Hall.

ILLEGALITY

Any alternative to that is welcome, even if it is tinged with a strong whiff of illegality. Yes, that is how bad it had become that I am willing to countenance some illegality in place of the buffoonery that Nairobians foisted upon themselves on that Election Day in 2017.

But now city residents must demonstrate that they have learnt their lessons and are unwilling to be subjected to more terrorism of incompetence and plunder. They must immediately engage constant vigilance and participate very pro-actively in the management of their city.

First off is to respond to the call put out on Friday for views, suggestions and proposals on how their city should be managed.

All too often, most city residents consider themselves too sophisticated and busy to involve themselves in public participation forums.

That is their undoing because those that create the time will participate and push an agenda that disadvantages those that did not.

FREE PASS

Many did not turn up to vote against Sonko last time, giving him almost a free pass to the County Hall.

He was so disdainful of city residents that he did not think he needed to appoint a deputy to give the city leadership stability in case of a crisis.

But so will any leader that feels that he is not accountable. Those old enough will recall that in 1983, the then elected leadership of City Hall was dissolved and a commission appointed in its place with the mandate and expectation that it will clean the dump that City Hall had become. It did not happen.

The commission, not being accountable to the people of Nairobi, became rogue. The corruption that they were supposed to tackle lured them into the sleaze ring. An infamous case of extreme sleaze was the disappearance of a city parking space that was near Harambee Avenue during the tenure of the last commission.

CARTELS

Lessons from that experience should tell us that whatever structure is put in place to run the functions that have been surrendered to the national government – and those functions comprise close to 80 per cent of the responsibility of the county government – will very quickly degenerate into a vicious vampire that continues to suck the city’s blood, or into a pliant pet that will be happily manipulated by business cartels.

Columnist Dennis Kibaara reminded me of something else in his Friday column in the Business Daily.

Nairobi is too important an entity to be handled so casually. It is at the nerve centre of a metropolis (comprising Kiambu, Machakos and parts of Kajiado) that once had a full ministry assigned to it.

There are grand plans of how that metropolis needs to be built and managed to unlock the value within it. It is an economy that is bigger than some countries in Africa. The Nairobi Metropolis Master Plan envisions a modern, people responsive, economically dynamic mini-state by 2030 - a very short 10 years from now. Sonko’s team was not going to take Nairobi there. It will be left to whichever team that comes in to develop an implementation plan to drive the process. This task will require smart, dedicated and remarkably selfless people.

Tom Mshindi is the former editor-in-chief of the Nation Group and is now consulting. [email protected], @tmshindi