It’s winter in Kenya:

It’s winter in the +254……..…..at least from where I sit (stand, squat, sleep) in the Nairobi Metropolitan area and toes, ears and fingers are freezing. Temperatures have plunged and are now hovering around 13 degrees Celsius at night. This is cold by Nairobi standards though I am told 30 minutes out of Nairobi around Limuru the mercury has been reported at 9 degrees Celsius and we are not yet into July the traditionally coldest month of the year!

I have had a heater in the house that has not been working for a few years thanks to a blown fuse that caused the plug to fuse with the extension cable. A few days ago I decided that this cold was the type to consign me to an early grave and I broke the extension cable and liberated the heater’s plug from its imprisonment by the extension cable. Then to add insult to injury on the unfortunate extension cable, I used its plug to connect to the heater and threw away the now useless cable and voila, I now have a working heater and a nice toasty bedroom. It’s the only place I want to be in these days after work where I can lie down in relative comfort, socks off, half sweater off the only tough decision being when to venture out of the room for one reason or another. Thank God that I have the essentials in my bedroom, a TV and a loo, so those forays are few and far between!

In this weather, those long forgotten heavy jackets, vests, scarves and (yes) gloves have been dusted off and now seem to have become ‘nom de plume’ with majority of Nairobians dressed up warmly to shield themselves from the elements. I see gloves being sold along the highways nowadays and wonder who had the foresight to import them in advance, or are they a product of some sweat shop in Kariobangi running full throttle 24 hours a day to meet the insatiable demand for them?

 I wonder how the young school going kids in those traditionally cold climes in Kenya like Limuru, Meru, Nyeri, Burnt Forest, Kinangop, Eldoret and Nyahururu (in no particular order) are faring since I noted a few years ago that a balaclava a.k.a ‘boshori’ was a necessary item of school clothing and that was in the summer (do we have such a thing in Kenya?) months. Now that it is winter which additional items of clothing to ward off the freezing temperatures will their parent be saddled with? Thermal underwear, full body woollen suits, blankets or hot water bottles perhaps!!! Essential items of clothing considering that many of the public schools require more than a coat of paint to make them spick and span – like windows, doors and roofs.

This is despite the fact that if the current government has its way future public primary school kids will be the proud owners of solar laptops to be used in drafty cold classrooms bereft of windows, doors and roofs!! Maybe they should have a heater app developed for those laptops as an added bonus for the children in the colder parts of this country and to give them an incentive to attend school so as to keep warm or a fan app to keep them cool when in the ravages of a heat wave.

But some Kenyans (and most tourists) in our capital city still don’t get it. They still walk around half dressed in tee shirts and shorts, tank tops and boob tubes as if they are in sweltering Mombasa not realizing that this is our winter season. It makes one wonder who is mad, them or us well draped people or if God, in his haste to create some of us, omitted to add the mandatory thermostat that the others seem to have been given a 2^nd dosage of in his infinite wisdom……….or to mock the rest of us!

Come on people you are making the majority of us look bad and what would your mother say, you going out half dressed when more sensible people are warmly wrapped up! You will catch your death of cold and will have no one to blame but yourself.

But ‘ngai baba’, what shall we do when July rolls in?

Are we there yet!

I have come to the rather sad conclusion that we are not yet ready as a nation to use the Thika Super highway, that expensive piece of real estate that cost us a pretty sum and lots of aggravation for the four years that it was under construction, or any other really great piece of architectural road project for that matter!! The Thika Road project including pedestrian bridges, service roads, vehicle overpasses and underpasses, pedestrian and cycling lanes, road furniture works and street lighting etc while a sight to behold seems to have brought out some of our most primitive and Stone Age tendencies amongst us!

Why have I come to this conclusion? Picture this if you may.

It is rush hour and you are finally and comfortably out of the maddening Nairobi city centre traffic jam and on your way home. At the Globe Cinema section, the nightmare begins with a traffic gridlock caused by impatient drivers not wanting to yield at the Kipande Road junction and drivers using the wrong outside lane and then forcing their way back into the lane intended for traffic proceeding to Ngara.

At Ngara you encounter a hoard of people jostling for position to cross the road on foot a scant 50 yards from the pedestrian overpass doing their best to block traffic and get run over by a vehicle in the process. To add to this confusion,’mkokoteni’ pushers are struggling to maneuver their carts piled high with assorted merchandise through the vehicular traffic oblivious to the danger to themselves and the other roads users while the cacophony is stepped up by  ‘matatus’ picking and dropping off passengers willy nilly on the road ignoring the bus stage a few yards away.

As you proceed towards Pangani, the same foolhardiness continues to manifest itself on that stretch of road with pedestrians casually crossing the road where cars are speeding past, while cyclists nonchalantly cycle their way along the road competing with the buses and trucks speeding dangerously close to them while studiously ignoring the cycling lanes intended for their use.  As you approach Pangani, matatus have converted part of the road into a bus stage and impeding the flow of traffic seems normal to them.  Further down the road, someone’s car has broken down or most likely run out of fuel and the hazard lights are blinking to warn other road users to be aware. There are no warning triangles as required by law, placed some distance before the vehicle. Traffic is flowing but with no formula because the slow traffic is on the fast lane, while the faster traffic is forced to bob and weave between lanes to maintain the speed required.

The speed limit is a fallacy as any casual glance will tell you because that bus just charged by at a speed way in excess of 100 kms/hr while the speed limit is 80 kms/hr for those monolithic public service vehicles while that decrepit pick up that has no business being on the road in teh first place is struggling to maintain a speed of 50 kms/hr and it is in the fast lane, the wrong lane for it!

All along the highway, all the rules and regulations of safe motoring are being ignored by all and sundry motorists, cyclists, pedestrians…………ALL! From the pedestrians walking on the roads and vehicle overpasses and underpasses, to the motorcyclist riding on the pedestrian walkway against the flow of traffic, to the cyclists and 'mkokoteni' guys oblivious to the dangers of using the vehicle overpasses as convenient shortcuts to where they are going, to the myriad of public service vehicles and private motorists who stop on the highway to drop off and collect god knows what and then speed off at a mad cap pace to catch up with lost time............ perhaps!

Let me also not forget the pedestrians jumping over safety barriers to make a mad dash across the road dicing and dueling with death in the process and inconveniencing the driving motorist. All of us have a role to play in terms of safe usage of these infrastructural masterpieces however harried and busy we are and we should take the trouble to understand and use them responsibly lest the usual refrain ‘serekali ingilie’ starts once the death toll escalates due to the carelessness exhibited by all of us.

It’s a tough job and someone has to do it!!

The mood was glum, the tension palpable. Those present at this meeting were trying their best to be upbeat but failing miserably none the less. We were here to make some tough decisions, elephantine in nature you might say, the kind of decisions that whatever the outcome it was going to backlash on us. The phase ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ took on a whole new meaning because, I was not at the periphery looking in, but right in the middle of the damn situation and I was damned if I did and damned if I didn’t.

The usual agenda items were dispensed with in a routine manner, the usual exuberance and jocular manner replaced by a tense and somber mood obvious to all. Eyes were mostly cast down and not making eye contact with each other. The business of the day dispensed with, one of our own was politely asked to leave the meeting as whatever needed to be discussed touched on them personally and under corporate governance rules any interested party on whom a matter touched upon needed to absent themselves, either physical exclusion or by not participating in the deliberations.  Should the rest of us also have been asked to leave the meeting room, weren’t we after all interested parties in any case?

This was it, the diplomacy of previous weeks, the efforts to resolve the impasse, the misinformation and twisting of facts in the media that had preceded this meeting was now behind us, water under the bridge, we had arrived at a point of no return. It was crunch time and hard decisions needed to be made and the consequences of such decisions were weighty and rested on our shoulders. The buck literally stopped with us!

Were we really ready? Were we ready to plunge into this pool of unchartered waters, not sure what the currents of these turbulent waters and fate held in store for us? Were we ready to make a weighty decision on one of our own and others caught up in the aftermath? Uncertainty was writ large on the faces of several as the Chairman outlined the issues that had brought us there and what our role was going to be at the end of the day, a matter that had to be concluded one way or another however long we took.

The questions and comments began, hesitant at first but slowly taking on the desired momentum. A probing question here, a clarification there, a rehash of the documents of the company to see that all loopholes had been sealed and that we had done everything by the book, a query as to whether the recommending committee had been properly constituted. Was their recommendation unanimous? This was now getting serious and it appeared clear that this was but a tactic to draw out the decision making process as long as possible  because clearly no one was looking forward to moving to the next step!!

Were there any exit clauses? Did we have any options other than making the hard decisions? Could we postpone this for some time in the future, sleep over it perhaps? But no, this thing needed to be concluded and it needed to be finalized immediately because too much was at stake.........................!

The above is a personal narrative meant to show the depth of helplessness that confronts someone when a weighty decision has to be made. If this is what being a president means then the presidency is not something I can wish on even my worst enemy because day in day out it is a never ending rollercoaster of a ride. Just as you think you have stabilized the ship another rogue waves comes along and threatens to sink your vessel once again. Just as you think all the ducks are in a row, some other issue comes along and pushes them out of kilter. But this is the world of leadership, of decision making where hard decisions have to be made despite opposition to whatever decision you may make.

At the pinnacle of leadership in any organisation, in any country, in any situation the buck screeches to a halt in front of you and not in a methodical, slow tap on the brakes kind of way but in a bone jarring stand on the brakes kind of way!  It is an emergency however you look at it and some people could lose their livelihoods, others their sanity and still others their dignity whichever decision is taken. You are damned if you do and damned if you don’t. It does not matter, how methodically you study the situation and look at it from all angles, at the end of the day the decision has to be made.

That is why, I think it is quite naïve and disingenuous that the majority of Kenyans see that the recently elected government of the day is not doing enough, and has been unable to meet its pledges and has been bedeviled with challenges ever since the president and his deputy were sworn in. This is the honeymoon period when all the sweet nothings mentioned as you wooed  the voters come back to haunt you because the structures are not in place, your detractors want to ensure that you do not succeed and as the structures of government are changing to the county system confusion and disorder rule the day.

So I posit that it is necessary to give our leaders sometime and cut them some slack so that they organise their business and get to understand the structures that oil the mechanisms that make things happen. This business of leadership is not easy and takes lots of commitment, spirit and guts and someone has to do it!