Endless cycle of festive pre-poll hubris and post-election rage

I promise you that I am not obsessed with explosions. Not even the pleasant pyrotechnics we are wont to discharge during festivities as some form of aesthetic dessert. And certainly not when owing to an adventurous predilection for catastrophic shortcuts, they go awry and transmogrify into terrifying, thunderous, kaleidoscopic mini-apocalypses.

But I really must revisit what happened at the Port of Beirut where, in August 2020, one of history’s most powerful accidental artificial non-nuclear explosions occurred, shaking all of Lebanon, as well as Turkey, Syria, Palestine, Jordan and Israel, and causing a fire that raged for weeks.

The explosion killed 218 people and injured 7,000. More than 300,000 were rendered homeless. Total damage has been estimated at more than $15 billion. A total tragedy. Absolutely sorrowful disaster.

Now, the proximate cause of this explosion was a fire caused by welding repair works at a warehouse holding a cargo of 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate fertiliser. If you paid any attention during chemistry class, you will be sweating as you read this.

But if you are a tunnel-visioned ‘relevance’ activist or a narrow-minded advocate for disciplinary silos in education, you will not know that fertiliser is a dangerous explosive.

Horrible explosive

The equivalent of 1.1 kilotons of TNT (trinitrotoluene, a horrible explosive, and a common benchmark for explosive potency) had lain in a portside warehouse, having been offloaded from a ship that needed urgent repairs, after being detained for years over a dispute about the other thing: corrupt bureaucrat’s kickback outstanding, and such like.

When the cost of the delays finally outstripped the benefits of negotiating release and delivering the fertiliser to its intended destination, the freighter abandoned the cargo and, our bureaucrats, not knowing how to proceed with the matter thenceforth, pursued a more worthwhile game.

Six years later, the warehouse owner decided to repair the structure, because of the notoriously rapid corrosion of metal in seaside conditions. The rest is history.

Poor Syria, perpetually besieged by explosions from good bombs, bad bombs and fertiliser, was recently devastated by a series of unforgiving earthquakes, leading to death, injury and material destruction on a stupendous scale. In the midst of a catastrophe whose impact remains unimaginable despite being graphically evident, irony, in all her caustic magnificence, proudly towered.

The stolid building housing the country’s Chamber of Civil Engineers stood defiantly, surrounded by the unsightly debris of former high-rises that couldn’t withstand the earth tremors. This doughty edifice appears oblivious to the high Richter intensity and frequency of disaster that felled its less fortunate neighbours.

The structural integrity of the Chamber’s offices vindicates the best standards of civil engineering. As the world rallied to help Syrians cope with the tragedy, it was reported that two of the country’s foremost building contractors, said to be responsible for the majority of the buildings that collapsed, had been arrested trying to cross the national border in different directions.

Early reports already identify outdated building practices as chiefly responsible for the structural vulnerability of local buildings. It seems that ‘outdated building practices’ is at best a spectacular euphemism for corruption, professional negligence and reckless gaming of building standards perpetrated by construction tenderpreneurs to maximise their margins so that they can afford to pay off bureaucrats and win work as well as approval of poor work.

The Chamber building is the standard. The rubble all around is the consequence of deviation from this standard. That is how I define corruption.

In Kenya’s urban areas, the departure from the standards codified to assure structural integrity is so egregious, we do not need even the smallest earth tremor for people to be buried in their homes.

Fully approved residential buildings spontaneously convulse in the dead of the stillest of nights, whereupon the relevant inspectorates and licensures emerge to issue warnings, threats, ultimatums and other tawdry displays of officious performativity. Afterwards, life goes on.

Corruption is very, very dangerous. Not just for the structural integrity of buildings, but even in politics.

There is a political movement in Kenya that is firmly trapped in an endless cycle of pre-election hubris and post-election rage.

So addled is the entire movement, with this bipolar frenzy, it does not seem to have found a moment for honest introspection and a candid deliberation of the nature and causes of its political curse.

Festive throngs

I will volunteer a hint. This movement loves to assemble ordinary people in festive throngs as a show of political might, yet it has nothing but rank contempt for the basic, grassroots mwananchi. As a result, her aspirations are illegible, and her agency indeterminate to the leadership.

Yet it is precisely as individual agents that party members are at their most valuable for a movement or campaign. Party agents are the most committed members of any political campaign.

A party that repeatedly abuses and deceives its agents in every election violates the building code of successful campaigns.

Coupled with shambolic nominations, such reckless political malpractices render campaigns vulnerable to catastrophic, spontaneous collapse.

Mr Ng’eno is an advocate of the High Court.