While the middle class has grown, the cost of Christmas has soared
We celebrate Christmas, but in our part of Mother Africa, we should also quietly dread it. The season of white heat, the kiangazi, has a way of turning the milk of human kindness into the vinegar of political madness.
For decades, the Christmas calendar has carried grim surprises in Kenya, Uganda, Somalia and across the region, where the birth of a saviour often coincided with the death of dreams. Sometimes with a pile of bodies.
There was the unforgettable Boxing Day of 2004. On that morning, while many were still drowsy from the previous day’s festivities, a massive 9.1 magnitude undersea earthquake off Sumatra, that large island in western Indonesia, triggered the Indian Ocean tsunami. It swallowed 227,898 lives globally. In Somalia the waves battered the coastline, killing nearly 300 people and destroying thousands of homes. In Kenya and Tanzania the sea rose and took children playing on the sand, leaving families to spend their Boxing Day digging through wreckage instead of sharing leftovers. It was an era-defining tragedy that proved nature has no respect for our holidays.
In Kenya the December curse was once a constitutional trap that forced the people to vote when the sun was at its most cruel. Before the 2010 Constitution shifted elections to the cooler days of August, Kenya settled its political scores in the December heat. In dense informal settlements where millions live in tin shacks that turn into ovens by noon, the heat does something to the spirit. When the mercury inside a corrugated iron room hits 30°C the brain begins to boil. This physical misery, combined with a disputed election, probably partly fuelled the explosion of late 2007. The post-election violence claimed 1,400 lives and displaced 650,000 people.
Merciful accident
The shift to August was either a merciful accident or a recognition that a nation cannot think clearly when baked alive by the sun and the rhetoric of angry men seeking power. Uganda remains locked in this cycle of Christmas dread, even though, like Kenya, it had the chance to break free when it rewrote its supreme laws.
Uganda’s 1995 Constituent Assembly was so busy trying to ensure that no one could ever again use a gun to overturn a vote that they forgot to look at the thermometer. Delegates voted to keep election day in January every five years. The timing flattered President Yoweri Museveni and his ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM). It was the month the Museveni-led rebels seized power in 1986, and it became the month anchoring their political order. As a result, while Kenyan reforms moved the vote to August, a month of cool breezes and harvest-time calm, Uganda remained tethered to the kiangazi.
This means the upcoming vote on January 15, 2026, will cast a shadow over every Christmas tree in the land. Perhaps the country needed more meteorologists in the rooms where power is brokered. Instead, the proximity of the vote to the holiday means that the spirit of Jesus is often crowded out by the shadow of the State and ruling party agents’ swords.
The roots of this tension go back to the disputed election of December 10, 1980, which was the spark that sent Museveni to the bush to fight. For 40 years, he has ensured that January is his month, a period of victory, at whatever cost. If the Pearl of Africa moved its election away from the new year, perhaps the brutality would soften, but for now, we see a country where people cut the Christmas and New Year cake with their eyes on the exit.
Quieter violence
There is also the quieter violence of inequity that defines our Christmases. We see the well-off arriving in villages in big four-wheel vehicles that cost more than the collective wealth of the parish. They come with water coolers and crates of bottled water, a judgment that the local well is poison. Women from the city emerge with Chinese fans to ward off the heat that local women endure while bending over smoky fires.
These displays breed resentment. When the majority has little and the minority parades plastic-wrapped comfort in a dust bowl, it breeds resentment if not anger.
Economic data over the last 20 years shows this wealth gap is structural. While the middle class has grown, the cost of Christmas has soared. For example, surveys indicate Kenyans now spend up to 1.08 times their average monthly income on the season alone. Much of it is performance, a brief burst of spending that delivers a January of school-fee despair.
The holiday has become a mechanism of debt rather than a celebration of life. The salt-of-the-earth people deserve a December of rest and dignity, not a seasonal parade of wealth by cousins from the city.
We should wish for a Christmas of reflection, a lifting of the December-January curse that has defined our times for too long. May this season be one where we look at each other with mercy and where the only fire we see is the one under the cooking pot.
The author is a journalist, writer and curator of the Wall of Great Africans. X@cobbo3
