A statement was recently issued signed by officials of the Office of the 4th President, Mr Uhuru Kenyatta, announcing that he had rejected all meeting requests with Opposition leader Rigathi Gachagua. It was fake.
A tweet, undoubtedly fake, issued on behalf of the leadership of Linda Mwananchi contained daft manifesto items one of which was an intention to cut tax on imported cars by 45 per cent. It was so daft it made dimples as a qualification for leadership the equivalent of a PPE, an MA in Public Policy and two doctorates. All fake, of course.
We are a nation of forgers and jokers. Who am I not to join you. This is a letter of appreciation to our land - and its profusion of dimples.
Let's start with an inventory, because before we do our national ritual of gnashing teeth over the state of the nation, it's worth remembering what's actually in the cupboard. And Kenya's cupboard, dear fellow dimples, is embarrassingly well-stocked for a country that spends so much time being told by its profligate leaders it's broke.
Start with the soil beneath our feet. We sit on more than 1,000 megawatts of geothermal steam and one of Africa's biggest wind farms, which means over 90 percent of our electricity comes from sources that don't cough smoke. While half the world is still arguing about whether climate change is real, Kenya is quietly running on clean power the way other countries run on excuses. We just haven't figured out how to turn cheap, guilt-free electricity into factories, jobs and export earnings instead of just really efficient phone charging. For Tik Tok, you know.
Then there's Nairobi's tech scene, which invented mobile money before it was cool, watched the rest of the planet copy M-Pesa, and never quite got the royalty cheque it deserved. “Silicon Savannah” isn’t just a nickname investors use to sound clever in pitch decks - it’s a genuine head start most African economies would kill for. We built the on-ramp; we just keep forgetting to drive the car onto it. Anyway, we have a Mobitelea in SHA, if it makes you feel any better.
Add a diaspora sending home billions of dollars a year, a tea and horticulture sector that’s the envy of supermarket shelves from London to Dubai, and runners who make the rest of the world look like they're jogging backwards.
Throw in the small matter of hosting one of only four United Nations headquarters cities on Earth — Nairobi keeps company with New York, Geneva and Vienna, which is not bad for a city whose matatus still haven't agreed on lane discipline. And then there’s the youth: a nation where three in four people are under 35, digitally fluent, allergic to tribal politics, and — as 2024 through 2026 proved rather dramatically — entirely capable of organising a leaderless national protest movement from group chats while the political class was still figuring out how to mute notifications.
Here's the joke, though, and it isn't a very funny one: we keep treating our best asset like a threat. A generation that can crash a government's tax plans through sheer coordinated WhatsApp fury is not a security problem to be tear-gassed into silence — it is a governance dividend waiting for someone in power to actually ask it for ideas instead of ID numbers.
So what would grown-up leadership look like, if we're serious about cashing in these gifts rather than just admiring them?
It starts boringly, which is usually how the good stuff starts. An independent fiscal council that scores every Finance Bill in public, so debt stops sneaking up on us disguised as a “development partnership”. Procurement moved fully online and auditable, because ghosts should haunt houses, not government tenders.
County governments given real deadlines for their share of national revenue, enforced by courts rather than vibes. A tax system that finally asks wealthy landowners and idle capital to contribute something, instead of squeezing the same overworked boda boda riders every single Finance Bill season.
None of this requires reinventing Kenya. The Constitution, the devolution architecture, a feisty Judiciary and an even feistier Press — when it’s not being abducted — are already sitting there, built and paid for, we just need leaders willing to use the instruction manual instead of freelancing.
Geothermal power can anchor manufacturing zones instead of just keeping fridges cold. Diaspora billions can build bonds and businesses instead of just funding relatives’ emergencies. The port at Mombasa can be a gateway to 300 million East African customers instead of a place where cargo goes to contemplate its life choices.
Kenya doesn't lack gifts. It lacks the discipline to unwrap them properly and the honesty to admit that talent without follow-through is just a very well-dressed disappointment. Give this country leaders who match its energy - actual and geothermal - and the next decade stops being a diagnosis of disaster and starts being a punchline of success everyone’s finally in on, together.
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I have this week lost a great friend, Frank Whalley, after a long illness, borne with the usual irrepressible, cheeky humour.
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Mr Mathiu is a communications consultant and farmer. [email protected]
