Imagine you and your extended family go game viewing in the Mara. You hire this confident, blunt guide to take you there safely and back, ensure you have a memorable time and value for your money.
He convinces you to leave the van, get into a ravine and walk far from the vehicle.
“There are no dangerous animals here. I have been here many times to see a large variety of lovely kudus. Come on. Chap! Chap!” he says.
You follow, turn a corner and almost fall over a large pride of sleepy lions which haven’t eaten for days.
“Hawa simba watatukula (The lions will maul us),” the tour guide says with a tremor in his voice.
“That Maasai at Choma Karanga Day and Night Club cheated me. He told me there are no lions here,” he lifts his lips and flashes his red gums in a rueful, semi-apologetic grin.
Bigger bottle of snake oil
Just as the lions prepare to pounce, a group of cowboy-type guys flying a hot air balloon nearby come to the rescue. Amid a racket of air guns, flames and swooshes of helium, they bring the balloon down between the family and the pride and help everyone to scamper on board just as the pride attacks.
The family jump in, the lions snapping at their heels, but not before a vicious lioness rips the cardboard wig off Grandma’s head.
With the danger past, the tour guide brings out a fresh, bigger bottle of snake oil.
“Next year,” he wags a fat finger. “Next year, I’ll not bring you here. Never. I have it on very good authority, a Maasai, that on the other side we can watch rhino, buffalo and even cheetahs safely from a distance. And there are no lions there.”
As he puffs the snake oil, Grandma’s bald head gleams in the noontime sun. She beams wanly every now and then at the tour guide’s 10,000-gallon Mugithi hat on account of episodic loss of network.
Uncle Kimani, reputed to be a big wealthy businessman in Pangani (or perhaps a successful carjacker) blazes lasers at the tour guide from beneath bushy eyebrows. His sharp moustache is stiff with tension.
“Choma Karanga Day,” the tour guide says, without missing a beat.
“But he is very good. Very reliable, not like the other one.”
Incompetence and bad strategy
Uncle Kimani appears to be wrestling with the decision whether to throw him off the balloon right away or wait for it to land and then kill him on solid ground.
Moral? If a service provider, employee or any other person misleads you into a huge loss through lack of attention, incompetence, naivete, faulty logic, bad strategy or not being clever or skillful enough, you don’t put them in charge of the clean-up. You fire them and let a fresh team do the disaster recovery.
If even one per cent of the bad things that our friends in Central are talking about in podcasts and on social media happen, they should clean out all the leaders who led them into the mess, make a fresh start.
Having said that, have you ever wondered why we have been growing at an average four per cent a year and not 15 per cent a year?
It’s got to do with leadership and corruption. We have been ruled by Presidents from two communities for a long time. When you elect a person, he doesn’t take power as an individual. It is his whole tribe which comes to power: They get big jobs and they have exclusive access to juicy corruption. We form Kenya A, made up of their elite, and Kenya B, the rest of us peasants. It is a wasteful system.
Generally, the Central people do some good things, then they do a lot of dodgy things, mainly looting and unfair distribution of resources and undermining their ethnic rivals. The Rift Valley people come to office with the single-minded objective of besting the Central people in the dodgy stuff. And a lot of pain and waste results.
The Kikuyu are the archetypal hustlers. My next-door neighbours in Makandune — hustling labour, mangoes, maize, cowpeas and beans — are tone-illiterate Kikuyu peasants from Murang’a. How did they even know this village existed?
Up the slopes in my ancestral village, my neighbour one homestead removed is from Nyeri. Wherever you go in this country, you will find the Central community, working, making money.
These days, I hear about an alleged economic warfare that then-President Moi apparently fought, closing banks and destroying cash crops. It created poverty for some time but the farmers moved on. But the country lost leading foreign exchange earners and its competitiveness forever.
The Rift Valley community is equally good and hardworking but they come to town to make money, then they retreat back home, wear dark suits, bowler hats, carry long, black cow sticks and show off to each other. They are not hustling with us in Makandune.
Our history of government since 1963 does not constitute a transformative approach to the management of the nation. Both these teams deserve the tour guide treatment.
Mr Mathiu, a media consultant at Steward-Africa, is a former Editor-in-Chief of Nation Media Group. [email protected]
