We were promised a stadium, we got a huge charcoal yard

On Tuesday, President Uhuru Kenyatta will lead the nation in commemorating another Madaraka Day from the lakeside city of Kisumu; which he now knows like the back of his hand.

Since the March 2018 handshake with Raila Odinga, the President has visited Kisumu more times than university students have seen the inside of a lecture hall this year. The last time he visited, he told residents that he was considering getting a second wife from Kisumu pending approval from the First Lady. He is expected to give an update on that matter; to give Luo elders adequate time to get approval from the Kenya Wildlife Service on whether they can wear their traditional ostrich headgear during the bride price negotiations.

A visit by the President is not a small thing. Many towns would have loved to be in Kisumu’s place but geography, history and civics (GHC) had other ideas. They are now left to consult their religious education (RE) pamphlets in their quest to seek divine intervention for the President not to bypass them whenever he calls on Kisumu.

While the people of Kisumu would have loved to grab the President and convert him into our asset, Kenyans are lucky we might be famous for selling fish but aren’t so selfish as not to share a national resource with the rest of the country. 

But this adrenaline rush to domesticate the President in Kisumu should not blind us to the pertinent concern that the rate at which national government projects are germinating in Kisumu would leave monocotyledons green with envy.

For instance, the ground-breaking ceremony for the new Jomo Kenyatta International Stadium, proposed as the main venue of the Madaraka Day event, was done in June last year and exactly a year later, we have a stadium ready for use.

Charcoal assembly yard

While Kisumu residents don’t have any expectation that the new international stadium will make the grade to host the national secondary school ball games, our only prayer is that it won’t look like a charcoal assembly yard; because the people of Kisumu don’t know where they shall hide their faces on the day of the handover.

This concern stems from the realisation during the just concluded National Prayer Breakfast speakers lined up to pray for many things but deliberately forgot to pray for government projects to look exactly as they were presented on paper on ground-breaking day. When the designs for the new stadium in Kisumu were shared, Kisumu residents were made to believe they were getting something closer to the San Siro in Milan, only for the real construction to give us what looked like Sun Zero.

It will not be the first time for a project to be reported to the police for not resembling what was promised on the internet. Online shoppers have been dealing with this pandemic before and what we thought was the preserve of online companies has now found its way into government.

When the Jubilee government introduced the Standard Gauge Railway for the first time, we were made to believe we were getting bullet trains with sharp noses and supersonic speeds. But when pictures of reconditioned trains being offloaded at the Mombasa Port were shared on the internet, the emergency line at the Health ministry was bombarded by callers looking for tips on how to survive a heart attack.

This is not what the statistics people intended when they told us most Kenyans below the age of 35 love spending time on their phones. We are sorry if government bureaucrats got the false impression that they can be assimilated into the filter-generation if they can successfully apply makeup on government projects for them to look cool on Instagram.

The writer comments on social issues