Small ‘entertainment hell’ that is Sagana town
A snapshot of a street along Sagana-Murang'a road.
When John Ngereza, who was the bandleader and guitarist for Orchestre Les Wanyika, visited Sagana town in 1983, he met and fell in love with Margaret Wambui Mwangi, then aged 19.
Sagana is a small but old town on the Nairobi-Nyeri highway, 100km north of Nairobi. Historians say it was founded in the 1930s when the first permanent commercial building was established by the colonial government. It gets its name from River Sagana, which is also called Thagana.
The cupid arrow dealt Ngereza and Wambui the agonising thrill that ended up doing them in. In 1984, she gave birth to John Ngereza Junior, leading Ngereza Senior to package the feeling in a song that he named “Afro Mtoto wa Sagana”, beseeching her to retrace the footsteps of their union and get back to him.
She had drifted from him after the birth of their son owing to ‘sensitisation’ by her father that musicians were not the best of lovers.
Ngereza died in 2000 without ever marrying his ‘Afro’ Wambui Mwangi.
Les Wanyika, founded in 1978 and composed of Tanzanian and Kenyan artistes, set base in Nairobi and the musicians packaged themselves as makers of powerful African, Swahili-composed rhumba, belted in crystal clear voices with appeasing guitaring and infectious singing.
Great guitar interweaving merged with cool horn/sax combinations and their songs never lost traction on dancefloors. The Ngereza/Afro escapade explains what exactly Sagana town is —haven for love (both true and illicit) where daily bold confessions tell of how even underage girls are being wasted in it.
Moral rot
The town in Kariti ward has a growing hospitality industry along the River Sagana, with cottages, watersports and other tourist attractions being exploited by investors. It is synonymous with a sea of humanity during the day and all life retiring into loud-music watering holes that operate till dawn.
“It is a real problem that we have. This is an extreme entertainment industry-inclined town and all manner of sexual escapades thrive … yet we have not been able to sieve this entertainment to remain legal … to only encompass the adults in consensual arrangements and what we have is mainly illegal exploitation of the very young,” said Nancy Karimi, a girls’ rights activist in the town.
She tells of how some Sagana bars admit underage girls, sell them alcohol alongside underage boys, freely let them access lodgings for sexual orgies “and the best area police and administration do is to collect Sh200 daily from the establishments hence advancing this irking impunity”.
Nation.Africa was shown numerous complaints filed to Interior PS Karanja Kibicho and the Kirinyaga County security committees, all detailing the moral rot in the town.
If Mr Kibicho uses public transport, he would only pay Sh50 to travel from his Kagio village to Sagana, and he is accused of not heeding resident’s cries.
“We want serious security intervention that will stop Sagana town being home to the underage sex market, where our children venture to get lost in drug abuse, miraa chewing and taking snuff,” said Pastor Richard Mugambi
“We cannot continue having a town that is not offering us industrial opportunities for employment solutions and instead is becoming a bottomless pit for our children.”
Afro’s father, Mwangi wa Mburi, now 93 years old, said he had tried his best to warn his daughter against falling prey to the love magic of the town, and admitted he was the cause of the failed marriage when he ruled their chemistry a ‘fraud’.
“It was something I was fond of preaching to all my five children in this Kirumi village … But she did not take heed. She only agreed with me when Ngereza bolted out of her life after the pregnancy. Thank God, another man from Thika came her way, married her and at 58 years old today, and a mother of four, she agrees that I was right,” he told Nation.Africa.
The town gained shape in the late 1940s, mainly because of the Nairobi-Nanyuki railway line that reached the area in 1930, with a terminus that brought residents the light of investing in the concrete jungle immediately after land adjudication commenced in 1965.
Land prices in Sagana have grown phenomenally from Sh200,000 an acre in the 1980s to Sh17 million to Sh40 million an acre, depending on location. Lodgings go for between Sh600 and Sh1,000 per room in ordinary establishments, though you can grab a sleep for Sh300 if you are streetwise.
For rentals, low-income earners are well catered for, at less than Sh1,000, while the working class can get single rooms for between Sh2, 000 and Sh3,000, with bedsitters ranging between Sh5,000 and Sh8,000.
So notorious are the town’s planners that they allowed it to grow without a sewer disposal system and its raw effluent meanders in an uncovered tunnel and drains into the Kanyiriri river, which in turn passes it on into the River Rwamuthambi before it too drains into the River Sagana at a place called Ngorano.
It could be said that Sagana town’s effluent is consumed by human, domestic and wildlife, the users of the three rivers’ waters downstream — a grave environmental crime that could lead to relevant sensible public health and environment officials ordering the town closed.
The town’s latitudes are 0019’S and 37012’E and it lies at an altitude of 1,231 metres above mean sea level. Its population by day is about 14,000 and by night that number drops to about 9,000, and residents are served by the Ndia sub-county administrative security.
“Our problem with this town is that it has been let to operate like one big unregulated casino … Tourists come to this town mostly in search of fun,” said Residents Welfare Association committee member Richard Kariba.
“We have not succeeded in regulating that fun to make it accessible in a responsible manner. At the end of the day, what we have as our town is a big risk where outlaws have imposed themselves in a domineering manner.”
The number of bars, including wines and spirits shops, miraa dens, bhang spots and contraband markets form 90 percent of the town’s enterprises, he said, with the balance filled by ordinary businesses.
The Sagana-Kagio junction.
In a week-long vigil in the town, Nation.Africa witnessed how police officers report to the sin industry spots to collect their daily rent that ranges from Sh200 to Sh500, depending on magnitude of criminality, so as to turn a blind eye to violations.
“When we pay the fees, we are allowed to sell alcohol without considering the law … the police only direct us to keep law and order inside the bars and they only make raids if violence erupts among our patrons,” said a female bar owner.
Crime
The town is used to armed raids by gangsters riding on motorbikes, mostly targeting M-Pesa agents. “But we recently came to know that the gangsters include police officers … We have in the past six months recorded three incidents where 10 of our police officers were the villains…,” revealed a senior security officer.
One of the incidents occurred in May, when three officers were arrested stealing from a businesswoman. Two others were found in the company of a deadly Mungiki gang siphoning oil from a tanker. And on December 5, 2021, five more were arrested after they abducted and robbed a Murang’a businessman. One of the officers has since been shot dead in Murang’a County, allegedly by detectives, after he was transferred from Kirinyaga County and advanced his armed heists before he was fixed.
The Sagana Police Station is also notorious for jailbreaks that reek of inside official help, especially involving moneyed capital offenders. Kirinyaga County Police Commander Mathews Mang’ira said “we are committed to dealing with all criminals regardless of what organisation they belong to … Even if they are our officers, we will deal with them”.
Brokers
The town, which is like a secluded island, attracts all manner of people, good and bad, from Kirinyaga towns and neighbouring Murang’a, Embu and Nyeri counties.
Its cash emanates from vibrant deals in the sand and building blocks mining activities, agricultural enterprises of horticulture and rice farmers and livestock brokers.
Livestock brokers contribute to the crime index of the town, with meat from animals stolen and slaughtered in Kirinyaga, Meru and Embu bushes packed in sacks and wholesaled in the town’s backstreets.
Fish farming is another enterprise that gives the town its mojo, especially those dealing in ornamental goldfish variety. The town hosts an aquaculture centre that measures about 59.37 hectares with 109 operational ponds, of which 72 (150m2) are for research and the rest are used for spawning, fingerling and grow-out production. The farm is supplied with gravity water from River Ragati.
The Sagana Centre was started by the colonial government in 1948 as Sagana Fish Culture Farm but changed its name to Sagana Aquaculture Centre after independence. In 2009, the farm was transformed to the National Aquaculture Research Development and Training Centre to spearhead the implementation of the Fish Farming Enterprise Productivity Project under the Economic Stimulus Programme (ESP).
The town is also home to a Level Four hospital that is characterised by lack of medicines and patients being referred to privately owned pharmacies, laboratories and clinics suspiciously owned by its staffers. The town also is host to the Sagana Power Sub-Station, as well as Sagana Tanneries, which deals in hides and skins.
To push for changes to the town’s infrastructure, the area’s 19,813 voters will pick their ward representative from a competitive pool of aspirants including United Democratic Alliance (UDA) aspirant Jeremiah Makimi, The Service Party’s Jeremiah Wambugu, Joseph Kadee (independent), Jubilee’s Francis Wangui and Wangari Muriithi of Narc Kenya. They all say that they will lobby for the town to have a functional sewer system to avert the high crime of feeding water users with raw sewerage, and improved garbage collection services.
Voters insist that the town can be salvaged and made great where enterprises that adhere to societal morals can thrive. Infrastructure Principal Secretary Mwangi Maringa said the town has several buildings that have been erected on grabbed public utility land.
“If your property stands on private land and you genuinely acquired it, the National Land Commission (NLC) will let you own it fully and should we need it, we will pay compensation,” he said.
“But if it was acquired through grabbing, then I am sorry it will be brought down at your own cost.”
Property owners and the NLC, he said, will also listen to each other and come up with an amicable solution that will not leave any of the parties in distress. Mr Maringa revealed that the town has a development master plan that was drawn in 1947.
“Since Sagana town is the centre of the entire Mt Kenya region, we must safeguard all public land surrounding it, more so when we have the Great North Road passing by, and now the railway line to Nanyuki having been rehabilitated for ease of transporting farm produce from the area to other towns in the country,” he said.
The town, he added, is key to the regional economy and grabbers should just surrender public land that they have used for many years.
