About two months ago, a group of men and women arrived in a lorry crammed with young trees, which they proceeded to plant on an empty space that makes up a roundabout near where I live.
This sizable space had become a recreation spot of some sort – on weekends, especially Sundays, young families would converge here, and being a safe area since it overlooked the road that snaked around it, parents would feel confident enough to allow their children to run loose. Locals also often take siestas here throughout the week.
This is not all, at the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic when entertainment facilities were shut down, it became a popular space for people to socialise ‘safely’. Groups of friends would park their cars here, crank up the music and generally have a good time until late into the night and then drive back home, having fulfilled their intrinsic need to socialise.
When I saw the workers, (who I assumed were from the county government) planting the trees, I was elated, even though I was not a beneficiary of the space – once the trees grew, I told myself, those that utilised the space would finally get respite from the scorching sun. I could even imagine myself, in a few months’ time, seated under one of the leafy trees enjoying the breeze, lazily watching cars whiz by, all my money problems forgotten.
The green spaces in urban areas in the country have long disappeared, while those in peri-urban areas are fast headed there as more and more landowners sell to real estate developers. Having a green space, therefore, any green space, is something to be appreciated.
Anyway, this week on Thursday, I was going past this area only to realise that the young trees, which had been growing quite nicely, making the massive roundabout look lush and inviting, were no longer there. All that remained of them was stalks, all the greenery gone! And then I saw the goats, busy munching on the stalks having gobbled up the leaves and branches.
To say that I was appalled would be an understatement. Were it in my place, I would have arrested whoever owned the goats and compelled him to pay for the damage his goats had caused. I had no doubt that when the owner unleashed his goats on that field, he knew exactly what he was doing.
He had spotted free fodder for his animals, and it did not matter to him that the trees had been planted there for a reason, and that lots of money and energy had been used to place them there. He did not care though, his only end goal was to feed his goats, and it did not matter that he was destroying public property in the process.
This unfortunate case brought to the fore just how generally selfish we are as a nation. We tend to be a ‘me, me, me’ society, as long as we are deriving an advantage from our actions, we don’t give a thought to how they impact others.
A majority of us are also not patriotic. That is why we readily vandalise our infrastructure for quick gain: We vandalise barrier grills on our highways, we vandalise communication masts, street light posts and steal the street lamps. We also steal street signs and uproot railways, just so that a small fraction can illegally benefit from the scrap metal trade.
Nothing, it seems, is beyond a Kenyan’s ‘vandalising’ ability. In 2014, the Kenya Electricity Transmission Company lost an underground electricity transmission cable at the Nairobi National Park worth millions of shillings, a cable that had been installed to enable provision of cheaper and more reliable electricity in the country.
For a moment, forget the vandals and the business people that aid this criminal behaviour. We ordinary wananchi are also to blame for the destruction we see. Sometime back, Nairobi County put up spacious sidewalks on our highways for pedestrian use, before this, we used to share the road with matatus, and not a single day went by without the media reporting that a pedestrian had been run over. If you regularly use Waiyaki Way, you must have seen that destroyed pedestrian walkway that was once a smooth cabro. Well, unruly matatu drivers and other errant motorists (and boda boda riders) drove over it and turned it into an uneven mass of scattered cabro.
But those charged with the duty to maintain our roads and other public spaces are also to blame for the deterioration we see because there is often little or no maintenance that takes place, as a result, all those good ideas end up becoming useless, money down the drain.
Think about it, if my county government had bothered to return to that roundabout after planting those trees, they would have realised that they no longer exist, and would have already apprehended the selfish goat owner and charged him with destruction of public property, or whatever offence that is.
