Things and concrete

On the morning of Sunday 26 May I took a flight from Nairobi's Wilson airport. Overflying the waking Nairobi bathed in soft light, I was faced with two realities. One is the beauty of the Nairobi National Park, and juxtaposed against it the housing estates of South C and South B. All bathed in the morning's sleepy light. The plane quickly changes direction and flies over the Industrial Area and the cornucopia of infrastructure. One moment, an industrial plant, next, a slum with neat rows of rusty  mabati roofs crammed together, next, a middle-class housing estate, next, a quarry. On and on until we left the City perimeter and got to agricultural land interspersed with deep and dangerous quarries. Our love affair with infrastructure is undeniable. A road here, a bridge there, a school, laptops -- the manifestos must have been manufactured in the same factory. Read the Machakos County Manifesto, and you realise that for an area so often ravaged by drought and famine, little is said about environmental regeneration and green technologies. The manifesto mentions the word environment exactly twice, once in relation to sand harvesting (yes, sand harvesting), and the other in relation to market infrastructure. Give us another concrete edifice, please. 

The Jubilee Manifesto does a little better. In a 70-page document, the environment is given two pages. Specific initiatives to encourage citizen participation and education in energy and waste management, and recycling are visibly absent. The plastic bag menace and public health implications of our open-air garbage disposal stink very loudly. Also highly desirable are land use policies that maximize what we have. How sustainable are projects such as Tatu City and other mushrooming lifestyle developments that uproot coffee and plant buildings? All the while, we are investing dollars in researching coffee varieties that can grow in dry areas.



Visions cast in concrete

We need roads,
we shall build roads.
The Park is in the way of the highway.
Move the Park
We need to move goods,
trade is important.
Development is at stake.

Where will our children play? 
Play? We shall give them laptops. 
Where will the women get together? 
We shall give them shopping malls. 
Where shall we grow our onions?
We shall make this a 24hr economy
strengthen construction and tourism,
grow the GDP so you can afford 
things in cans and fried and cured.

Silence, woman.
I have a manifesto to fulfill.
Sleep on, sleep in the city's beautiful lights
The city never slumbers.  
You don't need to be vigilant.

Sleep to the sweet jingle of progress
Sleep, sleep, the day is young,
and our vision is fresh. 

Let the dream embrace you.
You can lean on it -- 
it's as sure as concrete.