Nairobi March 13th 2011
To reach Nairobi Kenya direct from the DRC is to have arrived in a Metropole, the only one, by default, in East and Central Africa or anywhere else from Cairo to The Cape. Here is a city of sophisticated services, designer furniture show rooms, Jaguar dealerships, up-market restaurants, boutique hotels and leafy green neighbourhoods of palatial mansions, country clubs and all the other signposts of local and international money.
Kenya has had a place among the international jet set, hosting rock stars and royalty, going back to at least the 1920s and 30s with its glamorous and degenerate white settlers including the libidinous Happy Valley smart set. This is a country born and based on attracting the leisured and sporting classes for over a century—a giant country club that has hosted everyone from big game hunting tourists, Teddy Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway, to romantic settler writers Karen Blixen and any contemporary aristocrat or wealthy eccentric who wishes to set themselves up as a modern day bwana with their own Farm in Africa. From billionaires to back packers, Kenya accommodates them all. Strong infrastructure, relative political stability and open door policy to anyone wanting to invest, buy a holiday home, open a hotel or start a business supports many livelihoods, has produced a large resident and non-resident expat community. I will see many of my own tribe here.
There is definitely an urban vibe in this outpost of cosmopolitanism, although Nairobi’s charms are now a bit faded and the city has clearly seen better times. With its time warp Britishness, modern office towers and affluence this burgeoning centre is also a place of horrendous traffic jams and horrendous crime. The UN has designated Nairobi “Status C” on its international personal security ranking, making it among the most insecure cities in the world. Others have come up with their own moniker to describe it—Nairobbery. A city and a country that was an African success story has been stagnating for nearly 30 years, or at the very least, not realising its potential.
Like most African countries that each have their own unfortunate narrative or major fault line running through the society that hold it back, Kenya is a troubled place. I don’t have to look far to find that—the front page of the newspaper handed out by the smart young stewardess on my comfortable Kenya Airways flight from Kigali carries as its lead article the ongoing effort by the International Criminal Court to have extradited for trial 6 members of the government for having fomented election violence in a bid to stay in power. By all accounts the post election violence of 2007-08 was horrendous with 1200 people killed, 300,000 displaced, ethnic cleansing, a complete break-down of law and order in many areas and civil war narrowly averted. Kenya has come dangerously close to being a failed state.
After the stolen election in 2007 President Mwai Kibaki is still in office, having forced a shot gun marriage with the opposition who are now together in an unhappy unity government. Nearly 80 and previously seen as a gentlemanly politician and a technocrat Kibaki has shown a far harder side, becoming a more typical autocrat and an ethnic, not national, politician, primarily serving his ethnic Kikuyu people, Kenya’s largest. It is an unfortunate end to what had been a distinguished career as a government minister and, eventually, an opposition politician.
Now, rather than concentrating on governing and guiding the country toward peace and prosperity, most of the energies of the president and his people are focused on how to obstruct the ICC’s extradition requests and maintain power. Once again Kenya is at an impasse and going no where.
For a country that appeared destined to achieve greater things it shouldn’t be this way. The economy, the strongest in East Africa, or anywhere North of South, had a good run for the early decades after independence—buoyed by strong private sector companies and a large, well educated, and sophisticated middle and professional class. As recently as the early 1980s Kenya was not too far behind emergent Asia. Instead, Kenya side tracked into economic and political drift, brought short by its historical weaknesses—corruption, political violence and ethnic conflict. The country’s dreadful—and unfortunately named—President Moi oversaw the apogee of this decline during his 24 year rule. By the time he left office in 2002 many state corporations and economic sectors had almost ground to a halt under the weight of corruption and mismanagement.
Turning some of this around was one of President Kibaki’s early achievements since taking power in 2002. Kenya is far better governed now. But old familiar ways have not gone away. The government’s ethics director, John Githongo, previously the head of the local chapter of the anti-corruption NGO, Transpareny International, resigned in frustration, three years into the job, fleeing into exile in London and going into hiding. Chillingly, he recounts being “visited” by a group of shadowy political power brokers who warned him that his work would lead to trouble and accusing him—a fellow Kikuyu—of betraying his tribe, whose turn it was “to eat”. That is evocative language—to eat. And it is how Kenyans refer to corruption. Most famously Britain’s ambassador to Kenya recently accused government ministers of: “gorging on corruption and then vomiting on aid donors shoes”.
Arriving at the 5 Star Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi, the headquarters of nearly every visitor or local bwana in Kenya since 1904, and which has hosted everyone from Winston Churchill to Clark Gable, the comforts are more than pleasant—high tea, three restaurants, room service. I hear Brooklyn here, and Brummy accents from the English midlands; there are first time to Africa honeymooners, international businessmen, local bigwigs. All this is an hour and 10 minutes by air from Kigali and 3 hours by car to the DRC border, the portal to the kaleidoscope of chaos that is the Kivus. As I check-in the hotel lobby intercom is playing a muzak version of Born Free.
Give me Goma.