The Bahatian

  the backyard Sometimes we tend to become lethargic when we feel satisfied even for a minor accomplishment. Two years back, when I realized I was putting on weight, I embarked on rigorous exercises including long walks, cycling and hiking the back hills. I quickly lost the accumulated weight in a short time. See: https://paulkariuki.blogspot.com/2019/07/and-long-walk-made-difference.html   Not very long in a social joint, while following an English Premier League match, a friend happened to drop by during the interval and we had a bit of catching up. Then he made some remarks to the effect that I was ‘feeding well’ as I seemed to be in a kind of ‘good health.’

The speed at which some development projects are being implemented at is astonishing. With the General Election under a year away, elected members in different political offices are in a rush – a mad rush indeed – to complete projects, some of which were launched three years back and done at a staggering rate to be ready a few days or within a month for a handover or opening before the next vote.   It is all about political survival. Having enjoyed the trappings of power, and especially the benefits that come with being a holder of that political office, no politician is willing to bequeath their seats easily. Some have made it clear that their areas of representations are their fortes of sorts, and would not easily bequeath them to a serious competitor without cutting him or her down to size first.

I’m subscribed to four mobile services providers and had been a customer to the largest telco in the country for over a decade now. And I mean I had been using the same SIM card for that long, with the exception where I had lost my handset and replaced the line. I have managed to back up most of the contacts meaning no contact had been lost to date.   And during the over decade long that I have been a subscriber, and owing to my line of work, I’ve added so many contacts that nearly all SIM cards have run out of storage space necessitating saving new numbers on my Google contact storage.

What spoilt the party for the Mathina village water cartel was the increasing awareness by the residents that something was wrong in matters water. Many of the peasants’ children, especially the highly educated, were woke ones, and this is the lot that gave elders a hard time with grating questions. And the newcomers - those who bought plots recently and settled in the area - too realized something was wrong. Some of them were filth rich individuals, who, tired of urban life, have come to seek the solace of countryside, or were retirees who had bought plots and build their dream homes. They could not understand the water politics and why individual water needs had to be dictated by few individuals in the water office for ages.

Mathina village comprises of nine clusters, better known as settlement schemes. Each cluster, which is a village in itself, has a maximum of two hundred homesteads, but the number is increasing as the once vast individual farmlands are disappearing after being subdivided into minuscule pieces and sold as plots. It is now assuming a cosmopolitan face with a burgeoning population.   There are ranges of hills to the east of the village with at least three perennial springs in two of the forested hills. Two spring waters form part of the tributaries that flows swiftly downhill to join a big river that was known as River D. I say known because presently River D is a dry seasonal channel – flowing during those three wet months before petering out. We shall see how the river died a slow death.

My first encounter with con artists was in 2015 along the Kenyatta Avenue in Nakuru town. At the time, the first governor of the fast growing town that is aspiring for a city status had not began removing hawkers along the corridors of the buildings and in the streets. To say the town back then was a hub of activities especially on the streets as hawkers jostled for customers is not an understatement.   Halfway along the Kenyatta Avenue was a guy selling movies, and was easily identified from far off by his trademark hairstyle that was a hybrid between a box and a trimmed umbrella tree. His name was Kigen, and as is with members of Nilotic tribe persuasion, he was black. His skin was a tone deep black like the bottom of the cooking pot.

This book reads like a political treatise that examines the state of affairs of an average sovereign African nation after the independence. Kasanga is a typical newly independent African nation and figuratively a baby learning to walk on its own.   Like most African states, independence didn’t come on a silver platter but was hard fought for. There is a similarity to George Orwell’s fable, ‘Animal Farm’ with the exception that this is a political satire whose grim facts anyone can well relate with. Readers can easily identify some scenarios and replicate them to local political occurrences. Kenya, for instance, came close to cusp of violent regime change th rough the 1982 abortive coup attempt. Bloody coups then were hallmarks of independent African nations where power hungry leaders installed themselves to power through the barrel of the gun.