Oral East AfricaThe last year has not been easy, and I can assure you this one will not be either. We are undergoing a global economic cycle that has to grind its course, we did not prepare appropriately, worse still we exposed our under belly to the tides and this raft will rock about the sea for an extended period.
This year you will know someone, a relation, a friend who will be out of employment.
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Sometimes, their best bet will be relocating to a smaller town and I hope my retreat to Kisumu, incidentally the town of my childhood could offer perspectives.
Employment is a powerful source of comfort and stability and frequent guaranteed paychecks. But sometimes it is like a seedlings nursery, frequently watered and attended to yet to flourish and bear fruit one has to be transplanted to the farm rains are unpredictable and one has to fend off bills like plants do pests and diseases.
Once out of work your transition will be the most crucial move you have to make, to regulate the costs on your reduced incomes and sometimes moving to a smaller town or a cheaper neighborhood will do the trick.
Someone who knows someone
The first time I had to move neighbourhoods in Nairobi I called George Bush because he was dependable. He helped move me from my Brother’s; as any true Luhya settles into the city by first living at a relation’s while ‘looking for work’, to my first rental.
I had earned my stripes and was ready to set myself up in the city, and he helped me find and negotiate my way into a bedsitter on a derelict that stood next to the railway line and pretended to be part of Civo- government civil servants’ quarters along Outering Road.
Bush assessed my belongings, a mattress a 13 kilo meko cylinder and a bag of clothes and concluded I only needed two motorcycles for the move.
A decade later when I wanted to uproot myself from Nairobi I called him again, as the friend who held my hand and helped me cross the road in Nairobi. This time, though, I needed bigger transport as I planned to leave the city, along with my family of two.
Bush, is a longtime friend and can be relied on to know someone who will get something done. His father named him George Bush after the senior American who rained bombs in Iraq in the 1990’s. Our parents internalized the First Gulf war by naming children after the senior Bush and calling dogs Saddam. I wonder where Putin and Biden will lie in this dichotomy.
And as usual he knew someone who could pull my kind of move, sudden jump off the latch before it could close in on me. After a year of unemployment I had learned a few lessons about people and situations that needed decisive action to survive.
The decision to come down has to be one of my biggest, this side of adulating. I was no longer moving alone but had NyarSindo to convince.
While I am a leaf that flutters like a troubadours’ cloak; having been born in Kisii, grown up in Kisumu, then relocated to Busia and spent the last decade in the Capital, she is grounded. NyarSindo was born and bred in the city, who needs google maps to find her village.
It was also a rushed move, and for the first time, she was moving away from her folks vicinity. But she understood the necessity of the move and supported it. Before you set out on this journey be sure your family is on the same page because that is what makes the difference, Nyar Sindo made the diffrence. Like Anais Mitchel says in Hadestown, Nothing makes a man so bold; As a woman's smile and a hand to hold; But all alone, his blood runs thin; And doubt comes... doubt comes in.
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Dead Capital like Michael Jackson's Thriller
Moving to a small town was one of the strategies that helped our parents survive the structural adjustment programme in the 1990s.
Around 1999 when my father was edged out of the work cycle by the economic shocks of the SAPs, he decided to relocate us from USAID estate in Kisumu. My father tells me as a banker, he learned early to put up a retirement home when things were good.
He put up a small house in the middle of nowhere which was at some point was one of the few electrified houses in Bulanda village of Busia.
If Prof. Elisha Bitange Ndemo had had coined the concept of dead capital, my father’s little house project would have been a perfect example.
However, the hard times in the 90’s vindicated this experiment. While in Kisumu’s USAID estate we witnessed the harrowing evictions, the auctioneers, the death and desperation of an economic downturn; and falling back to rural areas and turning to agriculture saved an entire generation.
Dead capital rose to dance like Micheal Jackson’s thriller and today they are proving yet again they can be lifesaving. In Kisumu, these homes are turning into the new rise of real estate.
Outcrops of tenement flats hired out for rent are cropping up next to the palatial homes with fancy Luopean interiors.
Status anxiety
While I searched for a house along Riat hills off Kakamega road, the drive along an unnamed road built during 9th Edition of Africities Summit reminds you of NatGeo tinkling chorus of nature humming like a choir of chanting Ismailis at the AghaKhan. The city stretches out of the peaks of thicket like glowing lights adorned on an Indian temple.
Unlike Nairobi which hums like grinding motor on asphalt, ground together with ear-jarring blare of anxious hooting, sawing brakes and constant drilling Kisumu is completely laid back.
Here the wild is still within the city and the nature chorus typical of rural areas picks up around you in concert with your calm sleep. The chickens only join in the morning troupe like a crowning of the sensual mating serenades from bird species I have not yet spotted.
However even here, the economic decline is creeping in albeit at a slower rate.
The road to ruin
This stretch of an unnamed road skirting UzimaUniversity and ties up Kisumu airport would have been the most scenic drive were it not for the potholes.
The road is cratered like a land mined field and you cannot risk looking away from the wheel. The potholes are so large that gees swaddle in them and you have to drive on the sides to avoid the animals and the water.
I have always held that the legacy of Jubilee administration will not be the Kes1.4 trillion worth of road.
These paper thin tenderprenuer layers of tarmac cannot last a year and their better Chinese engineering will simply be swept away by El nino floods.
Plus the cost of road maintenance will be too high to be met by the current broke government and we’ll quickly join the pothole index of failed states.
What will remain however is the engraving legacy of debt and the poverty it will create for an entire generation.
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I’m an enthusiast writer who also enjoys reading such like pieces, I have a group of following that I will direct to this site.
Guguyu you made my Sunday, I enjoyed this.
I knew. I have enjoyed your pieces earlier. This is inspiring ????????
What a piece I feel like I have been on the move with you. Thank you for such a piece, let’s meet soon at Riat Hills
Civo was a simpler time… Derelict, unsafe, crowded and unsanitary, but the times were easier.
I miss Civo. I shall have to visit Kisumu
.loving this series…!