Shops on Gitanga road opposite Rusinga School go up in flames after they
were set on fire by protestors from Kawangware 56, Dagorretti North
Constituency in Nairobi on Friday. PHOTO | SALATON NJAU | NMG
About three years ago, we chose to spend part of the December
holidays as tourists in Zanzibar. It was still at the time when the
travel advisories against Kenya were in full effect following the
Westgate terrorist assault.
We flew into Zanzibar’s
Kisauni airport, where, quite blissfully, there was a separate
immigration counter for East African Community (EAC) citizens, contrary
to the Dar es Salaam Julius Nyerere International Airport’s legacy of
treating all arriving visitors as one heaving block of unwelcome
travellers.
It took about an hour to drive to our
destination in the northern part of the island, where we were going to
stay at a villa belonging to a South African owner.
We
did however get pulled over twice on the otherwise uneventful journey.
The first time was by the Zanzibar tourist police who wanted to check
the “papers” of our van. The “papers” were found to be in good order and
we were happily waved along. The next incident was not so easy.
Two
regular policemen wearing the full white Zanzibari police uniform,
buttons agonisingly stretched across their corpulent bellies, asked Kiba
our driver for his driving licence, PSV licence and rate card in that
order after taking a long, languorous look at the licence stickers on
the windscreen and finding no fault.
Of course, Kiba
could not produce a rate card since the van belonged to the villa’s
owner, so he was told that the policemen would keep his driving licence
until he could find it. The cops were quite pragmatic and told Kiba to
take down their mobile numbers and give it to any cop who might stop us
ahead so that they could explain that they were in possession of the
licence.
After a few minutes, one cop asked Kiba to
step out of the vehicle for a “conversation”. Money changed hands, the
driving licence was released and we were dispatched on our merry way.
Total time taken for the transaction: 15 glorious minutes of our
precious holiday. Kiba was visibly embarrassed and bristling with anger
at the capricious display of greed in front of his visitors.
We
chuckled and consoled his morose spirit with the fact that we were
coming from a country where our own Kenyan traffic cops would make his
Zanzibari traffic cops look like omena at a Nile Perch beauty parade.
Zanzibar
is a beautiful island with a heritage quite similar to Lamu. Arab,
African and Indian influences have melted into a traditional,
conservative Islamic culture.
Stone Town, which is the
main city on the island is a tourist haven with several narrow winding
streets dotted by the ubiquitous curio hustlers cajoling you to visit
their shops that have the same kikoys, African traditional masks,
paintings and batiks.
I spoke to one boutique owner,
marvelling at how they were lucky to still have tourists in Zanzibar, as
our villa owner had told us that they enjoyed bookings 11 out of 12
months in a year. She was not as bullish, however.
She
told us that most of the tourists to Zanzibar were typically on a
Kenya-Tanzania-Zanzibar circuit and the events in Kenya had
significantly impacted the numbers coming through to Zanzibar at that
time in 2014.
This conversation was replicated two
months ago when I was on a working visit to Kigali, shortly after the
August 8, 2017 elections here in Nairobi.
The
general manager at the hotel I was staying at was lamenting at the
impact the Kenyan elections were having on visitors to a city some 1,200
kilometres south west of Nairobi.
He said the exact
same thing as the Zanzibari boutique owner. A large number of tourists
to Rwanda were usually partaking in a circuit that started in Kenya.
Cancellations to Kenya therefore meant that the whole circuit, including
Rwanda would be cancelled.
That our fortunes (and our
sticky-fingered traffic cops) are intertwined within the East African
Community is an unassailable fact.
The intangible but
very apparent influence that Kenya has on the region’s economy should
give some pause to the proponents of the monetary (and doubtful
political) union for the EAC.
Our seeming inability to
arrive at a mutually agreeable political solution is one that is of our
own Kenyan making, and should never be exposed to the wider,
unsuspecting regional citizenry.
Or perhaps the
opposite is true: a regional constituency might require a very different
big picture thinking at the political level, making Kenyan tribal
issues the non-issues that they need to eventually become.
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