Uhuru and cement and mortar cult

Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta

By Charles Onyango-Obbo

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This is probably the last Christmas Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta is “eating” in State House as Head of State. We say “probably” because one hopes the August 2022 vote doesn’t go sideways and by next December there is still feuding over how to divide power.

On December 23, Mr Kenyatta toured one of his pet projects, the eight-lane elevated Nairobi Expressway. When completed by March, the 27.1-kilometre dual carriageway, much hated by environmentalists, will considerably decongest Mombasa Road and reduce travel time between Mlolongo and Westlands to 20 minutes.

Some things make presidents very happy. Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni is happiest when tending his vast herds of cattle. President Kenyatta is particularly in good cheer when inspecting projects like the expressway. He declared that the laying of the last of the girders linking the road was a “proud moment” for Kenya.

Amid the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown in 2020 and early this year, President Kenyatta was out, sometimes in the night, inspecting stuff that was being built in Nairobi — streets, hospitals or bus parks.

President Kenyatta is a member of the great Kenyan cement-mortar-and-tarmac cult. Cement, mortar and tarmac are how the Mwai Kibaki government continued into President Kenyatta’s. And cement, mortar and tarmac, not the March 2018 ‘Handshake’, nor ideology, might well be the ingredients that have created the bond between President Kenyatta and opposition-leader-cum-ally Raila Odinga.

A country’s spirit is the sum of how a people and their leaders want to be seen and the things it does to keep alive. Take Rwanda. Nearly two-thirds of the seats in its Parliament are held by women, the highest in the world. Rwanda, too, has more female ministers than male ones — 52 per cent, the highest in Africa.

There are likely more statues of or with women in Rwanda than elsewhere in East Africa. In Kigali, after they have had a beer or two and their tongues are loosened, some Rwandan men will complain that they are oppressed. A friend argues that the statue of a woman with a boy near the Kigali Convention Centre is symbolically that of her dragging a defeated man.

Yet, the reason for this cannot be just gender balance. In the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, nearly a million people were slaughtered in a population then of about 10 million. The economy collapsed. Piecing the country required a strong philosophy of rebirth. The domination of public life in Rwanda by women, then, is ultimately a gospel of rebirth.

Then take Uganda. It witnessed the kind of inflation no country in the region had seen during the 1971-1979 military dictatorship of Field Marshal Idi Amin and 1986, when General Museveni and his NRA rebels took power. But it was only with the 1988 economic liberalisation and reforms that inflation was brought under control. For the Museveni regime, two things were defining: Ending widespread insecurity and banishing high inflation.

Perhaps, much like the Kenya of the last years of Daniel arap Moi, a middle class-fuelled view that equal with the murderous violence inflation had done the biggest damage to the country, ran deep. For Museveni, putting a stop to it became a pillar of his legitimacy. In his early years, central bank and Finance ministry economic updates would be largely about inflation, an obsession that often baffled outsiders. However, to date, if one doesn’t appreciate its fear of inflation, one can’t fully understand most of Kampala’s policy decisions.

For Kenya, cement and mortar are an encapsulation of national progress and achievement. In his last term, Kibaki laid down tarmac like it was going out of fashion. The Thika Superhighway dual carriageway was his swan song.

Raila as Works minister in the first Kibaki government, was a roads man, a role he reprised as Prime Minister in the ‘half-loaf’ Grand Coalition Government between 2008 and 2013. Unsurprisingly, he is even the African Union’s High Representative for Infrastructure Development.

At his November State of the Nation address, President Kenyatta went ham on cement, mortar and tarmac, declaring after reeling a list of what he saw as his government’s infrastructure achievements, that “there were 11,200 kilometres of tarmacked roads constructed by four previous administrations in 123 years. In eight years, my administration has multiplied what the previous administrations had done by a factor of two”.

It was the only subject he returned to twice in his speech. He hardly mentioned dams. For some reason, Kenyan governments struggle to build things if they have to go into the ground. Since the 1970s, most dam projects in Kenya have failed, the money ending up in corrupt pockets.

Nairobi, though, can pull off builds on the surface — ports, roads, railways, offices. Clearly, for President Kenyatta, he wants to be remembered as the cement and mortar king. And Nairobi Expressway is the jewel in his crown.