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All opinion polls so far put Nairobi Senator Johnson Sakaja, who’s standing on a United Democratic Alliance (UDA) ticket, and corporate executive Polycarp Igathe to
be the frontrunners in the race to become governor of Nairobi County, home of the Kenyan capital.Nairobi is the 13th largest city in Africa, but according to the last Africa Wealth Report in 2021, it is the sixth wealthiest on the continent, with a total wealth worth $47 billion. It was fourth-ranked in the number of high net worth individuals (HNWIs) – fellows who have $1 million and above – with 6,000 of them, behind Johannesburg (with 15,1000), Cairo (7,500), and Cape Town (6,500). Interestingly, it was reported to have more HNWIs than Nigeria’s commercial capital Lagos, with 5,000.
Nairobi also remains East Africa’s commercial hub and leading financial centre. You might expect then that a candidate for Nairobi governor would cut a C-suite image and perhaps have some giant campaign poster in which he is wearing a Saville Row three-piece.
While one or two other hopefuls are shown suited, not so are the two frontrunners. Sakaja is dressed down for a trip to the market in several of his posters, and his most pimped-up looks are with him in a bright white shirt, tie, and rolled-up sleeves. Igathe has mostly stuck to one look; white shirt, tie and rolled-up sleeves.
Sakaja and Igathe know something about Nairobi, which would make a classic C-suite look an electoral kiss of death. For starters, in 2018, a Kenya Integrated Household Budget Survey revealed that Nairobi is not one of the most unequal cities in Africa but the world. It found that just 20 per cent of Nairobi’s population controls more than 75 per cent of its wealth. All of 40 per cent of Nairobi residents at the bottom of the income pyramid control a miserly 0.4 per cent of its wealth.
It is estimated that about 60 per cent of Nairobi’s population occupies just 6 per cent of its land, and about 70 per cent of Nairobians are estimated to live in around 200 informal settlements in and around the city.
The above tells us that the fellows who “own” the city, the moneyed folks and international financial capital, don’t control it. The millions of non-rich Nairobians do. And they can be unforgiving when they are in the voting booth.
Secondly, it is the “Sonko” effect. In 2017, an electoral revolt by Nairobi’s plebians against its patricians elected Mike Sonko Nairobi governor. In his brightly coloured T-shirts and heavy gold chains, Sonko was a product of Nairobi’s dark underbelly and as far away from a C-suite type as a politician could be. Let us say if you visited Sonko’s house, your teapot wouldn’t come covered with a cosy, and your wine wouldn’t be served in a stemless wine glass. But the masses loved him.
The owners of the city eventually regrouped and capitalising on his mistakes, ousted him in 2020. But those who have come after him are still afraid of his voters and are careful to tip a hat to them. The man’s name is not officially on the Nairobi ballot, but it is.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, they remind us how the city has changed both culturally and economically. In the last 15 years, as the endless by-passes and ring roads were built, the city spread, with a dizzying number of new apartments and mini and big malls. Fifteen years ago, you could know all the nice restaurants, clubs, and residential places in Nairobi off the top of your head. Today, may the gods be with you without Google Maps and if someone doesn’t drop you a pin.
The city’s middle class has grown, and it is more youthful today than it has ever been. These young people are the ones who have fanned out to live in the flashy but more affordable housing that has developed along the new by-passes and highways.
Many are creatives and small-time innovators who make living selling music, art, coding skills, clothes, design services, and the wide range of products they make online. Theirs is a democratic, t-shirt and jeans wearing kind of capital. I have been to Ruaka, and Fourways in Kiambu, some of the enclaves where these new age creatures live, and they are different and cool types of communities. A three-piece suit is a caricature.
But the number of the millions at the bottom of the food chain has also grown, and their circumstances seem to have worsened by the pandemic. The inequality in Nairobi appears to have grown sharper. The masses, though, still have the vote.
The white shirt, tie, and rolled-up sleeves (a nod to the working class) are how Sakaja and Igathe, and others like them around the country, are solving the old problem of how to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds; how to straddle two conflicting worlds.
In three weeks, we shall have the jury’s verdict on their endeavours.
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