PRESIDENT DECORATES DEVELOPMENT TO WESTERN KENYA IN DARK ART

By Robert Wesonga

This week, the state's most significant personality arrived in Western Kenya. He had come to the land of Mulembe to deliver development goodies. In a typically Kenyan way. For some reason, this most respected state personality chose to package the development in a most peculiar fashion. The promise of roads and stadia and factories and things, needed to be embroidered in an entertaining package of insults hurled, epithets exchanged, and body-shaming traded.

Some say that he went so low; that going on rampage against people he has worked with and knows more than we do, he had descended to the very doldrums of dark arts that characterize our political duels. I do not agree with those who think like that. In any case, he was not going anywhere, even low. In some cases, it is impossible for an artist to go so low in entertaining his audience.

While in some places development narrative is delivered in terms of billions and hundreds of millions, in Western Kenya, it was delivered in descriptions of body parts. We now know who has a big head, swollen stomach, misshapen body parts and oblong head. We even know who slept with who; who murdered who, and who dumped dead bodies in River Yala – apparently all under watch of very senior people – and we also know who they were.

There goes the anatomy of development in the region. First, it comes ferried in hordes of tax-funded motorcades and helicopters. All the way from Nairobi. It comes in a form accompanied by descriptions of physical deformities of other people. In the big, oblong and misshapen heads of other leaders. While in some places development goes narrated in kilometres of bitumen roads, dams, factories and things, here, the size and shape of heads of political opponents precedes the project.

Again, development travelled to Western Kenya with rumours, gossip and innuendo. The chief state personality proved that we can all get so low in handing out low-level tabloid rumours, gossip and uppercuts of insults and other epithets.

The senior most state personality was perhaps not told why the schools in Western Kenya are so severely understaffed, nor have fewer classrooms compared to schools in other places. Or maybe he was more concerned with the realisation that one of his political opponents did not have a house. Oh, sorry, that he was living in a borrowed house. And that that was not all: this political opponent, a joker he said, was also staying with a borrowed wife. That was a lot of content from Nairobi, enough to entertain and shock us for a lifetime.

Our executive almost bragged that he is not fat like his opponents. This suggested that he has grown thin trying to develop the Western region of the country. It show that the hard work of uplifting the level of the region had made him to un-fat, the cut down size. Seeing that his opponents were not enjoying the luxury of such hard work in taking Busia, Bungoma, Trans Nzoia and Kakamega right into Singapore, he advised them to go to the gym and cut down the size of their bellies, heads, and streamline the shape of heads.

He is sure that if they go to the gym, choose the treadmill, and ran on it with the speed with rumour mill was running and delivering juicy news to Western Kenya. He is sure the gym will improve their bodies. With the improvement, the state of Butula-Nambale-Adungosi road - the only dusty or muddy road in a pre-Singapore Kenya that connects three major sub counties.

In dishing out development to my county, the president was also generous with information. He said that he knows many things: that while he occupied the second highest office, one of his opponents, a minister for interior, killed and dumped innocent people in River Yala! That while he sat in the second highest seat, he was aware that another of his opponents made a young girl pregnant and later killed her. The president did not initiate any proceedings to make these people pay for these heinous misdeeds. He packaged them and delivered to an audience waiting to understand just why Mumias Sugar and Webuye Panpaper Mills have never fully returned from admittance in hospital.

Some people think that having a great leader who arrives in your backyard loaded with rumours of his opponents' sleeping talents, or escapades with women, or dossiers of his so-called enemies murder credentials, is a bad thing. It is not. Some reckon that for a president to arrive and dish out insults and descriptions of people's bodies, is as low as the lowest-rated gutter newspaper, or online tabloid. It is not. You see, having alighted from the Vision 2030 train and boarded a ship to Singapore, we shall need entrainment along the way as we sail to our new Utopia. What better person to lead the entertainment squadron than the president himself? Bill must surely fit the bill, seeing how easily he blends a crude sense of humour, dark comedy, bitterness, good English and some ordinary Kiswahili punchlines to produce art of a most tragicomic aspect.

In all of these, the silver lining exists. Once the Busia Stadium is complete, we shall invite the fighting bigwigs to a fistfight with each other in it. For there will be more dignity in that, than there is in the foulmouthed tirade, and body shaming that we saw being traded. 

 

Robert Wesonga is a freethinker 

who writes his own things

BEYOND NOAH'S ARK: WHEN FLOODWATERS SPEAK TO POWER

 Robert Wesonga

In the history of humankind’s belief systems, oral culture and literary productions, there have emerged several flood narratives of a religious aspect. These famed catastrophic floods have been instigated by supreme deities to destroy civilizations as an act of divine restoration, and retribution – following ages of wrongdoing by humankind. In a mythical twist of irony, the flood catastrophes have been meant to reset to the world to a new golden age, rid of sin and corruption.

The Epic of Gilgamesh remains the oldest flood narrative, dating as far back as 2100BC, which is over 4,000 years ago. In the Bible, the book of Genesis, a story is told of a killer flood and Noah’s Ark; the Epic of Gilgamesh – set in modern day Iraq – narrates a flood from which Utnapishtim, the protagonist and God’s loyalist, and his followers are saved; the Sumerian Mythology has the Eridu Genesis flood narrative and the redemption of Ziusudrad, and the Flood Myth in the Brahmana among the Hindu adherents.

These narratives share a hauntingly consistent anatomy. Across every culture, three motifs endure: first, a corrupt majority, those who refuse to listen to a Noah and whose transgressions invite divine wipe out; second, a solitary protagonist—faithful to the Creator or Noah or Brahman—tasked by deity to build a boat, an ark, for the willing. Ultimately, each story culminates in a reset of the universe, offering a clean horizon to those who chose the ark. In stark contrast, those who reject the call to board the ark are vanquished, never to witness the new sunrise breaking over the peaks of Mount Ararat.

In these ancient echoes, the water is never just water. It is a spiritual broom, a liquid reckoning sent to scrub the earth of the dirt of human folly. A few days ago, as the brown, swirling arteries of Nairobi burst their banks, and the city dwellers found themselves trapped in a terrifyingly literal re-enactment of the religious flood myths. But as the plastic bottles compete for space alongside the ruins of mabati-roofed homes, we must ask: Is this merely a meteorological failure, or is it a physical manifestation of a deeper, more destructive rot within our body politik?

For decades, the city of Nairobi has functioned as the grand stage of stagnant promises. When the rains come, they do not merely fall; they accuse. They expose the skeletal remains of a city planned for the few but inhabited by the millions. The water rushes into the living rooms of the poor not because the clouds are cruel, but because the trenches and gutters of our governance are clogged with the silt of grand corruption and the debris of indifference.

There is a profound epistemology to a flood—a way of knowing that only disaster can provide. It reveals the topography of inequality with brutal precision. The flood does not need a map to find the marginalized; it simply follows the path of least resistance, which in Nairobi, leads easily to the doors of those the state has forgotten. While the elite watch the downpour from the safety of high-walled "Edens" on the hills, the residents of the valley watch their lives dissolve into the mud. In the flood, the poor are forced into a terrible visibility—clinging to rooftops, their meagre belongings floating away like discarded memories.

This is the weight of a long-muffled national groan. For years, the cries of the displaced, the hunger of the northern herder, and the sighs of the unemployed have been drowned by the loud music of political rallies and the roar of V8 engines. We have built a society where wealth is the lifejacket, and poverty, the anchor that literally grounds many. But flood waters, in their blind, democratic fury, remind us that sometimes a broken system eventually threatens everyone. No amount of opulence can keep one’s soul dry when the very foundation of the state is built on the shifting sands of deceit. For even cars were washed away; bungalows invaded by raging waters; and manicured lawns submerged.

Why, then, should we speak of a political flood? Because our current system is a clogged gutter, overflowing with the effluent of sentimental tales. We have reached a point where leadership is no longer earned through wisdom or service, but through the goodness of one's cheeks or the thickness of one’s envelope.

The flood moment in Kenya, as tragic as it may seem, is an existential necessity. As long as our political system remains choked with the grime of impunity, only a political flood can reset the clock. We have cultivated a culture where we mock the better alternative simply because their bank accounts lack the excessive opulence we have been conditioned to worship. We have turned our elections into auctions, then act surprised when the purchasers treat the counties and constituencies we have sold them as their private purses.

Consider the voter in Busia, who can no longer distinguish which lie to disbelieve because the lie is the main political currency in circulation. Consider the herder in the bandit-ridden wilds of Baringo, who looks on helplessly as both drought and bandit snatch a fortune they have built for years; think of a free willed Kenyan in Kakamega who fails to see the difference between a rogue police officer who hurls a teargas canister at a peaceful people, and the gun-wielding bandits of the wild. When the boundaries between law and lawlessness, between service and theft, become this blurred, the social contract is not just torn—it is submerged.

The political flood we need is not one of blood, but of accountability. It is a flood of civic consciousness that washes away the diminished character of our leadership and leaves behind a fertile soil where integrity can finally take root. The Gen Z protest of 2024 gives us hope that the terrifying but redemptive flood is always an option. We must stop voting with our stomachs—driven by the temporary satisfaction of a handout—and start voting with our heads, looking at the long horizon of our children's future.

In the ancient myths, the flood was followed by a rainbow—a covenant of peace. But that peace was only possible because the world had been reset. In Kenya, we are still clinging to the old, rotting timber of tribalism and cronyism, hoping the storm will pass without us having to change.

As we look toward 2027, the clouds are gathering once more. We see them – and they are not few. They are already practicing their smiles and refining their narratives so that they can buy another five years of inaction. We must choose our Noah wisely, the one with the goodly ark that will carry us yonder – to Mountain Ararat, to witness a new dawn.

The flood moment is nigh. The gutters are full to bursting. The sky is a heavy, and ominously laden with black clouds. Whether we witness a new dawn or remain a footnote in a tragic history depends a lot on our courage to face the truth when we stand before the ballot box. We must decide if we want a country that nurtures life or a country that merely counts its victims as they float by – in the floods that we have caused to happen.

Robert Wesonga is a freethinker 

who writes his own things 

HOW LUHYAS CAN MAKE THEIR KING: REFLECTIONS FROM EMURUA DIKIRR

By Robert Wesonga

[Part Two]

In my previous musings published here last week, I stated that it was the first in a three-part series of my argument: WHY THE LUHYA NATION MUST NOW FIND A 'TRIBAL' KING. I promised to write parts two and three under the same title, but on the evening of 28^th February, something profound intervened—a force too potent to ignore. This force demands that we pause, reflect, and that we wrestle wisdom from the very jaws of tragedy – as it were.

And so today, on this page, we must still argue as candidly as only a people starved of political identity can—with the humility that befits our limited knowing, yet with the honesty that commands us to speak. For many homelands that have sought to rise from the peripheries of neglect—as the Luhya of Western Kenya must—have walked this taxing, often controversial path. Seneca the Younger reminds us: "It is true greatness to have in one the frailty of a man, and the security of a god." And so it is with communities: we must own our frailty even as we stretch toward the security that only unity can bestow.

The exceedingly profound happening that I allude to at the start is the same sad occurrence that has occasioned a slight twist to the title, but the subject of the engagement remains the same. On the evening of Saturday, 28th February 2026, the day ended as badly as any day could end. On social media, and indeed mainstream media, news started trickling in of a helicopter accident in Nandi County. Worse, there were reports that all the occupants of the helicopter were feared dead. When details of the helicopter involved and its manifest emerged, it was not difficult for the public to piece together that among the fallen was a national figure, the MP for Emurua Dikirr, Johanna Ngeno.

What followed was a torrent of grief that washed across the nation, but like all floods, it had its source, its epicentre. Geographically, that epicentre was Emurua Dikirr constituency, a place whose name now imposes itself into the national consciousness alongside the memory of its fallen son. Spiritually, the epicentre belonged amongst the Kipsigis people. In mourning the departed, his community was making a statement that transcended the routine condolences of political protocol. The people of Emurua Dikirr, the Kipsigis nation, were declaring that even though he was a national leader, they owned him first; that the bond between them and him was more spiritual than political. It was the kind of ownership that precedes elections and outlasts terms, the kind that cannot be legislated or debated in Parliament, but is felt in the marrow of a people's collective bone.

In the days that followed, I watched with the keen eye of a student of power as the Kipsigis community gathered themselves around this loss. They did not scatter in confusion or retreat into individual grief. They consolidated. They spoke with one voice. They reminded the nation that Johanna Ngeno was theirs, and in claiming him in death, they were also claiming the space he had occupied in their lives. There is a profound lesson here for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. Aristotle once observed that man is by nature a political animal, but he might have added that man is also by nature a tribal animal—not in the negative sense that the word 'tribe' has come to carry in our modern discourse, but in the sense that we belong first to those who belong to us.

Most importantly, it was clear the late Ngeno had died with a part of the Kipsigis people. You see, in this life we live, some things you choose, but others choose you; some people you choose, but others choose you. For the late Ngeno and the Kipsigis, it was different. Both the man and his people had chosen each other. It was a marriage of destiny, not of convenience. And in that mutual choosing, there is a power that no constitution can confer and no election can mandate.

Even in such times of adversity, the Luhya nation—a people who have struggled and still struggle at getting a definitive leader since Masinde Muliro and Wamalwa Kijana after him—must surely learn some lessons. World over, there comes a time in the history of societies when members realise that even though they may have several leaders and opinion shapers, they stand to benefit by gravitating and consolidating their support behind one of them. For the Luhya, such efforts have often been thwarted by either naysayers, or by those who posture as nationalists especially when they acquire a morbid appetite for self-gain. We have become masters of fragmentation, experts in division, virtuosos of pulling down our own before they can rise high enough to pull us up.

Believing in the charity which begins at home does not stop a community from pursuing a national agenda. It means, on the contrary, that by galvanising the potential of one from our backyard, we give them the best chance of getting to the top, and help in thwarting the ever-strengthening perception that there are communities that will make up voters, and others that enjoy the birthright of being leaders. This perception has evolved into a kind of political theology in our nation—that some are born to lead, others born to follow; some are born to rule, others born to vote. And we, the Luhya, have too often submitted to this theology, nodding along as if our marginalisation were divinely ordained rather than politically constructed.

We need to own our leader in ways that go beyond the transactional politics of election seasons. Ownership of a leader means something deeper than turning out to vote every five years and then retreating into political hibernation. It means holding that leader accountable not just to the nation, but to the community that birthed them. It means creating the kind of spiritual bond that the Kipsigis had with Ngeno—the kind that survives helicopter crashes and outlasts mortal existence. It means understanding that when we send one of our own to the national stage, we are not diminishing our community but extending it, projecting our collective voice into chambers where it might otherwise never be heard.

Whereas it is politically correct for leaders from any community to project a nationalist image, it is incumbent upon the communities behind these leaders that give them gravitas to own them, and if need be, project positive ethnicity by claiming them as their own. People from other communities will not accept our leaders unless they see that we have no doubts regarding their greatness. There is a paradox here that we must grasp: the more confidently we claim our own, the more readily others will accept them. National acceptance flows from communal confidence, not from communal erasure. You cannot be a gift to the nation if you are not first a treasure to your own people.

The late Johanna Ngeno understood this instinctively, as his people understood it. In his rise, they saw their own rise. In his voice, they heard their own concerns articulated. In his presence in Parliament, they felt themselves present. And now in his death, they are not diminished but somehow enlarged, because they have demonstrated to the nation what it means to be a community that knows how to own its own. The Kipsigis have taught us that political power is not just about numbers at the ballot box, but about presence in the national consciousness—and presence is achieved not by hiding your identity but by projecting it with confidence and pride.

Perhaps later, we, the Luhya, shall look back and say that with a masterpiece of good thought and strategy, we were able to solidify our power, and make count the numerical advantage that we so often brandish to no good effect. For we are not a small people—we are nearly seven million strong, a nation within a nation, a sleeping giant that has slumbered too long while others have danced. The time for waking is now. The lessons are before us, written not in books but in the blood of a fallen leader from a community that knew how to claim him. Let us learn, at last, how to make our king.

 

Wesonga is a freethinker, and writer of his own things.

There will be Part Three...