Sakaja's bizarre waste banquet shakes Nairobi

Arthur is quite the bougie name. I do not know much about Johnson, or Sakaja, but Arthur sounds like a name one would give a son they wished would grow into a cultured, well-mannered and educated good-English-spewing man.

A young Arthur would be the boy who wears white shirts and shorts and a hat, and whose face would scrunch up at the mere sight of chicken poop. Such habits would presumably follow him into adulthood.

Not our Arthur, the governor of Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, who, as the nation found out this past week, would have stink bombs for breakfast. So much so that he thought he would share some pungent delicacy with folks at the Stima Plaza in Ngara, delivering truckloads of garbage at their doorstep after City Hall had its electricity cut off.

He forgot to take plates, with his employees serving the meal on the tarmac. “It was, of course, unfortunate that one of the trucks tipped garbage. That was not the intention and that is why, in less than 30 minutes, all that garbage was collected. That is not how Nairobi County operates,” Sakaja apologised last week, ostensibly for the lack of plates.

Angered, Members of Parliament demanded the governor be arrested, with others called for his impeachment. Forgetting plates, it seems, is an unforgivable sin in this part of the world. Seeing that all their customers would be well fed for days, restaurants were closed for business. Who needs a restaurant when you have Arthur to feed all your wild cravings.

Sakaja, who formerly went by as Super Senator, has a reputation for feeding the masses. He takes pride in feeding school children.

Burgers are not the only things Sakaja keeps invisible. Controller of Budget Margaret Nyakang’o has perennially accused him of spending little, if at all anything, on development. Of course, Sakaja denies such claims. Being ‘super’ the governor sees things mere mortals cannot.

Sakaja, the tall, dark and dimpled man from God-knows-where, talks with an urbane swagger. His English is good, meaning that he is, perhaps, living up to his middle name. Is he well-mannered or cultured? Over to you, Stima Plaza folks. Is the good governor educated, formally? He claims to be hotter than ice at one degree.

He swears he earned it at a Ugandan institution that took the phrase “Degree ni Harambee” too seriously and decided to call itself Team University. 

Being no thermometer, I am unqualified to tell how many degrees Sakaja has, but it would help if he produced one of this classmates in campus. Better still, he could post a selfie of himself in a gown.

That Sakaja went to school is not in doubt. Before virtually attending’ Teams, Sakaja was at the University of Nairobi. He found the roots of education too bitter and dropped out, ostensibly to pursue a career in politics.

He must have, arguably rightly, seen a brighter future in his new line of work when he was a part of former Presidents Mwai Kibaki’s and Uhuru Kenyatta’s campaign teams respectively in 2007 and 2013, when he chaired Uhuru’s The National Alliance party.

Sakaja previously tried rapping, but probably figured a career in music would be as cumbersome as studying. Nyashinski warned prospective rappers ages ago.

Politics offered instant rewards for Sakaja, who was nominated to the National Assembly in 2013. Five years later, he would become Nairobi’s senator and set his sights on the governorship.

Sakaja’s goal was to bring back sanity to the city. From the garbage dumping events of last week, many must have been fooled by Sakaja’s definition of sanity. Could it be that what he wanted all along was to prove to Sonko that he was better at littering the city?

If that had been the plan, Sakaja bossed it. Dumping waste at the city centre, against his intended job description of responsible waste management was too high a low, nothing that Sonko, who admitted to soiling the Jacaranda grounds with faeces, could match.