Cities don't run on charisma but on competence

There’s a photograph from 1963 that still hangs in City Hall, Nairobi, bathed in golden light, jacaranda trees lining pristine boulevards, the Kenyatta International Conference Centre rising like a promise against an endless sky. That Nairobi wasn’t just a city. It was a statement: Africa can build world-class cities. We belong at the table. 

Barack Obama saw that city in 2015. So did Joe Biden, as Vice President in 2020, and Theresa May in 2018. Hillary Clinton praised Nairobi hair stylists as comparable to those in California and New York. Nairobi has hosted kings, presidents, and Nobel laureates. The city has been the diplomatic heart of East Africa, the Silicon Savannah, the gateway to a continent on the rise. In her infamous song ‘My City’, Mayonde says there is no city like Nairobi. 

Walk down Tom Mboya Street today and what do you see? Potholes that swallow matatus whole. Garbage piling at corners where flower beds once bloomed. Traffic lights that haven’t worked in years. Hawkers competing for space on pavements where families once strolled. Sewage bursts into the streets during every rainy season. 

This is not the Nairobi that welcomed world leaders. This is not the city our grandparents built. Nairobi wasn’t always like this. Between the 1960s and early 1990s, visionary mayors and town clerks understood that cities are systems, not fiefdoms and built Nairobi into East Africa’s crown jewel. They didn’t govern with rhetoric. They governed with spreadsheets, engineering plans, and long-term vision. They built Uhuru Park when politicians wanted to sell it. They expanded sewage systems before populations exploded. They maintained roads before cracks became canyons. They planted trees not for photo opportunities, but because cities need lungs. 

They weren’t charismatic orators. They were administrators. CEOs of a complex operation called urban governance. And Nairobi thrived under their stewardship. Then something shifted. Politics replaced planning. Manifestos replaced maintenance. Vision gave way to survival. We began electing people who could speak well, not people who could manage well. And Nairobi began to die slowly at first, then all at once. 

New York City and Nairobi are separated by 11,500km and have vastly different economies. Yet both are global cities with similar challenges: congestion, inequality, infrastructure decay, and rapid population growth. The difference? New York treats itself like a corporation. It has a budget larger than that of many countries. It employs urban planners who think in decades, not election cycles.

When Michael Bloomberg became mayor in 2002, he didn’t arrive with empty promises; he arrived with systems. He introduced congestion pricing. He expanded bike lanes. He created public plazas in Times Square, turning car-choked intersections into pedestrian havens. He used data to deploy police, fix potholes, and improve sanitation. Was he perfect? No. But he treated New York like a business that needed to deliver services to eight million shareholders, its residents. 

Nairobi, by contrast, treats governance like a lottery. We elect governors who arrive with big promises and leave with bigger scandals. Systems collapse because no one maintains them. Budgets disappear into ghost projects. Residents, who are the shareholders, watch helplessly as their investment decays. New York learned something Nairobi has forgotten: Cities don’t run on charisma. They run on competence. 

Nairobi can borrow from New York’s obsession with data-driven governance. Imagine if we tracked garbage collection the way New York does, ward-by-ward, with real-time dashboards showing which neighborhoods are served and which are neglected. Imagine if potholes were reported through apps and fixed within 48 hours, not 48 months. Imagine if our matatu system, chaotic but efficient, was formalised like New York’s subway, with digital payments and accountability. 

In 2027, Nairobi will elect a governor. The question isn’t whether the next leader will be a politician, businessman, statistician, or historian. The question is simpler and more urgent: Will they be a manager? 

We need a leader who will institute performance contracts for every county department. Treat Nairobi like New York treats itself: as a complex corporation that owes its residents functional infrastructure, not empty promises.