Tucked neatly in Makueni, is the bustling Wote

Makueni, Kenya:  The sight of donkeys in Wote, the headquarters of Makueni County is synonymous with search for water. The beasts of burden are all over the place, weighed down by 20 litre jerricans of water scooped from the sand at Kaiti River.

Piped water trickles from pipes that run from Muuoni boreholes not far from the town of 100,000, but it is little and reserved for drinking. The problem is replicated all over the county with the exception of Kibwezi and the hilly Mbooni and kilome sub-counties.

The name Wote is Kiswahili version for “all” a popular cliché during the colonial days. The small town hosted the only DO’s office in a vast area where all residents were required to gather for administrative purposes from time to time.

Wote would have remained just that, a small administrative town had a permanent Secretary for health in President Kenyatta’s government Mr John Kyalo not confused deliberately or otherwise the name Mukurwe-ini in Nyeri where a district hospital was to be built, for Makueni. The hospital that has grown into a referral facility second only to the Machakos District Hospital in the lower Eastern region, proved a major boost for the promotion of the town into a district headquarters.

Today, Wote, once a dusty shopping centre in the middle of nowhere is a bustling commercial hub served by tarmac roads and electricity from the national grid. It has overgrown once more developed Makindu and Kibwezi towns on the Nairobi/Mombasa highway with banks, malls and educational institutions competing for dominance under the azure skies that hardly hold rain bearing clouds. Residents are forever thankful to the Moi regime for settling on Wote as district headquarters against a wave of opposition from civil servants.