What they won't tell you about El Niño

The government appears ready and has set aside billions to fix El Niño so sirkal saidia victims can be evacuated long before the rains start.

In Murang’a, residents have been urged to visit distant uncles so that when entire hillsides flatten their huts, the owners will be conveniently absent. Health teams are already swatting malaria-causing mosquitoes to death as engineers clean up drains to prevent flooding in urban centres.

For me, unfortunately, this high level of preparedness is a disaster. Can you imagine how boring television will be without farmers wading waist-deep in floodwaters with goats on their heads while the MP, in a business suit and Italian shoes, blasts the Government for not doing anything to help his people?

I also bemoan this preparedness because the work of an elder is to gather his brood and tell them how difficult life was in the past and how deadly the last El Niño was. Now, what tales will our kids tell our grandchildren if we prepare so well that this thing turns out to be just a mousy little El Niño?

I was lucky. I saw the big one in 1998. When rainmakers at meteorological department announced in 1997 that the mother of all rains was coming,

I was among the skeptics who assumed they were spinning fiction as usual. I was therefore not in the least worried about rain when I left my office one evening and caught the first matatu to town.

But somewhere near Nyayo Stadium, we ran into a deluge so vicious that the driver couldn’t see an inch beyond his nose. Traffic stalled and we sat in silence for an hour. When it became apparent that we weren’t going to drive anywhere, we began walking. I joined a long, meandering queue for a matatu to Umoja. Three hours later, I was still standing in the same spot, so thoroughly drenched that a bucket of rainwater was squelching around in my father’s union.

I got home at 2am. There wasn’t a morsel to eat in the place and my mattress — I didn’t own a bed — was soaked. It rained throughout the night. In the morning, I caught a matatu that sputtered to a halt in the middle of a deep pool of dirty water near Country Bus Station.

You can therefore picture me shivering and squelching my way into the office at 10am, the very image of a muddy and rained on chicken. Now, those are the sort of things the Met people never mention when they talk about El Niño.

But here is some advice from a veteran: First, keep a blanket in the office just in case the rains catch you Facebooking on company time and you are unable to get home.

Second, if you must drink, don’t fall asleep in the gutter or your remains will be swept all the way to Egypt.

Last, if your residence is an illegal settlement bordering Nairobi River, get moving to higher ground now. My friend, the Government will be too busy ‘assessing the situation’ to come to your aid. Yeah. Just thought you should know.