Why cruise on expressway ends in crawl at Kitengela

Nairobi Expressway Mlolongo toll station. [Boniface Okendo, Standard]

Good morning, Kajiado Governor Joseph ole Lenku. I haven't had a chance to congratulate you on your re-election - I didn't vote, anyway - so I had nothing to do with your re-election.

I hear some women came your way this week to protest the grabbing of their land. I want to protest the grabbing of the Nairobi-Namanga Road by tuktuk, boda boda, donkeys and other contraptions, every morning and evening.

Consequently, wading through a kilometre of the Kitengela township takes longer than the 40-kilometre commute from Nairobi's CBD. It takes one anything between 30 mins to a full-hour to wade through this mayhem.

But that's not my problem; we say kazi ni kazi and every hustle is important, even though this is a major highway connecting East Africa. If you have experienced the Southern by-pass, you wouldn't know you are cutting through the Kikuyu township, so order can be imposed, if we want to.

And now that Kitengela is a municipality, what does that even mean, save for the fact that folks will start paying rates for their properties? You certainly can't tax folks who still get water on handcarts and sewerage is at best trucked off, or simply dumped on roads and waterways.

Or the cruise on the Nairobi Expressway crushes into a donkey-crawl. That would be primitive, if you'd excuse my salty vocabulary. As for the water, I hear there is fresh water from Kilimanjaro Mountain that was diverted to flower farms, instead of serving the township that's reliant on salty borehole water. Maybe next time I'll join the picketing women to protest the state of the affairs.