The chang’aa effect that makes Nairobi intoxicating

Confession! I have taken chang’aa but for medical reasons. As young kids, we suffered from a bad cough. My mum tried all sorts of medicines.

Desperate, she gave us a teaspoonful of chang’aa each morning for some time.

It seemed to have worked. Incidentally, I still hear of similar recommendations today - take some whiskey if you have a bad cold.

Many years later, I learned that alcohol is one of the key ingredients used in manufacturing drugs and perfumes.

Out of curiosity, I will ask her where she got that chang’aa from. At 81, police should have no interest in her past.

Making alcohol is a universal skill; even the most primitive society knew how to make it.

That could be the reason it’s used in religious ceremonies, up to this day.

Any efforts to stop illegal alcohol brewing in Kenya and beyond have failed and will fail. It’s better to formalise it like waragi in Uganda and konyagi in Tanzania.

Two reasons make it hard to stop illicit alcohol brewing. One, it’s very easy and cheap to make, and by extension very profitable.

It about mixing any biological matter, including elephant droppings in some places, then distilling the alcoholic content.

Some heat fastens the biological process, better fermentation. The chang’aa dens are usually near rivers for cooling purposes.

The biological matter is usually waste from foodstuffs or peelings which make the cost of production almost zero.

Other materials used include maize flour, sugar, molasses, sorghum, and other cheap and easily available materials.

That is why chang’aa is cheap and portent with alcohol content often as high as 60 per cent. There is no cost of quality control.

What chang’aa dealers can’t make from unit cost like the popular high-end brands, they make from volume.

Chang’aa boasts some of the most loyal consumers.

Chang’aa drinkers love their drink because it makes them high faster, and truth be said, most alcoholics love the “kick” and the feeling of being high, which is godlike.

They even start speaking in tongues. Urban highly literate men (not sure about women) talk in their mother tongue when drunk. Rural folks talk in English even when illiterate.

Enough entertainment. Nairobi behaves like Chang’aa brewer; it distils the brightest and the most ambitious brains from the counties, with or without devolution.

Aspiring cities

As we argued last, week, which is what keeps the city ahead of the other counties.

The towns aspiring to be cities seem oblivious of that fact.

The growth of the city is about people and their ideas, not structures.

Incidentally, even towns that boast of universities like Karatina, Chuka, Kakamega, Nyahururu, Voi, and others suffer from brain drain.

Instead of retaining these brains after graduation, they are just interested in the rent they pay.

The graduates from the “county” universities will shift to Nairobi as soon as they graduate.

Nairobi, in addition to having more universities, keeps its brains with a bit of leakage to abroad or majuu.

Will the towns aspiring to be cities distil brains from the rest of the country?

Do they have the attractions that Nairobi offers, including timeliness? If they can’t, they are better off the way they are.

Nairobi lately has even started distilling brains from the neighbouring countries and even from the rest of the world.

Why else are incubators like iHub or Nailab doing so well? We can’t forget Safaricom.

The “changaarial” behaviour of Nairobi is best exposed by turning “useless” people into wealth creators.

This includes school dropouts who like chang’aa’s raw materials are squeezed by Nairobi’s competitive heat and turned into businessmen and entrepreneurs who keep the city humming and give it a tax base.

Am sure most readers know of men and women characterized as failures by our education system but prospered once they found their way to Nairobi.

Chang’aa brewers mix anything from potatoes peels to pineapple peels to cabbages, anything biological.

Nairobi allows the mixing of tribes, religions, creeds, colours, and nationalities.

This mixture brings out the best in us heated by competition.

The newly aspiring cities like Kisumu lack that mixing. Nakuru and Eldoret might succeed where Kisumu failed; it’s too homogeneous to experience the chang’aa effect.

Any town or county willing to learn from chang’aa brewers will prosper and give Nairobi a run for its money.

Other great cities we admire from New York to London, Tokyo to Shanghai have prospered because of the chang’aa effect.

But the reality on the ground is that counties prefer to remain homogeneous, prefer to employ their own even ignoring 30 per cent reserved for outsiders. Growth and prosperity will continue to elude them.

The same applies to towns aspiring to be cities.

The chang’aa brewers might be anonymous, always running away from police and disproportionately women; but their modus operandi could be what is needed for the economic transformation of Kenya.

Even Vision 2030 and Big Four agenda can learn a lesson or two from chang’aa brewers.

And where did the name chang’aa come from?

From which language?

Let me call my mum and ask her where she got that chang’aa from. I will report to you next week.

 

-The writer is an associate professor, University of Nairobi