Brace yourself, season of anomie is upon us, again, like it really never ended

Rescue operation at the site of the collapsed building in South C , Nairobi, on January  7, 2026.  [Elvis Ogina, Standard]

I wanted to write about Siaya Senator Oburu Oginga’s alleged run for the presidency next year, because it’s a compelling prospect, but also because Oburu has nominated and endorsed himself, and hailed his own suitability.

The latter is informed by a singular element: he’s the senior brother to the departed Raila Odinga, a much-loved politician who ensured Oburu remained in the shadows during his lifetime.

Well, that’s not entirely true; Oburu says they lived like twins, which means they did almost everything together—barring the two stints of jail-time and exile that Raila suffered—which is to say Oburu “twinship” was confined to the good times.

The other interesting element of Oburu’s run for top office is that he’d fortify the narrative about dynasts, having succeeded his own brother, because the divide between so-called hustlers and dynasts has been vanquished as a hoax.

The inventor of the dynasty-hustler narrative, Prezzo Bill Ruto, according to his estranged former Deputy, Rigathi Gachagua aka Riggy G, has since moved on to a new narrative about taking Kenyans to “Singapore.”

Riggy G claims this is pompous narrative is especially invented for folks in Nyanza, because they like to floss, or what we called pandisa in our boyhood in Nairobi’s Eastlands.

As a master of pandisa, Riggy G charges, Prezzo Ruto has invented the Singapore narrative because it sounds fancy, unlike the bottom-up nonsense invented for folks in Central Kenya. The down-to-earth folks there prefer to understate their wealth or accomplishments. In any case, they work the soil to produce food, so the idea of bottom-up resonated with them.

To gain even more traction, Prezzo Ruto claims “Canaan,” the fabled land that Raila preached to his followers, is shorthand for “Singapore.”

Well, let’s now move from fiction to fact: The road to Kenya’s Singapore is littered with a collapsed and collapsing infrastructure, the latest edifice to tumble down being that building in South C that was designed as a ladder to heaven.

I hear the floors kept on being added as one adds slices of bread to form a bandika, and the centre could not hold. I suspect the reason those approvals kept coming was not because some palms were greased but because the official policy was to keep the floors going until they hit the heavens.

Apparently, even folks at City Hall were helpless in the face of this edifice that continued to grow like the fabled Jack and the Beanstalk; the officers were waved away and urged to mind their own business.

Now that we have blood on the floor, two innocent lives snuffed out, the sanctimony from relevant government offices will dissipate and the construction will resume quietly. After all, we are all absorbed by the tedium of crawling through traffic and dodging boda bodas that dart on the road, or the slow-moving donkeys pulling cans of water.

So, our Singapore will be littered by broken bones and blood and tears, not to mention burst sewers that constantly reminds us of our shitty politics.

But, let’s not despair. Since this is Kenya and Kenya is our business, we’ll soon catch sights of caravans booming with music and tamasha, heralding the commencement of the campaign period. And folks will line up to receive some Sh200 shillings bribes in exchange of their votes.

I hear the recent by-elections were a dress rehearsal of how money will be poured to alter electoral outcomes. And hard-up Kenyans will lament: what do I get by not taking money that’s stolen from us anyway?

I have no answer to such questions; actually, I ask questions for a living. I suppose that’s what Wole Soyinka, the Nobel laureate, calls the season of anomie. Brace yourselves.