Furore over Wanga Kingdom

Edward Indakwa

It's a bad time to be a Wanga, that illustrious Luhya sub-tribe that gave history the fabled Nabongo Mumia.

For the past week, I have been asked to explain ‘the real king of the Wanga’ more times than I care to remember.

Unfortunately, I have no idea. When my great grandfather died in 1945, Mumia Nabongo was no more. By the time my grandfather died in 1979, we were just frightened of the village headman.

By the time His Royal Highness Nabongo Peter Mumia was installed a few years ago, none of the people aged between 18 and 40 knew a single Wanga war cry.

They had never held a spear in their hands either, and only a handful could skin a goat.

Of course when retired paramount chief was also installed as Nabongo, everyone got confused. And when he passed on, the confusion reached fever pitch.

Those, however, are issues that are well beyond me.

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My age, I’m not even a junior elder yet and this does not allow me to as much as whisper about such grave matters of state.

Frail

Nonetheless, I couldn’t help noticing that when Nabongo William Rapando (sorry to say that, Nabongo Peter) was getting buried, I couldn’t help noticing that the bull that his successor speared in the ageless ritual with which my people have installed new kings was not a ‘bull.’

In the days when Nabongo reigned and well up to the 1970s, the bulls that strutted across the ridges were hefty, well built beasts with thick necks and monstrous humps. I saw them in my youth. I know.

But they are no more. You could cross an entire village without bumping into a bull. And when you do, what you see is a frail thing because the cost of artificial insemination is astronomical.

In short, arable farming and livestock production, the pillars of the traditional Wanga economy, died a long time ago.

Fragmentation

The fattened goats that Nabongo served his guests are no more, as are the crops, for which the Nabongo’s granaries were famed.

In just two weeks of fighting in 2008, there wasn’t a vegetable on any market in the kingdom.

Sugarcane, which replaced our traditional economy, is on the decline.

Last year, Mumias Sugar Company struggled to find cane for milling, a situation that you could attribute to Kakamega and Bungoma being the most populous counties in Kenya and the attendant land inheritance and fragmentation issues. It is doubtful that cane farming, as Mumias has always known it, will exist in ten years.

The question, therefore, should not be that may the real Nabongo of Wanga step forward, but rather, will the Wanga people step forward?

Nabongo Mumia’s kingdom was said to span several provinces.

Yet since independence, no son of Wanga has been a minister. What happened to the sons of the great king?

Supervision the Indian way

Last week, an Indian national, 30, supervising a road construction project in Nyanza, reportedly punched and kicked a Kenyan foreman, 50, for "not meeting targets."

I am not sure how they go about things in India, but down here, a young man does not kick an old man unless the said young man is a robber, a member of a banned sect or, oh yes, a Government official wearing some sort of jungle uniform.

The Indian national in question is here on a work permit (which the Brits denied Mariga). That suggests he has skills that are way beyond the expertise of the engineering graduates that we churn out from Nairobi, Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya Polytechnic and Mombasa Polytechnic universities.

That in itself is a bit odd because it is Kenyan boys and girls who manage national road construction projects in many countries in southern Africa.

What that episode suggests, however, is that management scientists need to urgently reconsider their theories. When workers don’t meet set targets, it is assumed they have a problem of sorts that could be either personal or related to the workplace. Scholars give a whole raft of remedies, paramount among them being motivation.

But as that foreign national ably demonstrated, motivating non-performing workers is a waste of time and money. Why go through all that when you can kick sense into their heads as you would a pupil, which is banned in Kenya anyway?

I wouldn’t blame him though. Maybe he was just angry that nearly 100 years after his forefathers build the East African Railway for us, we are still bothering Indians to fix potholes and build roads for us.