Nomads, peasants build the new city

When Kenya launched Vision 2030 a few years ago, the government also released artist’s impressions of what Nairobi would look like by 2030. It was part-Shanghai, part-Dubai.

You could hear the noise of people falling off their chairs laughing. The government was so shambolic then, no one took the Vision 2030 thing seriously.

Today, there might be doubters, but no one is laughing any more as the flyovers, fancy bypasses, and 12-lane roads being built around Nairobi by the Chinese take shape.

But Nairobi is not the only African city in the make-up room. I read somewhere that Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa has hatched an ambitious plan to pimp up.

Kigali has a whole bunch of guys from Singapore who are helping slowly transform it into the region’s most beautiful and orderly capital.

Sudan is attempting a mini-Dubai along the riverfront in Khartoum. So is Djibouti. Even chaotic Lagos is reclaiming land along its Atlantic beach and fashioning a modern 21st century city enclave.

But there are an equal number of laggards. In East Africa, Bujumbura and Kampala are stuck in the past. Kampala has impressive new buildings and hotels but the streets in Mogadishu are better and ugly concrete jungles have eaten all the green spaces.

So how does one explain our different approaches to cities? Cities like Nairobi have reached that point where there are people who have come of age, whose parents and grandfathers were both born in the city and have weak rural connections.

Kampala is still run by peasants. You will find no family that has lived consistently in Kampala for 100 years. Military tough guy Idi Amin chased away the oldest urbanites, the Asians, in 1972. Decades of war and upheaval uprooted the rest.

For as long as a country is run by men and women who go to relax in their country farms and homes, you will have a messy city. They see the city as something to escape from.

But cultural traits also affect our approach. Leaders from a cattle-keeping nomadic background as in Uganda, tend to invest more in distribution, rural feeder networks, and long stretches of tarmac roads that sometimes go nowhere.

They neglect the city because that is a product of the settled mindset of farmers. Uganda was ruled at Independence by cotton farmers from the north, and banana, coffee, and tea growers from the south.

They invested in building Kampala, and were mega infrastructure types obsessed with symbols of permanency — like building the now decrepit Mulago Hospital. Farmers also tend to be better builders of state institutions than cattle keepers.

Then you have displaced Rwandese, traumatised by the bleakness of decades in refugee camps, and the loss of roots in the country they left behind. The few places they can call home and build paradise are the cosmopolitan cities. So you have crisp flower-bedecked Kigali.

When you bring all these groups together; people born of farmers, cattle keepers, fishermen, and third generation urbanites — exciting things begin to happen big time — as in the emerging future Nairobi.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is Nation Media Group’s executive editor for Africa & Digital Media. E-mail: cobbo@nation.co.ke