Strange revearsal in Kogelo

There was gossip that he had been bewitched. The auctioneers came calling. The school was sold. At ICIPE, the organisation he had founded, a boardroom coup forced him out.

The circumstances were unclear. By the time Prof Odhiambo died in 2003, Mbeji Academy no longer existed. The new owners had turned it into a primary school — Gulf Academy.

At the Kogelo dispensary compound, a crowd was gathering for a final prayer meeting before the nightlong vigil in front of CNN.

A giant screen would be set up after the service, courtesy of a television station.

A Safaricom banner sat loudly beside the clinic, and there were salespeople selling SIM cards and scratch cards.

The VCT people had set up a tent in readiness for what they called “moonlight testing.” They were hoping to test people throughout the night “as the results came in.” Everybody was cashing in on hope.

Inside the dispensary, the clinical officer on duty was attending to children, delivering government services.

He had been working at the dispensary for three years and this, he said, was just another Tuesday. Things were not bad, he said. There were very few cases of shortages these days, and when there was one, he was warned well in advance. He shrugged about the prospect of an Obama victory.

“Obama is an American. I am on duty. It’s a normal Tuesday. Definitely, I’d like Obama to win but may the best team win.” The biggest shortage, he said, was of brains. There was a brain drain. Experts and admin people were in short supply.

If there was a sense of business as usual it masked a grim reality.

That somehow over the last generation, Nyanza Province had slipped down the rankings and now, by almost every single measure — access to health services, water, and household incomes — it was the poorest region in the country.

And strangely, Nyanza also had the highest protein deficiency in the country.

Some years ago on Rusinga Island, I had come across some women selling dried fish by the lakeshores, open-backed fish they called mgongo wazi. The fish, they told me, came from Lake Turkana.

A region’s dose of development had always been directly proportional to a region’s loyalty to the government. In Nyanza, it had been in short supply for a generation.

And even with Raila Odinga in government, it would take some time before “development” arrived through conventional means. Which is why what was happening in Kogelo, momentarily lost in the dust of rising expectations of an Obama victory, had a flavour of the miraculous.