Hellish Kitale-Lodwar road and the pain of social imbalance

A section of Kitale-Lodwar road. Courtesy: Twitter

Thirteen years may have passed but their resolve to rewrite their history has never faded.  The incident happened sometime in April, 2003. The set-up was in Kainuk town, Turkana County.

That morning, Kainuk residents – powered by an unbreakable chain of widows and orphans – took to the streets. With them were two grievances: the menace brought by bandit bullets and the pain of depending on an impassable Kitale-Lodwar road.

Well, to cut the long story short, anyone familiar with the happenings in Turkana will confirm to you that the only road joining the region to the rest of Kenya degrades the very essence of Kenya’s sovereignty. Kitale-Lodwar road is not even ideal for camel caravans. Currently, it only supports a lethal cabal of crooks who live off the back of road-users plying that route.

With this comes unpleasant news. Only the brave can shoulder the weight of transporting merchandise to Turkana. As a result, only those with heavy pockets can purchase. Of course, there is that social reasoning the creeps in. In Turkana, you get an imbalanced society composed of a tiny minority enjoying the fruits of “living in Kenya”, and the rest of us with gloomy faces.

Believe you me, this is the mother of all causes of poverty in Turkana.

While this scenario hardly popped up as a “real” issue that deserved public attention some years ago, devolution has brought home some hitherto Nairobi-based elite largess that now push villagers to reframe their collective questions.

One question that keeps coming up is why Turkana leaders choose not to travel by road. Here you get some scary facts. The number of flights plying Nairobi-Lodwar route keeps surging. Some Turkana top honchos now own private copters to facilitate their travels in and out of this rugged, locked county.

Parallel to these, the region can easily scoop a gold medal for hosting many of Kenya’s poorest people.

Now, you get the drift. This bad road has its victims and beneficiaries.

How a region swimming in endless pools of poverty can be attractive to an ever-increasing chain of airlines still baffles me. Something just doesn’t add up here.

I hear people saying that if leaders can hop from Nairobi’s Wilson Airport to Lodwar minus the headache that comes with swallowing tonnes of dust and dodging bandit bullets along Kitale-Lodwar road, what makes us – the invisible majority – (to) expect them to be vociferous proponents of public issues.

Here we are silently aiding the growth of a Kenya’s version of apartheid. It is simple. You need no technical knowhow to stomach the extent of social disequilibrium caused by bad roads in northern Kenya. We have a two-layered social edifice. Those whose fortunes have been grounded because they crawl. And those with catchy stories because they fly.

For those who may think my frustration is informed by some sort of we-versus-them spirits should just get this right. Guys, the “crawling” and the “flying” classes have lots of interlocking interests. And by the way, it is the “flying” class that may find it hard to live without the support of the “crawling” types.

This is how. The tonnes of meat rolling down your throats daily come from livestock farms of those “crawling” types. They feed you, albeit their rugged terrains!

The state of our not-so-politically-relevant communities epitomizes the callousness of our collective thinking. On this front, the Kenyan State is guilty as charged. It only raised its hand when some oily substance was spotted in Lokichar.

What remains to be seen is whether this change of heart will lessen the burden of the residents of Turkana in particular, and northern Kenya in general. All in all, I still find no reason not to cling on skepticism. Someone must build those northern Kenya roads.

Twitter: @mlemukol.