Spare us comedy of chapati machines
By Clay Muganda, March 15, 2025About a week ago, my younger brother and I were telling his spouse how a section of the village used to share one cast iron pan to make chapatis during festive seasons.
It must have been hectic, she reckoned, for families to make a beeline for the only pan and probably inconvenience one another because some of them could not make chapatis fast enough.
Nope, we said. There was no backlog, so to write, and it was such a seamless exercise since each person understood the importance of the occasion and would not inconvenience the next user.
There was proper planning within the communities, and this extended to other aspects of everyday living that required the involvement of the government. For instance, the village cattle dips never ran out of acaricides or water, even in places where there was no piped water.
Contrast that to today when the atmosphere is filled with cris de coeur from farmers, the sick, parents of school-going children, and everyone in between over their inability to afford farm inputs, medication, school fees, and basic needs.
While the government is becoming bigger, and getting closer to the people, physically and through technology, its usefulness is not being felt, and its impact on society is only painful.
It is a case of being so near yet so far. In the past, the link between the citizenry and the State at the lowest level of governance was the chiefs and their assistants manning large locations and sub-locations.
The locations and sub-locations were subdivided into smaller areas so that administrators could have fewer people to serve with the aim being better service provision—but things have turned out differently, for the worse.
Then there is technology which should speed up responses but technological advances have not added to the improvement of quality of life as people seem worse off than when they made use of the few public telephone booths in market centres.
The poor quality of life is not confined to rural areas. Urban areas have become concrete jungles with more people living in squalid conditions despite taxes getting increased by the hour.
Kenya’s premier city, Nairobi, a regional hub once touted as Green City in the Sun has turned into a grim, and dirty urban jungle where the leadership is at the forefront of increasing the rot.
Devolution was supposed to help the citizenry enjoy the fruits of Independence by eradicating the so-called historical injustices meted out to certain communities, but the elected representatives see it as an opportunity to fatten their bank accounts.
They measure their success through physical infrastructure, and not service provision. The dispensaries and health centres have been leveled up to hospitals which in many cases are just buildings that were put up by their cronies who got tenders through underhand dealings.
At the national level, sloganeering gets louder as personality politics of praise and worship take centre stage. The message from the leaders is that listening to the citizenry is not something they signed up for.
To the Executive, ignoring the voters’ cries is the best policy, and when they talk about their lived experiences of suffering, they are told they are wrong, they do not understand how things work, they are just on a fault-finding mission.
There is a total communication breakdown between the Executive and the governed and only one party is seeing that disconnect because they are suffering and their concerns are being downplayed.
The freedoms Kenyans died for during the fights for Independence in the 1950s, political pluralism, and a new constitutional order in the 1980s and 1990s are being trampled upon, with impunity.
Some of the people who fought for those freedoms were co-opted in the government of the day, and have changed tune and become the choirmasters and mistresses of oppression.
It is not a case of the more things change the more they remain the same. It is a case of things getting worse. Freedom fighters of yore are the supporters of the government’s highhandedness, they are the praise singers and worshippers of corrupt systems because they benefit from it.
They have gone against the ideals they were fighting for and those coming out as the alternative cannot be trusted because they were once beneficiaries of favouritism; they know the benefits of corrupted systems and are just waiting for the right opportunity to join the current gravy train.
The systems are broken and stop-gap measures will not mend them. Kenya needs a total reset—and that requires much more than empty promises of installing machines for making one million chapatis per day.
The writer is Managing Editor of the Alliance for Science (AfS). These views are solely his.