By Silas N
As a generation, Wangari Mathai will never be proud of us. She rolling furiously on her grave for the insult.
We are going to let SGR spoil the beautiful park, one of the few green spots remaining in the city.
When I was young and stupid, used to believe that the park is a useless inconvenience. Then I met this guy, used to be in Chiromo while I was in Main Campus and he explained to me about the original zoning of the city, why from Makaburini, from Bunyala Road, all the way to Chiromo we have the parks (Railway Golf Club, Uhuru Park, Central Park, and the University of Nairobi’s mini forests as you head up to Chiromo). To give the city, some breathing space. And absorb the smoke from your cheap and dangerous imports from Japan that has made the city the most polluted in Africa.
Now I know better. I know the value of trees and I get worried anytime I see a timber yard or the huge charcoal warehouses like the one in South B. I cringe (genuinely when I see a jiko being washwad in my home).
Nairobi National Parks is worth protecting and much more precious than the SGR or whatever tasteless apartments they want to erect in the park.
I hate it that for my daughter to play, I have to fork out at least Sh 1,500 in most malls, when a simple neighbourhood park should be some of the fewer guarantees as a tax-payer who lives in the city.
A while ago, while on a tour with KTB, we were taken to some coffee farm in Kiambu. The man guiding through the farm said something that really bothered me. He said, one coffee tree is worthy much more than an apartment.
“An apartment only employs one person once it has been erected , the caretaker, but this coffee tree can employee many more people for many more years.”
He went on to decry on how wrong it was for Kiambu County to take to Real Estate at the expense of farming because it is one of the most arable parts of the country.
The upshot: we have Kenya, a country with more agriculturally productive land than Dubai, receiving a food donation from a desert.
But as I keep saying, Africa we are a cursed country. Badly so.
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