50 years on: Imagining Kenya in 2063

To those of us alive today, Enkare Nyorobi, which translates to ‘the place of cool waters’, will be unrecognisable in 2063. While it will retain its status as the country’s political capital city, it will no longer be the country’s economic powerhouse, having lost the sheen to oil rich Turkana and decadent Isiolo, then Africa’s Las Vegas. But Koinange Street will be alive as ever, the Governor having legalised the oldest trade to plug gaps in the county budget. K-Street will those days be parked with foreign hookers, the local talent having retired after menopause or fled to Isiolo to tega gamblers. Karen will instead be dusty, muddy  Nairobi’s landscape will have changed considerably. The statues of Jomo Kenyatta, Tom Mboya and Dedan Kimathi, like memory of the old heroes will be non-existent, having been pinched in 2018 by a sleazy political operative and converted into scrap metal. Talk that Karen was once an elite leafy address  will be met by loud guffaws and shrieks, having gone to seed decades back. Karen will instead be a dusty, muddy and moldy settlement teeming with donkeys ferrying water, mongrels with missing front teeth, ugly flats, masses of human population and stoned street boys.
Historians will attribute its fall to sons and daughters of present day aristocrats inheriting and selling their parents’ estates for a song to tycoons in Eastleigh, who will have taken over Karen, Kitsuru and Runda as well. Although Muthaiga will retain its status as Nairobi’s most expensive address, the once spacious homes will have long given way to bungalows set on one eighth of an acre.  Those bungalows will be a marvel to watch as they will be the only ones standing. The coolest shopping malls in Nairobi will be in Kibera Laini Saba. Historians will explain that as soon as land title deeds were issued in 2014, beneficiaries sold their birth right to developers who speedily erected take-me-to-heaven skyscrapers. Two impotent bush rats Nyayo Stadium, the Railway Station, Machakos Country Bus and Wilson Airport and the Department of Defense will be flattened to create ‘development’ via being relocated to neighbouring counties connected to Nairobi by fast trains docking at an underground station beneath the current Railway Station. The Nairobi National Park will be the Kenya Wildlife Museum. All the wild animals, with the exception of two impotent bush rats, will be extinct. In fact, the few students  trooping there for a school visit will only be shown stuffed animals and diagrams of how things were by a bored naturalist, one of two in the East African Community. The city’s population will have ballooned to astronomical levels, with masses of obese humanity squeezed into 80-storied flats. Nyama choma will be a relic of history and all foods consumed in the CBD will be imported and genetically modified. Only the super rich will afford goat meat imported from Kismayu, Somalia. Historians will explain that the livestock industry in Kenya collapsed when pastoralists quit herding cows to forage in the oilfields of Ngamia One in Turkana county, Kenya’s richest.
-The standardmedia