The Road Is Rotting and They Cannot Even Process It

There is a pothole on the road into my side of town that has been there so long the residents no longer call it a pothole. It has a shape. It has moods. In April it becomes a lake and small boys fish in it for fun. Somebody once planted a banana stem in it as a protest and the banana did quite well. That road has been launched three times, by three different men, with three different ribbons and three different choirs, and it remains a rumour with tarmac at the edges.

So the question, can our politicians compare to Zohran Mamdani, is an absurd one. Comparison requires a shared unit of measurement. You cannot compare the temperature to a Tuesday.

Look at what the man actually does. Cheaper buses. Rent that stops climbing. Childcare. Boring, functional, unphotogenic things that quietly improve an ordinary Wednesday. There is no ribbon in that. no MC shouting “let us receive our leader” while a choir sweats through the second verse. Nobody claps for a bus fare. It simply works, for people who will never know your name.

Now bring that concept here and watch it fail to launch. Our leaders do not reject it. They cannot load it. It is like sending a document in a format the machine has never met. The screen just sits there, thinking.

Here’s why - our version is basically a political reality show. First the groundbreaking, with a shovel that has never touched soil and a hard hat that has never met a construction site. Then the folded arms. Then the inspection, which is the same photograph as the groundbreaking but with mud. Then the commissioning. Then, two years later, another groundbreaking on the identical stretch, because in this country a road is not infrastructure, it is a renewable resource of press coverage.

Ask one of them about the drainage plan and watch the face change. Not angry. Confused, the way you stare at a question in a subject you dropped in Form Two. They will answer with a story about their late father, then something about our people, then a promise about a stadium. Never the drainage. The drainage does not clap.

That is the real gap. It is not that they are worse human beings than Mamdani. It is that they were raised inside a system where visibility is the product and function is a side effect nobody audits. Fixing a road buys you one afternoon of goodwill. Launching a road buys you four years, a hashtag, and a nickname.

And here is the uncomfortable part. Good leadership looks like almost nothing happening. No convoy, no envelope, no ecstatic crowd bussed in at dawn. Just a fare that drops, a rent that holds, a road that stays a road. It is so undramatic that if it happened in Nairobi tomorrow we would be deeply suspicious. We would ask what he is planning. We would say somebody must be funding him.

So the answer is not that we lack the men. We lack the appetite for boredom.

Give us a leader whose entire record is that the road did not rot, and half the country will look at him and ask, with real concern, what exactly he has been doing all this time.