Random blues: We don’t have to live or love, we just pray

A National Youth Service bulldozer at a demolition site in Area one, Mathare

The expatriate is not always an entirely practical man. After all, since moving to Kenya, he has had numerous domestic employees to cater for his every need: cooking, cleaning, Land Rover polishing...

However, he remembers ‘the old country’, where any problem that might have arisen was usually dealt with efficiently and practically, often by means of functioning institutions. When the justice system failed back home in, say, the United Kingdom, he would rely on State and civil society organisations to correct things, achieving once more that balance in society for which a lazily contented country such as Britain is famous.