There was something surreal as Kenya marked Jamhuri Day recently. The host of the national event, Governor Mike Mbuvi Sonko was missing.
Hours to the event, he was holed up in a courtroom, a bevy of lawyers who included sitting legislators convincing the court to grant him bail.
Forty-eight hours earlier, he was in a holding cell at Nairobi’s Kamiti Maximum Prison, after being tracked and chased down by law enforcement officers over corruption allegations.
After 56 years of independence, Kenya’s capital City Nairobi, was without leadership, reminding Kenyans once again of how low the city, once the pride of an entire continent, had sunk in just under a decade of devolution.
There is no doubt that Sonko inherited a broken city from his predecessor Evans Kidero, also fighting his own legal battles before the anti-corruption court.
But Sonko broke this limping city, further sinking it deeper and deeper into the morass that its inhabitants have for years tried to pull themselves out of.
Now, Nairobi finds itself at another reputational low point. Residents are starved of water. They are either chocked by garbage or traffic or by both.
They have no reliable public transportation system, yet they have had representation and budgetary allocations for all these functions. Crucially, they have paid taxes through the various fees and taxes levied by the county government to get these problems sorted or at least attempt to get sorted.
As he nears halftime in his term as governor, some bit of retrospection shows that the warning signs were all there. The first, perhaps was a one-page manifesto that he and his running mate Polycarp Igathe shared on social media as elections neared. It was ambitious yet simple.
In his first hundred days, Sonko pledged to leverage technology and establish a traffic command centre.
He was also to give incentives to high capacity buses, embark on a paving revolution to create safer pedestrian walkways, organise hawkers and identify specific hours during which they can sell their wares and expand the Nairobi Metropolitan area.
The manifesto though lacked one crucial element the electorate hardly noticed. And it was perhaps too simple. It did not explain how all these things would be done. Now, some 700 days later none of these promises has come to pass.
Instead, there has been a constant cannibalisation of the capital, and it all started with the resignation of his Deputy Polycarp Igathe after just months in office. And it has been downhill since then.
Although City Hall has been the scene of many of his battles, most of his wars have been fought out in the public gallery.
As a public servant, he has provoked questions of character, ethics, temperament and general suitability in holding public office. His City Hall has been the epicenter of chaos. He has surrounded himself with wimps and yes men all looking out for themselves, none serving the greater cause of seeing a better Nairobi, hoping that the crumbs that fall off the public pie, land on their laps.
None of them brave enough to tell him off. The few who gave in to their collective moral compasses walked away. But they didn’t go unscathed. Many left with more than egg on their faces, their reputations dragged through the mud.
“It’s not possible to work with someone who constantly threatens to sack you, threatens to have you jailed and you have to work under tension; that’s why I decided to quit my job,” former Education CEC Janet Ouko said of her former boss.
After the resignation, Sonko said Janet had been sacked over alleged embezzlement of bursary funds. The embezzlement allegations though, have always found their way back to his Mua Hills address. Enormous holes have been poked in his subsequent budgets, his explanations hardly sufficient.
Late last month, Nairobi Senator Johnson Sakaja led nine city MPs in accusing Sonko of presiding over a dysfunctional executive characterised by ‘gung-ho tactics’ and called for a comprehensive forensic audit of all money allocated to the county in the last three financial years - 2016/17, 2017/18 and 2018/19.
In April 2019, former Auditor General Edward Ouko declared a multi-million shilling secret budget allocated to Sonko illegally after City Hall’s Legal and Justice Committee revealed that the governor had been enjoying a Sh96 million “confidential expenditures” annually since he came into office in 2017.
“Having a confidential budget is normal. Running Nairobi is not a joke. There are many things happening under my office,” said Sonko at the time. He also said he uses the money to gather information and intelligence on security.
Nairobi’s slip towards anarchy does not solely rest on the shoulders of the politician who has made more news from punching walls, posing with assault rifles, recording private, sometimes intimate conversations with friends and colleagues and sharing them on social media, than from implementing any notable policies.
Part of this responsibility lies with his Jubilee Party that along the way has fanned Sonko’s outbursts, encouraged his recklessness and cheered on his every unorthodox move to serve short-term political interests.
Jubilee, a party equally dogged by unmet promises, did little to stop a Sonko candidature. Even the soberest of legislators within the party raised no objection. Those that did, hardly raised their voices beyond whisper, their focus more on not upsetting the Jubilee juggernaut.
“Sonko’s candidature was a bit complicated,” Jubilee Party Secretary General Raphael Tuju says. “We tried our best to ensure the choice we took was the choice of the people. If we did anything else, we’d be accused of imposing a candidate on the electorate.”
He says the party’s hands were tied with the popularity Sonko enjoyed in the run up to the election.
“The people were calling out for him. Would you want to blame the party or the people who elected him?” Tuju says, adding that when he presented his candidature to the party, Sonko had been cleared by the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC) as well as the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC).
As Nairobi goes through an uncertain phase, there has been one constant throughout this period. Sonko has hardly changed. He has remained true to himself. The same bling wearing, name calling, name dropping individual.
His address might have changed, but deep down, he remains the same man, and in this exists a rather curious paradox.
In his madness, hundreds of thousands see method. In a country of obscene inequalities, many have looked at him as the promise that an elected office holds. He comes from no notable bloodline. His supporters have literally followed his journey from matatu owning philanthropist in Buru Buru to MP, senator and then governor.
And they admire his journey paved in gold leggings and expensive designer shoes. They see themselves in him and the possibilities life has to offer. These are the more than 800,000 people who voted for him.
Today, Sonko continues to challenge perceptions that were one thought as obvious. He has shown you really don’t need to know what you are doing to run a city. By terrorising his county employees, he has shown that all inclusive leadership still remains a myth in the country.
He has also shown that the breed of leaders who believed they know best and should never be challenged is still alive and kicking.
That you can make stuff up as you go along. And crucially, like many who have come before him, he has shown that the interests of the people seldom matter for an elected leader. The leader’s personal interests always, come first.
