I recently had the good fortune to visit a part of Nyandarua County called Dundori or, more curiously, “Gwakiongo” (named after the nickname of a mzungu who owned a vast ranch in that area between Ol Kalou and Nakuru).
The land, even today, is fabulously fertile, potatoes and peas literally grow on their own and the cows are a wonder to behold. And yet, Nyandarua is the poorest among the Kikuyu counties – it had a 2009 population of 596,000 in an area of 3,245 sq km and has a poverty rate of 46.3 per cent, the highest in the region. Its largest city is Ol Kalou with a population of 66,000.
Compare these statistics with its eastern neighbour Nyeri with an almost equal land mass of 3,337 sq km and population of 694,000. The poverty rate is 32.7 per cent while the largest city, Nyeri, has a population of 120,000. Nyandarua is currently struggling to build a county headquarters at Ol Kalou, 53 years after independence while Nyeri was a prosperous provincial capital where the founder of the Boy Scout movement Lord Baden-Powell is immortalised in a decent memorial in the hotel grounds of the Outspan Hotel called Paxtu House where he died.
The County also recently played host to the beatified Sister Irene Nyaatha. In contrast, the people of Nyandarua have been busy destroying every available evidence of colonial occupation, especially the grand homes constructed by the notorious colonialists of the so-called ‘Happy Valley’, instead of making them tourist attractions.
They have even recently rejected artefacts of modern development – wind power generation – when most homes in the district have no electricity. Those interested about this county can read Juliet Barnes 2013 book, “The Ghosts of Happy Valley”.
So where does all this lead us, you may ask? First, the fallacy that having a good climate and plenty of fertile land will automatically lead to prosperity simply does not hold. Secondly, the idea that prosperity can only be brought to you by the Government again is similarly untrue. The people of Murang’a and Nyeri did not have the privileges of good land like Nyandarua had or of proximity to Nairobi that Kiambu had.
And yet, they were able to turn their adversities into advantage by sheer hard work, tenacity, risk-taking and a willingness to challenge the colonialists at every opportunity, including engaging them in a brutal humiliating war. They also realised that to prosper, you must literally get out of the box and fight for your rights. To a certain extent, it is those other properties that have led to the so-called dominance by the “Murang’a tycoons”.
-JH Kimura, Ph.D.
