We were at the airport to pick up our business associate from the United Kingdom who was making his first visit to Kenya . We had decided to meet him since he was arriving on a Sunday and the flight was arriving at a decent hour of ten in the morning .
We intended to meet him and drive him to the hotel and take advantage to meet him in person , we had had numerous zoom meetings which could not replace a face to face encounter and to accord him the famed Kenyan hospitality by taking him out to lunch before the business agenda kicked in on Monday .
He was through immigration , customs and the now mandatory health verification within thirty minutes and by the time we were meeting , masked of course , his very first remark was how surprised he was and impressed by our modern and efficient airport .
We are quite used to this type of remark from foreigners since it seems that the accepted perception about Africa is a place where there is nothing and nothing ever works . He was equally surprised when we left the airport and he started to take in the sights .
He was genuinely surprised by the road network and the apparent existence of infrastructure improvements and he was particularly surprised to see so many cars . He was also pleasantly surprised by the hotel we had booked for him , which fortunately was near the airport .
We gave him an hour to settle in and freshen up and were then on our way to lunch and used the southern bypass that runs along the Nairobi National Park and he recognized the park and even informed us that Nairobi was the only city with a game park within it . He had done his homework .
As if to welcome our visitor to Nairobi , we saw a herd of about thirty buffaloes that were lazing in the hot sun and stopped for him to take pictures . This was proving to be an auspicious visit for our guest and it seemed as though Kenya was showing off its best .
During lunch , at a well-known meat eatery , which he also knew about and was glad that we had chosen to take him there , the topics were generally light about Kenya and the many places a tourist could go , which he seemed to be well acquainted with . That ’ s the power of destination marketing .
The eatery lived up to its top billing and the variety on offer and the friendly and highly competent staff ensured our visitor was enthralled during the entire lunch period as we discussed the outline of our agenda for the following week .
As the week would be packed with meetings and presentations we agreed that he would choose where he wanted to go on the following Saturday and Sunday before he was due to depart on Sunday evening to return to the cold UK , a prospect he did not relish .
We were therefore taken aback when on Saturday morning he requested that we take him to Kibra , Umoja or Mathare , names that he could obviously not pronounce correctly so he had written them down on a piece of paper . We were stumped as to how he had come across the locations .
Apparently our guest had posted his superb experience so far in Kenya on his social media accounts and was gushing about the beauty of Nairobi and its people when he was inundated with clips of the other side of Nairobi . Not sure why anybody would want to bust his bubble .
Our guest , being a true marketer , had his curiosity piqued into also wanting to see the real Nairobi not only the postcard Nairobi which was what we had confined him to during the week of intense meetings and he probably wanted to marry the glossy presentations with reality .
So here we were , put in a quandary , since the superb destination marketing that the country had invested in was being countered by faceless communication that had the insidious effect of negating what the country would officially like to portray .
Nevertheless we gingerly began the tour of Nairobi by going first to Umoja and his first question was why there were no access roads in the area . We explained that they were there on the master plan even though they were not on the ground . They would be built in due course .
He did comment that in his understanding amenities like roads , water and sewage preceded settlement of an area to which we replied in the affirmative that that was the case and they again were on the master plan that oversaw urban development . His second question , deriving from the fact that we had said that there was a master plan , was about the haphazard buildings many of which looked dangerous and unsafe . He wanted to know if there was an urban authority that planned the habitats and its environs .
Again we answered in the affirmative and you could see the beginning of doubt in that no person in his or her right mind would approve the type of houses that we were looking at and he wondered if quality of life was ever a consideration in approving such structures .
By the time we got to Mathare North , the traffic gridlock was at its peak and he again wondered why people did business on the roads and why the minibuses , matatus , parked on the roads hence creating the traffic jam . The police presence did not seem to help .
We battled our way out of the horrendous jams of Mathare and going through the Thika Superhighway we reentered the city and a semblance of order and sanity and drove through the city and off the Ngong Road and we were in Kibra .
Our guest was actually shocked to realize that there was a slum , supposedly the biggest in Africa , if such a record is worth repeating , smack in the middle of the city . So his question was if this slum was also in the master plan , to which we replied that in the master plan it did not exist .
How exactly do you explain how the city that boasts to having the only national park in its boundaries can also have the biggest slum in Africa , not outside but actually inside its boundaries ? The whole idea just did not make sense to an outsider .
How was it possible to have the best and the worst co-exist in such close proximity ? Was this not an urban planner ’ s nightmare ? How is service delivery to be packaged in two entirely different market demographics when they exist within each other ?
Later , during dinner we agreed that the failure was a systemic one since apparently there were bodies tasked with the orderly planning and regulating the urban growth but they were , for one reason or other , being ignored or not implemented .