When attending a burial in Western, you are often counselled to “mourn with one eye and one ear” lest your vision and hearing are blurred.
It behoves you to know who is standing or sitting next to you.
The dry eye and alert ear allow the mourner to follow the activities around him: What fellow mourners are saying.
Unfortunately, when politicians from this part of the country address funeral gatherings, they mourn with both eyes.
The surrounding din and sights are just background.
Put differently, it is said that when you set a trap for a bird, you do not go talking about it near a fireplace. The bird will flee or may not return to the nest.
That was the case with the Western Economic Development Forum, a blueprint conceived by local leaders to boost the highly resourced but seriously under-developed region out of its deep economic abyss.
The idea enjoyed some prominence after the 2013 general election before it dramatically fell off the front-burner.
Five years later, the great idea that sounded like a Marshal Plan for economic empowerment has been relegated to the back burner. It would have remained in the doldrums had Kisumu Governor Jack Ranguma not made public new plans to set up an investment bank for Western Kenya.
The WEDF had initially envisaged the Western Bank would be headquartered in Kakamega or Bungoma towns to spur investment through easy access to capital.
With a regional population of nearly 10 million people just slightly below the population of Rwanda or Burundi
the Western Bank was a great economic idea. It was great because the majority of residents in this region fear bank loans.
They have impoverished quite a number.
Experience has made them believe banks are vultures that deceitfully encroach on your property on behalf of speculators. Many loan borrowers have lost land, livestock or businesses after defaulting, defeated by punitive interest rates.
The only trusted lending institutions are savings and co-operative societies popularly known as saccos. Banks are perceived with derision as are institutions presided over by criminal gangs.
When the idea of a Western Bank mooted by ANC leader Musalia Mudavadi, Webuye MP Alfred Sambu, Busia Senator Amos Wako, Emuhaya MP Wilbur Ottichilo, former Lugari MP Cyrus Jirongo and Funyula MP Paul Otuoma, among other legislators in their second term or more in Parliament, everyone was alive to how the region had suffered economic exclusion for a long time.
Just as is the case with the sugar and paper industries, the project has been sabotaged and from the look of things Governor Ranguma appears set to run away with the idea.
Whether true or false, the reasons why the project suffered a stillbirth are depressing.
The story goes that a number of first-term MPs were bribed by chief executives of the more established banks some say including the top leadership of the CBK then — to frustrate this idea.
The argument was the region is better off with existing indigenous banks.Material poverty has a way of vacuuming even the brightest of minds.
It is not by accident that a number of well-educated scholars and politicians are paid a pittance by power barons to undermine any economic activity or plans with inherent collective benefits in the region.
The economic sabotage takes the same pattern in the sugar industry. It was finally brought to its knees.
That is why at a funeral one is advised to “mourn with one eye and one ear” lest you fail to detect omundu mulosi (the night-runner or witch) in the crowd.
Political night-runners are ruining the fortunes of the region that was once the land of sugar, milk, honey and for a long time held the promise of Kenya’s breadbasket.