No one would have imagined if a pessimist had predicted the possibility. That, one day an elegant, seven-star hotel in the central business district of East Africa’s business and population hub would lie desolate.
The facility, which hosted world leaders and celebrities for decades, has been robbed of its stature. Its doors are closed to the public. The classy and luxuriously furnished rooms are deserted.
Even the VIP room where former US First Lady Hillary Clinton once stayed when she visited Nairobi is idle. The once cockroach-free facility tells a different tale of a hospitality establishment that has seen better times.
No one knows, or yet to confirm, how rats are coping in a place where they once had plenty to nibble.
Where did the patrons of the famous hospitality hub go? Some of the customers would sit there, sipping wine, coffee and brandy, while waiting for a multiple course meal.
It was the most convenient rendezvous they knew. It’s close to their offices, and convenient, with the right ambience. It’s the right place to exhibit class and style to impressionable dates.
Here, they held clandestine meetings, small talk and business chats. Executive deals were brokered here. The country’s power elite dined and wined, building the nation their way.
These people — state officers — from the National Assembly, about 85 metres down the road, work at a facility that hosts the largest number of people with a high purchasing power. This hotel was their rendezvous.
These people once had disposable income, with a national kitty, which they treated as conduit for handouts to the vulnerable. They once had money, and means of control, dividing and ruling their subjects.
Times are changing for most people. Pocket leaks are spreading across the land, as national consumption walks the uncharted terrain of post-2022 general election.
The promised era of equalisation is yet to show signs of lifting up bottomers. Instead, citizens of the stranded middle class are spurning places they once patronised. No one’s filling the chasm.
Yet around what was once bubbling InterContinental Hotel, sleep homeless people. Tens or more can be counted early morning, stealing a wink from a troubled night of deprivation.
Hilton Hotel, too, lies idle, closed for business, while the homeless sleep outside the facility with many empty beds, in fully furnished rooms. If wishes were horses, the state could ‘acquire’ Hilton and InterCon for the use of the homeless in their neighbourhoods.
A regular 6am to 7am walk across Nairobi’s ‘Richside’ exposes the reality of capitalism in its absurd frame, sleeping side by side with dehumanisation personified. This wasn’t how humanity was intended to live in a supposedly God-fearing country, now struggling in the era of bottom-up.
Along the way from the City Square Post Office bridge, through to Harambee Avenue, across left to Parliament Road, a right turn trek up to Kenyatta Avenue, through to Koinange Street, is a world turned upside down.
At Kenyatta Avenue-Koinange Street, turn left through Jumia Mosque, then down to Kimathi Street, walk down Aga Khan Walk, make a twist back to City Square Post Office bridge, is an experience outstanding in contradictions.
Standing on the bridge, facing Westlands, to the left stands stoic Central Bank of Kenya, a sturdy, fortified, secured and policed building, that houses Kenya’s wealth. In front to the right, stands tall the glassy Times Tower that houses the Kenya Revenue Authority. This is the official working space of the Zacheuses of the republic.
Right ahead to the left, lies the Treasury Building, a guarded, gated and barricaded building, with thick, robust steel barriers.
Opposite the Treasury Building sits Vigilance House, the headquarters of the National Police Service. The back entrance is always manned/womanned by a dozen or so policemen and women, working with sniffer dogs.
Around here works free radicals - some in police uniforms, and armed. There are also others in civilian, keeping watch on the richside of the city.
One morning last week, there was this rotund, combat-ready policewoman. She was shouting at an old man who stood around the guarded district like he had nowhere else to go that early.
From the woman’s police voice, the man was idling in a way that seemed to suggest he could be a security threat. He could be a security risk, even though the idler was lonely, famished and unarmed. His crime seemed to be, he was idling suspiciously on the richside.