• The two hubs have more in common than the administrators have bargained for
A few weeks ago, Cape Town’s mayor flew to Nairobi to meet up with his counterpart, to sign an agreement to make Cape Town and Nairobi sister cities, with a shared mission to be the “undisputed economic hubs” of their respective regions.
When I got over the shock at not being invited along to guide the Cape Town delegation around my native Nairobi, I got to thinking about how much the two cities really have in common.
In fact, my knee-jerk reaction was that forming a sisterhood between Cape Town and Mombasa and a twinning of Nairobi with Johannesburg might have been more appropriate.
However, as I said to one of my cousins, who had the same thought, Cape Town has a certain “kimbelembele”, and only the top dog would do.
Also to be honest, Johannesburg’s civic leadership has been so unstable recently that you might sign an agreement with Mayor X today, but by the time his flight returns home, he has been ditched and replaced as mayor by someone with a completely different agenda.
The mess in the City of Gold is related to the problems South Africa has with coalitions. Political parties here cannot seem to get coalitions right, and in fact, a parliamentary committee will soon be in Kenya on a benchmarking trip to study Kenya Kwanza and Azimio.
They will also be coming to study how Kenya’s "grand coalition cabinet" from April 2008 to April 2013 worked.
Last year, South Africa’s main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, which is hoping to lead a grand opposition coalition to topple the ANC at the 2024 General Election, sent its leaders to Nairobi to learn how party coalitions such as Azimo and Kenya Kwanza work.
I find this all a little ironic, seeing as one of the inspirations for Kenya’s government of national unity was the GNU that governed South Africa from April 27, 1994 to February 3, 1997.
Nevertheless, back to the similarities between Cape Town and Nairobi.
Events in Cape Town during the last few weeks have put Cape Town in the global spotlight as a place where international fugitives go to ground to escape justice in their native countries.
There was the arrest at the end of May of one of the Rwanda genocide's most wanted remaining suspects, Fulgence Kayishema, on a farm just outside Cape Town.
At around the same time, four Bulgarian nationals were shot dead at a mansion in one of Cape Town’s most exclusive neighbourhoods, and one of them, Krasimir Kamenov, has since been named as a wanted fugitive by Interpol.
Then last weekend, a Namibian lawyer, Marén de Klerk, wanted for a corruption case in his home country, was also arrested near Cape Town. The Namibian authorities have applied to have him extradited.
This all reminded me of a time when, if international fugitives wanted to disappear, they went to Nairobi to do it.
Remember Felicien Kabuga? In 2001, the Rwanda government, which is rarely if ever wrong about where genocidaires are hiding, issued an official statement, stating that Kabuga was living in Kenya and demanding that the government arrest him.
Kabuga is thought to have fled Kenya a few years later after his rumoured protectors lost their influence in the corridors of power.
Then there was the Kurdish guerrilla leader Abdullah Ocalan. He, too, was captured in dramatic fashion in Nairobi back in 1999.
Even recently, I mentioned in this column the story of the Facebook rapist Thabo Bester, who was arrested in Arusha shortly before he and his alleged accomplices crossed the border into Kenya, where they had hoped to disappear.
And there have been several others in years past.
Here in South Africa, an expert in these matters recently told me that Cape Town had been considered a safe haven for international fugitives from as far back as the 1980s.
He said this could be blamed on corruption in government circles and also the fact that the city, a favourite with foreign tourists, is perfect to allow foreign fugitives from justice to hide in plain sight. Does this sound familiar to Nairobians?