Many visitors to the Coast simply do not get it when we indigenous coastals assert that we are marginalised. This is because these visitors go only to Mombasa, Diani beach, the South Coast, Shanzu, Mtwapa and Malindi – and what do they see? They see exotic beach resorts, many small businesses servicing these resorts, and the tall buildings of Mombasa.
None of the coastal towns have the kind of slum you see in Nairobi, for instance Mathare, Mukuru, Korogocho and Kibera. Indeed, I don’t think most residents of Coast are familiar with the term “flying toilet”, coined in Kibera, and about which the less said the better.
So, there are two things that upcountry folk need to understand about the Coast’s marginalisation.
First, do not mistake the Coast for only the narrow strip of prosperity that you see where the tourism supply chain has created opportunities for a lucky few, many of them non-coastals. This is actually a global phenomenon, whereby certain industries or sectors create small oases of prosperity around them. In the US and UK, for instance, there are so-called university towns where institutions with thousands of students, including overseas students, are serviced by hundreds of workers whose jobs are generated in the neighbouring communities.
The little prosperity you see at the Coast is incidental to investment in tourism – and mostly foreign investment.
Secondly, take a look at the interior of the Coast. Where are our equivalents of the numerous coffee factories of Central Kenya; the tea factories in Central and the Rift Valley; the milk collection points and cooling plants of Central and Rift Valley; or even the sugarcane factories of Western Kenya?
Let me tell you a political fact of life. All these upcountry factories were only possible through government intervention and it is they that provide the ordinary small-scale coffee, tea, sugar and dairy farmer with the opportunity to make a decent living from the sweat of their brow. Entire regions of Coast are bereft of such factories and opportunities. In any country, province or county where the majority of the population is rural folk and small-scale farmers, the only path to a modest level of prosperity is for government to provide a value-adding food-processing infrastructure.
This way, local farmers are actively encouraged and facilitated to produce high-value crops for which there is a ready market. In the absence of such factories and other food production infrastructure, farmers become imprisoned in poverty as they can only grow food for subsistence, or their own consumption. The majority of Coast people live in precisely such a prison, 52 years after Independence!
So, you may ask how is it that while Eastern, Western, Central, Rift Valley and Nyanza have all benefited from development schemes designed to uplift ordinary small-scale farmers from poverty, the Coast has received no such benefit? There are only two reasons for this.
One, we have never had leaders – with the exception of the late Emmanuel Karisa Maitha – aggressive and focused enough to take the Coast to the national high table, where the crucial decisions are made that determine who will remain poor and who will be lifted up from poverty.
Two, we at the Coast have never united enough to prevent the upcountry political barons from permanently relegating us to the backbench, as it were. In order to count and to rise up from the prison of agrarian poverty, we must present the big political battalions with a Coast vote bloc that is indispensable.
The Mijikenda, for instance, have never been united enough to attain the political relevance that their numbers justify. Our lack of unity and leadership failure has been our abiding undoing. However, after 50 years of being placed on the political – and therefore the developmental – backburner; 50 years of crushing poverty all over the Coast region; 50 years of being ruled by those who divide us, there is now an awakening at the Coast. Those who doubt we will be presenting a united front and vote bloc of at least (that is, no less than) 2.5 million in 2017 will be in for a shock that will last for almost as long as our years in the developmental wilderness.
And all we want is to see our people get a decent chance at a decent standard of life. There is no more powerful driving force for unity than this long-held wish.