They say the dance of a madman at the village market is always funny until it is your relative that is the mad man. Then it stops being funny. We used to hear of corruption in other countries and shake our heads at it. Of leaders that gave zero fucks about their people and wonder what the hell was wrong with them. How could they be so inhuman? So out of touch. And look at us now, beating all the records and carrying all the medals home, both literally at the track and other fields, and figuratively.
This is what we have been reduced to as a country. You know, It would almost be funny if it wasn’t so familiar. We cannot laugh anymore, because that mad man is now our country….our relative.
A stadium toilet that barely functional and looks like it was built 20 years ago, reportedly costing two million shillings. Deplorable and tiny, the kind of structure you could walk past without a second glance, except now you know what it cost. And suddenly, it’s not just a toilet….it’s a mirror.
This, this is the country where billions disappear into “curtains,” where hospital gates are priced like luxury homes, and where entire projects exist only on paper. When you look at it that way, two million begins to feel… small. Almost polite. You know, discount on dysfunction.
This is how corruption survives. Forget the grand heists and the billions siphoned through public hospitals as your everyday mwananchi bleeds to death (literally). Forget about the rampant land grabbing and what have you. It is the normalization of the ridiculous. Today it’s a toilet. Tomorrow it’s a road that washes away in the rain. Next week, it’s a hospital without equipment, staffed by people doing their best inside a system that has already failed them.
We have reached a point where outrage competes with fatigue. And you know what the funny part is? That fatigue is winning.
Ghost structures are perhaps the most honest metaphor for where we stand. Budgeted, approved, funded… and then nothing. This is the country of ghosts. Even spouses are ghosts now, abi. Ghost buildings. Ghost services. And of course, zero accountability. It is not just money that vanishes, but intention. Let us not even start on the trust.
And still, we move on. We laugh and share screenshots, because what else can we do?. We shake our heads and return to our lives, as though this is simply the cost of being here. Yes, we have normalized bullshit. Forgive my French, but I am a tired citizen, as are millions of others, after all the stories we have been seeing week long of how failed our health systems are.
This is not normal at all, that every inflated tender is a quiet theft from something real. A classroom that remains overcrowded and the numerous hospitals that runs out of medicine. At what point does it end? The real question is why, why does it keep happening without consequence?
Accountability, in theory, exists. There are audits, oversight bodies, committees, reports. But too often, they end where they begin. In paperwork. Simply put, another cash cow whose projects never even takes off. Audit bodies and committees do not come cheap…but people have to eat. Mtu wangu cartel need jobs, heck even their children need jobs. And so committees are formed…to investigate scandals whose outcomes we already know. Form another committee, to investigate the just disbanded committee. Repeat cycle…public interest is after all, as feeble as it comes. Before long, the system learns that there is little risk, and plenty of reward.
So yes, perhaps the two-million-shilling toilet is “better” than a ghost project. At least it exists. At least there is something to point at, to critique and to photograph. (I cannot believe I am even saying this….but then again, I ask for the second time in this article, what can we do?)
A painfully low bar for a country with ambition.
I wanted to say maybe things will change if we refuse to normalize the absurd. With asking harder questions, more consistently. But, we’ve been there. We’ve done that. But all of it and for what? More dead youth.
Until then, the toilets will keep costing millions.
