Back from two months working on a BBC documentary around Lake Naivasha. The shoot also took me on a bone-rattler of a drive west to Kisumu, and left me feeling hopeful but unavoidably depressed.
Our route out west first took us south, down into the Great Rift Valley and along the outskirts of the Masai Mara game reserve. From there we wended our way north, through coffee plantations and sugar-cane fields, to Kisumu, on the edge of Lake Victoria. Returning home, we trundled past Kericho's massive tea fields and once again found ourselves in a hotel on Lake Naivasha's shores, surrounded by flower farms that export millions of stems each day.
And I thought: Good God, what does Kenya not have? Tea, coffee and flower exports, fish in lakes Victoria and Naivasha, sugar, a diverse tourism industry to sell your firstborn child for, a well-positioned port. If ever there were a country that should not need foreign assistance, it's Kenya.
And yet, and yet, and yet, everyone knows the story. Hardly a traffic light in the capital, Nairobi, miserable roads, an exploding population, laughable governance, shameful law-enforcement.
It was hard for me to understand what corruption meant, really, before I saw it here. That a country of Kenya's potential could be so reduced to such shambles testifies to its power.
