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Issue 00601 |
January 30 - February 5, 2010 |
issn 0856 - 9135 |
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Off Topic |
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Maybe Arusha is Kandahar! By lute wa lutengano It was a Monday morning. These are normally not the best of days. Mondays always remind of me why human beings wail on arrival in this world when being born. That is a mark of registering their arrival in this world of struggle. My primary school teacher used to tell us that life is one continuous struggle. At the end of this arduous stretch of struggle is calm and death. For one reason or another Monday mornings most represent this struggle of mankind. No wonder people reluctantly get out of their beds; take an unfriendly shower; gulp down some stale coffee and rush to office to get exploited. This Monday morning was like any other. I did all the above and at 7:30 am squeezed my rather generous body into my tiny ramshackle which resembles a car. A few minutes from my home in Njiro area, actually at the bottom of the ESAMI hill, I came across some strange development a traffic jam. I call it strange because, the normal traffic jam one comes across everyday in the morning along the Njiro road begins around the road area straddling the AICC Kijenge housing estate. In my mind I thought there must be a major and tragic road accident up front. After an hour, having covered hardly a kilometre, I reached the Njiro railway crossing. The traffic was going nowhere. There were long lines of cars behind and in front. It was then that I decided to branch off and take the rough road which goes south and which you may in a round way drive behind Themi Hill and reconnect with Uhuru road at Metropole Cinema area. There was heavy traffic along this road as well and it took me an hour and a half to reach the Metropole. Uhuru road was something else. Here the traffic jam was even worse. It took another hour to reach the Exim Bank junction. It was here that I noticed that the central Clock Tower roundabout area had been closed. I sneaked my way along Goliondoi road and after another hour again I was at last in my office at the AICC building. It was 11:00 am. I was hyper upset. I was late for an 8:30 appointment with some officer who was flying later that morning for Nairobi en-route to Europe. Later on I realised that I was one of the lucky ones who at least made it to the office before noon. Most employees in my institution never made it before noon and some got so exasperated that after being stuck for more than four hours on the road decided to return home and call it a day. Actually even my appointment guy never made it on time to Kilimanjaro International Airport for his Nairobi flight. He and his fellow passengers who had hired a minibus were then forced to re-hire it for the four-hour road trip to Nairobi via Namanga. My neighbour who was rushing breakfast to his sick aunt at Mount Meru Hospital arrived there during the lunch hour break. I am told many patients at the several hospitals in town went without breakfast on this fateful day. I can not comprehend of the millions if not billions of shillings lost in unopened shops, offices, businesses, cancelled appointments and the like. It was late in the afternoon of that Monday that I was told the whole chaos and city-life-stoppage was the work of the powers that may be who wanted to secure the Clock Tower area to enable a VIP attend to some official function.
Is Arusha under attack by the Taliban? my
appointment guy had asked me in a message he sent me on reaching
Scotland, his home. Yeah! My be Arusha has become Kandahar! I wondered.
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