By Salwa Mahmoud
For many in Kenya, opportunity is a promise waiting to be fulfilled. But in Basuba Ward and Kiunga Ward along the Kenya-Somalia border, opportunity is nothing but a cruel lie. Here, communities are abandoned, stripped of dignity, and forced to survive in neglect. They live with insecurity, crushing poverty, and the absence of even the most basic services.
The border dictates every breath of life. Roads are not just bad, they are death traps. Not a single strip of tarmac exists. Families, traders, and children wade through dust and danger daily. Children are expected to dream, yet they walk for hours to schools that are miles apart. Many drop out not because they lack ambition, but because this country has abandoned them. And those who make it to class find nothing, no libraries, no sports programs, no resources. Just empty promises. Instead of opening doors, authorities build more barriers. Roadblocks, checkpoints, restrictions. Security has become a weapon, punishing the very people it is meant to protect.
Health care is a cruel joke here. Clinics are lifeless shells with no doctors, just nurses who have no idea when it comes to serious patients, just painkillers in the dispensaries, no hope. When people fall sick, families are forced into impossible choices. Risk death on the broken roads or wait for death at home.
In Kiunga, a pregnant woman needed urgent care to rescue her and the unborn baby , the local facility could not help. Roads were impassable, sea transport unreliable. She had died and the unborn baby died too. Both were buried, which could be different if services were good.. And this is not a tragic exception, it is the norm. People here do not die of illness alone. They die of neglect. They die because those in power look away.
The economy is equally merciless. Farmers grow grain and watermelons only to watch them rot. Fishermen haul in catches that rot unsold. Families struggle on scraps while leaders boast about development elsewhere. The youth, the majority in these wards, are left to wither. No jobs, no training, no programs. Their energy is wasted, their potential dismissed. They are trapped in a cycle of deliberate exclusion.
Even the most basic rights are denied. Birth certificates, IDs, passports, and documents every Kenyan should have are almost impossible to get. Families must spend months navigating bureaucracy designed to break them. Without documents, they are stateless in their own country. No jobs. No schools. No access to government programs. They are deliberately erased. Mobile networks barely exist, cutting them off from emergency help, from family, from opportunity. Roads are dangerous, transport is costly, and still the state adds more restrictions instead of fixing what is broken.
Decisions about land, resources, and projects are made far away by people who have never walked these roads or buried loved ones lost to neglect. The voices of Basuba and Kiunga mean nothing to those in offices. Here, water is unreliable, electricity is a dream, and every single day is a battle just to survive.
And yet, despite the cruelty, the people endure. They dream of schools with books, hospitals that save lives, roads that actually lead somewhere, markets where hard work pays, and a government that treats them as Kenyans, not criminals, not outsiders.
Their suffering should not just sadden you, it should enrage you. Their resilience should not just inspire you, it should shame you. This is not fate. This is not bad luck. This is deliberate neglect, sustained indifference, and misplaced priorities. Basuba and Kiunga are proof that Kenya is two countries. One that is seen, celebrated, and developed. Another that is deliberately forgotten, abandoned, and left to rot.
National progress is a lie if it leaves these people behind. Their story is not just a cry for help, it is hypocrisy of a country that has chosen to ignore its own citizens. Their pain should disturb your sleep. Their abandonment should haunt your conscience. Until there is justice, until there is inclusion, until there is respect, Kenya has no right to boast of progress.
