By Loureen Alma
I walk the road of kaloyce- kolewo stretch with my sandals swallowing mud
And my spirit swallowing disbelife
Because this 900-metres road is a heartbreak
Not a road
Wearing a reflector jacket as a scandal
A ribbon -cutting ceremony hiding a wound
A government report pretending to be progress
For I will let this number sit with you
Ksh. 2.5million
As it breath
It echo like a coin dropped into an empty well
That hasn’t seen water in decades.
The two point five million
For a path that leads nowhere
A road with no drainage
No destination
No dignity
For it feels like buying a house and forgetting the roof
Like selling hope and delivering dust
Like calling a brick ‘a building ‘ and expecting aplouse for it
In three months or more
And the resident still wade through wast water
Like unwanted guest in there own homes waiting for stone pitching
That should have been sculpted into the soil
On day one
Not a day ‘whenever they feel like it’
And the funniest thing is that
they call this; Development!
But I call it what it is
A beautifully wrapped insult,
A budget dissapearing act,
A shilling – shaped betrayal
When a county vanishes
Into project of little value,
When accountability becomes a rumour
And transparency becomes a ghost
The people are left holding
The receipt for someone else’s negligence
Am tired of seeing public resources treated like
loose change in deep pockets
Tired of being told to clap
For mediocrity dressed as achievement
Tired of pretending we don’t see the cracks
When they are big enough to swallow the truth, whole
But know this
The citizens,
The ones who walk these roads ,
The ones who pay,
The ones who wait ,
We are not powerless ,
We are not voiceless ,
We are not invissible .
We must rise and demand answers
Demand audits
Demand every shilling return the value it promised
For that roads are not metaphors
There are lifelines
And when they break a lifeline
They break a community .
Kaloyce-kolewo desserves better.
Changing The Mindset
