WHAT IS THIS?

I remember one evening when the sky above Turkana burned slowly into dusk, the sun dissolving into a red wound over the horizon. I had climbed the stony ribs of the Lotiruk hills and sat alone at the peak, where the wind moved like an old spirit through the dry grass. From that height, the land stretched endlessly, an ancient geography of silence. The earth lay bare and immense: scattered acacia trees leaning like tired elders, distant Lokwamosing, Lopii, Nakukulas and Lomunyenkirion kraals crouching in the dust, and the faint shimmer of the river Tirkwel winding through the thirsty land.

It was a landscape both sacred and wounded, a homeland that carried the memories of our ancestors like a heavy drumbeat beneath the soil. As I sat there, gazing across the ancestral plains, I took a slow mental journey across Turkana: from Nawountos to Kainuk, from the Elemi Triangle to beyond the cracked valleys of Suguta, and in that silent cross-country tour of memory and imagination, a sorrow settled heavily on my spirit. For the land itself seemed to whisper stories of abandonment.

Turkana has endured the harsh grammar of suffering. Drought arrives like a recurring curse, stripping the land and its people of dignity. Banditry prowls across the borders like a shadow with a rifle, leaving widows, orphans, and silent homesteads behind. Generations have grown up watching their livestock vanish to hunger, bullets, or rustlers. Yet nature and violence alone are not the deepest wounds of this land. The greater tragedy lies within: the quiet betrayal of those who were meant to lead.

The tragedy of Turkana today is not merely poverty; it is the architecture of betrayal built by its own schooled sons and daughters.

Somewhere along the journey from the dusty classrooms of missionary schools to the air-conditioned offices of County power, a transformation occurred. Those who escaped the desert through formal education were once the hope of the community. They were supposed to be bridges between the forgotten pastoralist and the modern state. Instead, many have become professional brokers/middlemen who trade in the suffering of their own people. They stand between aid and the hungry, between development and the neglected, between opportunity and the desperate.

The tragedy is almost Shakespearean in its irony. The very tools that were meant to liberate Turkana: education, leadership, and political awareness, have often been turned into instruments of manipulation. Election seasons reveal this painful truth with brutal clarity. Politicians arrive like seasonal rainclouds, promising rivers of change. Behind them stand “the brokers”: the educated elites who speak the language of policy, development, and donor relations. They organize rallies, craft narratives, mobilize voters, and translate promises into illusions. The electorate, the genuine Turkana pastoralists who still herd goats across the unforgiving plains, place their hopes in these figures.

But after the ballot boxes close, the story changes.

The “brokers” move quietly into the corridors of power. Tenders are awarded. Contracts appear. Appointments are made. Allowances are distributed. The machinery of patronage begins to hum like an engine fed by public grief. Meanwhile, the villages remain unchanged. Thirst still hits like the bandits of Kapedo while boreholes are still dry. Schools still face teachers’ inadequacy. Health centres still echo with emptiness. The promises that once sounded like thunder dissolve into the desert wind.

The English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley once wrote in Ozymandias that “the lone and level sands stretch far away.” The line echoes hauntingly when one thinks of Turkana. Grand promises and towering political rhetoric collapse into the same emptiness that surrounds abandoned/ghost projects across the County. A half-built classroom here. A broken water pump there. Development reduced to monuments of neglect.

In Lodwar, however, the contrast is striking. Multi-storey buildings rise slowly against the desert skyline. Expensive vehicles glide through dusty streets like symbols of a different reality. Behind their tinted windows sit men who once claimed to speak for the poor pastoralist. Wealth accumulates quietly in the hands of a few while the many remain trapped in cycles of hunger and dependency.

George Orwell, in Animal Farm, warned that revolutions sometimes end with new masters who resemble the old ones. His haunting line “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” captures the moral contradiction unfolding in Turkana. Power that was meant to uplift has instead stratified the community into new hierarchies. The elites flourish while the ordinary people endure. What makes the tragedy even deeper is the silence that surrounds it.

The ordinary Turkana voter often lacks the political instruments to challenge this system. Illiteracy, poverty, and isolation combine to produce a quiet resignation. Many know they are being betrayed, yet the machinery of patronage keeps them dependent. A bag of maize during drought. A thousand note during campaigns. A promise of temporary employment. These small gestures become chains that bind the electorate to the very figures who perpetuate their hardship.

The playwright Bertolt Brecht once asked bitterly, “What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?” His question resonates in Turkana’s political economy. The theft here is not dramatic or violent. It is bureaucratic, procedural, and disguised as governance. Funds meant for development evaporate through inflated tenders, incomplete/ghost projects, and consultancy reports that gather dust in offices. Meanwhile, the pastoralist continues his lonely walk across the merciless desert.

I imagine him sometimes: a man with dusty/cracked feet and a faded Lorwanta shuka, guiding thin goats through thorn bushes under the unforgiving sun. His children wait at home, their stomachs empty, their future uncertain. He does not know either the language of policy frameworks or development indicators. He only knows that every election brings promises and every drought brings despair.

Sincerely speaking, this is a serious conundrum. What is this tragic transformation among us? How did we arrive at such behaviour? When did service become brokerage? Where did our shared communal approach to life vanish? Where did Ubuntu go? Who taught us to profit from suffering? When did formal education become betrayal? And who will restore our conscience?

From the peak of Lotiruk hills, as the twilight deepened around me, I felt the weight of these contradictions pressing on the soul of Turkana. The wind moved across the hills like a lament. It carried the voices of forgotten people: herders, widows, children, whose hopes rarely travel beyond the dusty boundaries of their villages.

The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky once observed that “the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” If one were to adapt his thought to Turkana, perhaps civilization could be judged by entering its villages. There, far from political speeches and development conferences, the truth becomes painfully visible. The people who should have been the beneficiaries of progress remain spectators of their own marginalization. Yet despair alone cannot sustain a people forever.

History teaches that awakening often begins slowly, like the first drops of rain before a storm. Communities eventually recognize patterns of exploitation. They begin to ask questions. They demand accountability. The same education that produced brokers can also produce reformers. The same youth who now watch silently may one day challenge the structures that suffocate their future.

Even the desert itself offers lessons of resilience. After months of drought, a single rain can awaken seeds that slept beneath the soil for years. Suddenly, the land bursts into green life, reminding the world that dormancy is not death.

As darkness finally covered the plains beneath Lotiruk hills that evening, a faint hope stirred in my thoughts. Perhaps the story of Turkana is not yet finished. Perhaps the people who have endured drought, raids, and neglect possess within them a deeper strength than the elites who exploit them. One day, the ordinary pastoralist may awaken to the power of his voice, his vote, and his dignity. On that day, the brokers will no longer stand comfortably between the people and their destiny. On that day, Turkana will begin to liberate itself, not through violence or bitterness, but through collective awakening and moral courage.

And when that awakening finally comes, the silent hills of Lotiruk will bear witness to a new story: the story of a people who refused to remain prisoners of betrayal, and who rose slowly, painfully, but unmistakably toward the freedom they had long been denied.