Wajir town is the county headquarters of Wajir County. It’s estimated that there are at least 200,000 people that live in the town. It is also the oldest town in the now defunct Northern Frontier District (NFD). Foreigners hate and love the town at equal measure; they love it because its people are welcoming and open hearted and loathed because of the texture of the water, the heat and the horrible sewerage system. You are not in Wajir unless you have seen the following factors that define the century old town. 1. Stray mad people. Ever heard the old Somali adage that hadii aa walantahay Wajeer aad which roughly translate as if you are mad then go to Wajir? That could not be truer for the town. One in every ten people on the streets of Wajir town is stray mad people. There are mad teachers, medical officers, principals and even business owners. But interesting to note is that most of these people are not originally from Wajir. They come from other areas of the province. Most people argue the town holds a natural medicine for them due to the heat coupled with the water and the sewerage system. But psychiatrist say there is no established scientific fact to support that argument. Whether there is a scientific reason or not Wajir remains the leading hub of stray mad persons. 2. The sewer system. Famed for its bucket latrine, the town has no sewerage system hundrends years after it was established as an administrative centre for the colonial government. Then, when did the problem start? When the latrine system was put in place, Wajir population was only 1,000 people, but now the town has grown to a population of over 200,000 people. According to Alex Kagunda, an engineer with the former Ministry of State for the Development of Northern Kenya and Other Arid Lands, the town can no longer sustain the old system. A project was started in 2008 to put a proper sewerage system in the town. It practically started in 2011 and ended the following year after the funding for the project was exhausted. “The whole project was estimated to cost 1.5 billion shillings. Unfortunately we have only managed to raise less than 400 million shillings,” the former minister of State for the Development of Northern Kenya and Other Arid Lands Ibrahim Elmi said. “The money is not enough to finish even phase one of the three-phase project,” he told Sabahi, an online news forum. Stories abound of visitors who would wait for the darkness of the night to go out and relieve themselves as they cannot do it during day time for fear of sighting the bucket full of the “goodies”. But the good news is that the current county government of Wajir has allocated at least 100 million for the completion of the remaining phases. 3. Water source. When the severe drought hit the region in 2011, Wajir town was flooded by herders in search of water. The town is blessed with water however sour. History has it that long before Wajir was set up as an administrative centre, Orahey wells used to serve as a water point where herders and wayfarers would replenish their water stock. Today, orahey wells still offer the residents a relief at times of acute water shortage as it supplies half the water consumed in the town. Go to any homestead in the town and you would find shallow wells of about twenty meters deep full of water. Visitors had to be tutored on how to operate the wadhan, a container used for scooping water from the well. 4. Language A Wajir resident can be conspicuously identified from a mass of Somali speaking people by their style of the Somali language; its unique with natural touch. They are known for speaking the language with ease. The language spoken by Wajir residents usually occupy the centre of every joke. 5. Multi-ethnic It’s only in Wajir where an Arab, a Somali and a Portuguese-Somali locally known as Barawe are neighbours without a tinge of racism. According to local historians, Arabs and the Boranas were the earliest inhabitants of the town. The Arabs settled the town as merchants while the Somali-Portuguese migrated from the East African coastline. 6 historical Wajir town holds a lot of historical structures. The town was at the centre of fierce battle between the Italians and the British armies during the World War Two.
Posted on: Sun, 28 Sep 2014 07:50:56 +0000
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