Why You Can’t Elope in Kenya
Kenya has one city. Everything else is a suburb with delusions or a town waiting for Nairobi to notice it exists. You can’t run away here. You can’t start over. You can’t build a different life in a different place because there is no different place, just Nairobi and the places people leave to come to Nairobi.
Growing up on American films and European novels sold a specific fantasy: the escape. The protagonist packs a bag, boards a bus, and arrives somewhere new where nobody knows their name. Blank canvas. Fresh start. Lonely but liberating. The geography itself becomes a character in the reinvention story because the destination has its own identity, economy, culture, and possibilities.
Nairobi’s Waiting Rooms
Mombasa and Kisumu exist but they’re not alternatives to Nairobi. You go there for Christmas celebrations, family obligations, or because you failed in Nairobi and need to regroup before trying again. Nobody moves to Eldoret to reinvent themselves. Nobody flees to Nakuru for a clean slate. Those cities can’t sustain the fantasy because they lack the infrastructure, job market, cultural density, and administrative independence to function as legitimate destinations.
Devolution created forty-seven counties with budgets, governors, and development plans. All of them still orbit Nairobi because the infrastructure of daily life remains centralized. Raise venture capital in Eldoret and watch investors ask when you’re moving operations to Nairobi. The assumption isn’t even hidden anymore. Serious business happens in one postal code.
The Psychological Monopoly
The problem runs deeper than economics. Nairobi is the only place that feels like it counts. The only place where success is measured, ambition is taken seriously, and futures are built. Everywhere else is context, not the main stage. That suffocates a country claiming development because development requires options, and options require multiple centres of gravity.
E-Citizen digitized nearly every government service, possibly making Kenya first in Africa to do so this thoroughly. Passports, business registration, land searches, tax compliance, and police clearances are all online. The platform proved that physical proximity to government shouldn’t dictate where you live your life. But digitizing bureaucracy only freed you from government queues, not from Nairobi’s economic monopoly.
The movie fantasy is really about possibility. The protagonist moves more than cities; they move into a different version of their life. Kenya has one place that matters. Everywhere else is waiting to matter or has accepted it never will.
You can’t run away to start over if there’s nowhere to run to.
