Our “city fathers” have literally got their knickers in a twist with the latest distraction to their dodgy service delivery. A group of four brave, swashbuckling heroes have launched a brazen attack using cans of spray paint as their weapons and Nairobi building walls as their battleground. I first heard about the “graffiti artists” on Twitter when word spread like wildfire about the thought provoking murals that had suddenly appeared overnight on the Nairobi City Market walls. The Sunday Nation on March 25th carried a more detailed story on the history of the artists as well as the strong motivation and belief in their cause. The four trailblazers have chosen to use art to express their palpable frustration with all things wrong in Kenyan politics and, my word, a picture is worth a thousand words.

The indignant reaction from the City Council of Nairobi and the Police was so predictable it was boring. Cover the pictures! This is illegal! How the **** did this happen and who the **** do these guys think they are? Meanwhile, our city of Nairobi has very little in the form of public art and what these artists have managed to do is provide not only poignant messages for the average Kenyan voter but also provide stimulating visual stories that tantalize our taste buds for more locally inspired and publicly displayed art.

Art is a form of creative expression that enables the viewer to experience different senses that affect both emotional and psychological stimuli. With this background in mind, the city of Philadelphia in the United States decided to launch a counter attack on what was becoming a prolific graffiti problem in the early nineties by embracing the graffiti artists into ‘city employees’ whose job was to beautify the city. I visited Philadelphia – also known as the City of Murals-in the spring of 2010 and found a city with over 3000 murals covering walls of buildings across the Central Business District as well as row houses in low-income neighbourhoods. The murals are beautiful and powerful artistic impressions of American urban culture, giving voice to the artists to express their individual and collective voices.

But it is the origins of the murals that warrants attention. In 1984, the Mayor of Philadelphia, Wilson Goode decided that the best way to eradicate the graffiti crisis plaguing his city was to stop fighting it and start embracing it. A program was started called the Philadelphia Anti-Graffiti Network where a muralist. Jane Golden, was hired to reach out to graffiti writers and redirect their energies from destructive graffiti writing to constructive mural painting. The result was surprising even to the originators of the concept. The mural painting empowered the youth to take an active role in beautifying their own neighborhoods, adding life, beauty and color to an old industrial city. The murals also provide unification in areas of racial tension, with Golden’s team stepping into neighborhoods with a history of violent racial altercations and getting residents to participate in painting murals that celebrate the diversity of residents and healing of racial wounds.

Talking tough and hastily whitewashing the efforts of Uhuru, Swift99, BanksSlave and Smokilla – street names of the four buccaneers who have chosen the Nairobi City walls to tell their story – is very shortsighted. It will only serve to raise their profile absolutely free [something any brand would kill for] and elevate them into urban legends. Ask any spouse, parent, or school administrator: when you try to impose a seemingly pointless, draconian rule the mavericks will always do their damndest to go around, above or below it in an effort not to comply. The four Nairobi street artists have found that vehicle to tell their story and trying to silence those voices will be as good as trying to muzzle a hungry cat in a tight sack. The City Council of Nairobi’s energies are much better spent finding ways to engage more artists to make our capital city a reflection of our national character. Find those mavericks, put them in the Mayor’s Mercedes Benz rather than those awful city council cattle trucks for ferrying prisoners and fete their artistic prowess. This could be a way of getting the City beautified in the lowest cost and most authentic manner possible. Oh and to the local authorities: while you’re at it, please take note that the Neanderthals painting silly messages with names of contenders for Governor, Senate and whatever other political seat is available on sections of Thika Highway in Nairobi and Makupa Causeway in Mombasa are not artists by any definition. They should collectively be thrown into a sack with a very hungry cat in the back of a City Council cattle truck.

In other completely unrelated news, the CEO of Telkom Kenya, Mickael Ghossein was last week widely quoted by the press as saying: “We are in a position to meet all our financial obligations to banks and if we don’t, then there is no reason for them to worry because there are penalties.” This was in response to published reports that the company’s financials were, quite simply, in dire straits. I read the quote and two words came to mind: Train Smash. Telling banks not to worry about being repaid because there are penalties is as good as waving a red flag in front of a Spanish bull. Penalties for late loan payments are meant to act as a deterrent for default. What matters to banks most is whether the borrower will have the cash to repay the loan and not whether the bank will make money from penalties. I have no doubt that the CEO’s words may have caused massive “bankstipation” (an ailment of “constipatory ” origins occasionally suffered by those in the banking industry) amongst Telkom’s bankers. Those words may come to paint a very unattractive mural for the company’s future financial fortunes.

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Twitter:@carolmusyoka