MANDERA (Kenya): Visitors to north-east Kenya from the capital Nairobi are sometimes asked “How’s Kenya?” as if it was a foreign country. The question, offered with real curiosity not irony, shows just how isolated the mainly Muslim and nomadic people of this vast, arid region on the borders of Ethiopia and Somalia feel.

“We have been treated as outcasts, completely sidelined while they pour money into central and eastern,” complains Mohamed Ali, deputy head of a school in tatty Mandera town.

With a presidential election on Dec 27, political parties headquartered in Nairobi are finally pledging to focus on development in North Eastern, one of Kenya’s eight provinces.

But with an electorate of barely 300,000 out of a total 14 million, the territory is clearly not a major political priority.

Given the wilful neglect of the past, people give President Mwai Kibaki credit for some improvements, like more bore-holes for water, the most prized commodity in a drought-prone region.

Most, however, say he has not done nearly enough — and seldom visited them.

That view, plus resentment over harassment of Muslims in anti-terrorism sweeps, means the province is expected to go for the opposition, which leads Kibaki in polls here and nationwide.

“They don’t believe they are part of Kenya and they have good reason to think that,” opposition leader Raila Odinga says, though whether he would deliver or not to an area far away from his tribal base is a matter of conjecture.

Their geographical isolation heightened by the total absence of decent roads, the northerners’ ethnicity also unites them with tribes across the nearby borders rather than the rest of Swahili-speaking Kenya.

Both British colonialists and successive Kenyan governments have neglected development in the northern territories.

The ratio of qualified doctors to patients, for example, is 1 to 120,000 in North Eastern, compared to 1 to 20,000 in the far more populated Central Province.—Reuters