All Kenya woes are blamed on El Nino

Rhinos and buffalo herds move slowly across the horizon, a high-rise, 20th century skyline as their backdrop, in a nature park near Nairobi. In Kenya's Rift Valley province, warriors prepare to kill their tribal enemies; some armed with poison-tipped arrows, others with AK47s.

At the foot of the Ngong Hills, where the writer Karen Blixen had her farm, a polo game is in progress and the KCs (Kenyan Cowboys or whites) are knocking back the Tuskar beers; but down the road a group of black street children, just some of 40,000 young homeless in and around Nairobi, are sniffing glue and sleeping rough.

Kenya has always been a land of startling, cheek-by-jowl contrasts. But this year El Nino came to visit at Christmas and stayed.

The result in most of Kenya has been one long continuous downpour. Plains have flooded and rivers burst their banks. Scores of people have died, as have thousands of cattle. Crops recovering from last year's drought have been battered down.

Outbreaks of deadly diseases have followed. Mosquitoes spread acute malaria and a mysterious bleeding disease linked to the deadly Rift Valley fever.

In Nairobi it has rained almost every day for two months. No one can remember rainfall in such quantity. Most afternoons a downpour drives people from the streets and throws traffic into chaos. The meteorologists says Kenya has received 20 times its normal rainfall in the past month.

As Shakespeare noted, troubles don't tend to come singly. Just about everything that goes wrong in Kenya these days gets blamed on El Nino, but often it is only compounding the many woes afflicting the country - a crumbling infrastructure, rampant corruption, tribal conflict and political instability.

On Kenyatta Avenue, Nairobi's equivalent of O'Connell Street, the rains have gouged huge potholes in the tarmac which challenge the suspension of all but the largest jeeps. Traffic comes to a virtual standstill as cars weave a path between these obstacles.

The rains have increased the frequency of power cuts, and the telephone system has become a nightmare. Connections with most of the provinces have been out for weeks, and even phoning within different districts of Nairobi is difficult. None of which stops the Kenya Telephone Company charging for any attempt to ring someone, whether or not the person is reached, as I found out when checking out from my hotel in Nairobi.

The deluge has knocked the stuffing out of an infrastructure suffering from years of neglect and mismanagement. And worse: corruption has meant that much of essential spending in many areas was creamed off by senior government figures.

Everyone in Kenya has their own tale of corruption. Drivers pray they won't be stopped by traffic policeman who requests "favours" or "considerations" for turning a blind eye to a faulty headlight or an expired tax-disc.

The Irish Franciscan missionary, Brother Larry Timmons, was killed last year, shortly after he made allegations of corruption against the bigwigs in his town of Lare, a few hours north of Nairobi. Now the inquest into his death has been delayed, because his lawyers refuse to oil the wheels of justice as some people would like them to.

The rains have thrown Kenyans into a melancholic mood. There is a sense of an opportunity lost. Only last year, large parts of the country were enduring a painful drought, yet there was little investment in dams and reservoirs to save the precious water when it did arrive. Tumultuous rains have simply washed fertile soils down the rivers and into the Indian Ocean.

Each week seems to bring a new calamity. Tribal clashes in the Rift Valley have aroused fears of a Rwandan-style blood-letting. Tourism was already in crisis, but the murder last week of a British tourist, Mr Roy Chivers, will make matters worse.

Mr Chivers was walking with his wife in the grounds of the exclusive Aberdare Country Club under Mount Kenya when he was set upon by two robbers and stabbed.

It could happen anywhere. But according to an Irish nurse who was the first person on the scene to assist the victim, Mr Chivers would not have died if he had been brought to hospital more quickly. It took almost five hours to get him to hospital in the capital. Even western tourists fall victim to a decaying infrastructure.

And yet Kenya remains the dominant economic power in East Africa. The offices of the major Western corporations and banks pepper the Nairobi skyline. Amid all the economic collapse, highly efficient and profitable businesses are prospering.

On Valentine's Day, I visited a rose farm less than an hour from Nairobi. A year ago, this farm did not exist - the land was used for coffee growing - now, it sends 70,000 rose stems to the flower auctions in Amsterdam every night.

More factory than farm, the operation makes use of all the latest agricultural technology, most notably drip irrigation techniques pioneered by the Israelis. Roses of all colours grow, indifferent to the daily downpours, under huge greenhouses made of polythene and timber. Large amounts of fertilisers and pesticides are flushed into the soil so as to leave nothing to chance.

The business is owned by a member of the ascendant economic power in Kenya, the Asian community. It is managed by a white Kenyan with extensive agricultural training. And, as ever, the labour-force is composed entirely of black Kenyans.

As for roses, so also for a wide variety of vegetables. Huge European retailers such as Tesco and Sainsburys are massive purchasers of high-quality food produced in Kenya - just look at the flower boxes and food cartons in your local store.

Why this success can't be replicated more widely is a mystery. Kenya has a highly educated workforce by African standards. But so many are like Robson, a young management graduate I met during the week. What do you want to do now, I asked him. "Another management course," he replied.

But if the rain keeps falling, there won't be anything left to manage.