Daily Inspiration Quote by Richard Leakey

“Virtually impossible” is the kind of phrase that pretends to be modest while doing heavy political work. Leakey isn’t just describing a logistical headache; he’s setting the terms of what the state can reasonably expect to do in Northern Kenya. The line reads like field realism, but its real intent is to redraw the map of responsibility: if control is impossible, then failure is pre-excused, and hard choices (militarization, forced settlement, neglect) start to sound like reluctant necessities rather than policy decisions.

The subtext sits in the pairing of “control” with “migrant nomads.” Nomadism isn’t treated as a sophisticated adaptation to aridity and uncertainty; it becomes an administrative problem, a population that won’t hold still long enough to be governed in the ways modern states prefer: fixed addresses, taxable assets, legible borders. “Chiefly” quietly flattens diverse communities into a single category, making a vast region feel like one undifferentiated challenge.

Context matters: Northern Kenya has long been managed from the center as frontier, not as fully integrated citizen-space, shaped by colonial “closed districts,” post-independence securitization, and recurrent cycles of drought, cross-border movement, and marginalization. Leakey, as an environmentalist, likely means the ecology drives mobility; rain and pasture write the itinerary, not Nairobi. Still, the sentence can be read as a warning about conservation and security policies that misfire when they assume sedentarism. When a government insists on “control” where the land demands movement, it’s often the people who end up paying for the mismatch.