Towards the end of April, water taps around the Coast started releasing air instead of water due to the closure of the water plant at Baricho, Kilifi County.
What happened?
The whole plant had to be closed because flood water submerged the pumping wells.*
As much as the irony didn’t escape us that there was water scarcity because of a problem caused by an abundance of water, it’s quite depressing to see a country this badly managed.
It rains a bit in Nairobi, and potholes large enough to swallow a young child pop up all over the city. It’s like the roads are made out of sugar that dissolve in water.
Then you have the trash problem.
You walk along an area like Kileleshwa (that’s supposed to be posh) in search of one – just one – outdoor trash can and you find nothing (and please if you find one, send me its GPS coordinates).
And in Mombasa…
God, let’s not even start.
Let’s just say there are so many trash hotspots, if you were to replace each one with a wifi hotspot, the whole of Mombasa would be online.
And let’s not delve into the sporadic trash burning that happens around. Does anybody care how such a practice affects people who are asthmatic? For a country that just banned plastic bags, you’d think someone would care (just a teeny tiny) bit about the environmental problems caused by trash burning.
Then you have the beautiful but useless solar-powered lights that have been installed to light the streets. Their luminance is so low, they might as well have been installed to attract moths, because they’re not there to light the streets, that’s for sure.
University staff are still on strike.
The strike started in Feb and we’re already in May.
By the way, that’s a whole Spring semester.
So what exactly is the cause of all these problems?
Are our academic institutions spewing out incompetent engineers/doctors (etc..) who don’t know what they’re doing? Or do we have incompetent policymakers who operate on an oh-shit-now-what strategy?
Take for example the water problem around the Coast.
If we had rainwater harvesting policy similar to Delhi’s that makes it mandatory for all buildings on plots of areas above 500 square meters to install RWH structures, maybe residents of Kilifi and Mombasa would have felt the pinch a bit less.
But having lived in the country for close to a year, if such a policy came into effect, I can imagine one of two things happening:
– The paperwork would suddenly reflect that all plots are 450 square meters or less.
– People who are supposed to enforce these policies will find a way to get rich out of making sure some people ‘are above the law’.
Every month, Kenyans see their gross salaries shrink because of taxes {as someone accurately described it on twitter}, “like spinach after it’s been cooked.” I feel the problem is politicians have forgotten they are in positions of service. Or maybe they think they’re in the business of self-promotion that comes complete with selfies and photo-ops.
Instead of having an economy based on meritocracy, I am baffled because I don’t know what we have.
The motto for development plans in this country seem to be, “one step forward, two steps backwards, three steps to the side.” (Four steps backwards and plunging into a river if you clash with a politician’s personal interests).
Just for the record, I hate politics.
I don’t even follow the news (I’m just aware of some news items because people keep on talking about them).
What breaks my heart is the amount of potential we’re collectively wasting as a country because of corruption, because of bad infrastructure, because of mismanaged resources.
And to be honest, this country has got a lot of potential. I met a person recently who’s been applying machine learning techniques to identify diseased plants – for fun!
It’s also depressing because every infrastructure problem we have has a solution out there.
It’s not like we’re trying to get to Mars.
We’re just asking for well-maintained clean roads and water in the taps. How hard could that be?
* According to official reports, “Coast Water services discovered discovered that the embankment (the protective barrier to the pumps) of one of the boreholes had been swept away and the pump lost in the flood water. Boreholes number 2 and 3 were covered with muddy water and all power components had been destroyed and some pipes swept away. The 5 downstream wells were full of muddy water as well.”
Image from National Geographic: http://www.nationalgeographic.com.au/nature/why-this-giant-crack-opened-up-in-kenya.aspx