From theory to practice

Some members of Tuala youth initiative group with their donated football siting atop their home made one. Taken on 14th September.

In my efforts to get involved in local community development, I recently accepted an invitation to attend a fund raising for the proposed secondary school in our locality. They have a shell of the secondary school that was started but construction stalled after the contractor fled with the money half way through. The event was moderately attended and a fair amount was raised. This type of fund raising activity brings forth several troubling issues. Among them is the question of accountability. The money raised sometimes gets ‘misplaced somehow’ and those that sat in the sun baking as they handed over that they did not have, are left with nothing but hopes and dreams. Another issue is following through. As previously noted contractors are notorious for accepting money for a project and then abandoning it half way or not doing anything at all. It is usually difficult to pursue these shady contractors once they have accepted the money. Will the school get constructed in time for next year’s school intake? Time will tell and I will keep readers informed of developments.
I also attended a neighborhood meeting of Rongai residents and business people a few weeks ago. The topic discussed was garbage and sewage. As mentioned in the previous article, on entering Ongata Rongai from Nairobi, you are met by open sewage spewing a green murky liquid substance. It is said many a small animal that had the misfortune to stumble into these open drainage systems has been vaporized, never to roam the earth again.
In addition to the garbage and sewer issues, we also discussed building codes, access roads and a few other topics that were not on the agenda. At the end, the participants came up with four resolutions to adopt and implement. My take on this neighborhood meeting is that while the the nothing is going to be done as we have a very ineffective County Council that in my opinion earns a failing grade in the provision of basic services.
Getting Involved
I have begun visiting neighbors and town residents and have met a few development minded citizens. In the course of my ‘meet the people tour’ I met a group of local youth who work in the nearby quarries loading trucks with stones. A little background is deserved. Kajiado County has many rocky areas that are mined for building stones. At the entrance to our town, which is more like a trading center, a group of youth waits for trucks coming from outside the area. They then hop unto the trucks to be loaders of the building stones that are mined in the hinterland. The truck owners have an agreement with the local youth to provide loading work to them in exchange for buying stones from their area. I met the chairman of this group who shared a little about this group. He told me they are a registered group and have an account where every member contributes a set sum weekly. He told me that recently his group has stalled and contributions were no longer being given as regularly. He heartily welcomed me and told me he would like a visionary to help propel their youth group further. Since community activism is what I am all about, I humbly welcomed his invitation to work with his group in engaging the youth in social and recreational activities. The youth in rural Kenya are prone to partaking illicit brews due to boredom or lack of worthwhile engagements.
One of my first gestures of being involved was donating a football to the youth to play with as they waited for loading work. Previously they had been using a homemade football composed of nylon and bound together by sisal rope. This small token was received with much appreciation. Going forward we plan to start a local football team. Duties have been assigned. Among them are scouting suitable grounds, pricing hardware for the goal posts and approaching corporations for sponsorship.
I will keep readers appraised of developments.

Slumber not, dear mother land.

Above photo: Once majestic Nairobi Railways, its frontage has been turned into a terminus for public transport vehicles. I took this on the 17th of September.

As ardent readers of my blog know, I was based abroad from the start of this very informative transformational blog. I am back home ready to assist and do my part in building this yet-to-be great nation. A sage once told me: “Even that America that people are fleeing to, was once barren and bare. Pioneers made it the way it is now. So build your America here in Kenya.” These words of advice, coupled with the fact that all my ideas for development can only be implemented while I am on the ground, made me transplant.
Initial Impressions
Kenya has changed these years I have been away. There are very few clunkers on the roads.There are some nice cars here and there but the vast majority of people still walk or take public transport. Nairobi has become overcrowded. While not rundown, its beauty has paled due to lack of maintenance. It is not a pleasant experience walking around this once great city, former pride of East Africa. On the positive, it is cleaner than it was during the former regime. People don’t litter for fear County Askaris may pounce on you from out of the blue. And gone are the days when women used to cook chapatis outside Times Tower building. There is no smoking on the streets; they have designated smoking areas where people huddle together like chickens during a storm to puff away, inflating their lungs with noxious fumes.
There are many more people especially the youth; sadly they have taken to aping western culture in song dance, dress and mannerisms. Generally, people are well dressed especially the ladies. Clothes, new and used are in abundance and it is thus easy to dress decently.
As for the roads, I have not been to see the famous Thika road and don’t intend to. A major modern highway leading to nowhere serves no purpose and we will be paying for it several generations down the line. What we need are feeder and access roads leading to densely populated areas or areas where commerce takes place. Other roads are still the same. There are no new roads in my area, Rongai which is outside Nairobi. The town has become very densely populated, trash everywhere, traffic a night mare with speeding drivers and non obedient matatus.
As regards communication, everyone has a phone. I mean from the tech savvy generation, up to the old grandma out in the country. Safaricom is very dominant as a supplier of mobile telephone service. Their Mpesa mobile banking system probably has more users then all formal banks combined together. Internet connectivity has improved tremendously according to those I asked. There are many internet capable phones being offered at affordable price points and the youth have taken to them in droves. Internet cafes are still popular as the price of a laptop or desktop is still prohibitive.
As is obvious, our greedy politicians have not bettered their ways, they are busy feeding themselves oblivious of their starving electorate. Recently without fanfare, they unanimously agreed to dip into the emergency reserve fund to pay their back taxes. And a day after a fire tragedy in one of the Nairobi slums, the Cabinet passed a resolution to shift the date of the next General Elections from August next year to December of the same year. The excuse given was flimsy at best. These are not the leaders that will transform this nation. Local Government is even more ineffectual. I will deal with them in the next article.
All in all, I am very optimistic about my motherland but we need a concerted effort with every ones involvement to propel this nation forward. Development will not take place with a centralized form of Government and the new Constitution is already stumbling out the gate as regards its implementation. Hopefully a new Government under a devolved type of administration will fare well as regards delivery services but it will only be driven by a completely new set of servant leaders. So my fellow Kenyans, choose wisely at the next Elections. To this end, we suggest an intense campaign geared towards civic education. I plan to start a civic education program and will be contacting civil society bodies for teaching materials.
Going forward I plan to post more development related articles and interviews with regular Kenyans. The tale of Kenya needs to told and I am optimistic this story will have a happy ending.
I sign off with this well intended Moi era Slogan that somehow went awry: “Peace, Love and Unity.”

Banana juice gold mine

A very fine initiative from our Kenyan youth

Going green: Kenyan doing his part

Here is another example from last year of an enterprising Kenyan using available green technology to become energy independent. Unfortunately our government is not supportive of such innovators because it takes away from the monopoly government energy producer.
We, the technologically savvy need to band together to bring a new order in the next General Elections.

Power of innovation

Here is a prime example of innovation at work in our rural areas. We will shortly be doing a post about how we can fund such projects in order to develop sustainable rural economies.

Beyond implementation: The arduous task ahead

The proposed constitution has passed the referendum stage and we applaud our brothers and sisters for voting in a civil and orderly manner. The work ahead of us is the implementation. It will be a hard upward journey given the radical proposals contained in the new constitution such as the new demarcations that will reshape the country into new governing units. In order to enforce the new constitution, various committees will be formed to push the implementation agenda forward. Story found HERE. The time line given is five years for full implementation which will take us well past the general elections of 2012. Some of the caveats will have to be functional before the elections such as the new wards (officials to be known as Assembly men and women instead of Councilors) and counties which will replace the provinces.
In my view, this constitution will be very expensive to implement, with the only immediate beneficiaries being the officials in the various implementation committees. The other longer term beneficiaries will be the holders of the purse strings when the devolution funds are released. As for the ordinary mwanainchi (regular citizen, man on the street), I predict a dismal and bleak future if we are to rely on this constitution to bring us any meaningful tangible progress. My dire prognosis is based on the hurried jostling by greedy politicians for inclusion in the various implementation committees for the lucrative allowances. I predict these committees will stretch their mandate as far as possible in order to milk the public coffers beyond their required time.
When the euphoria of this new constitution has dissipated, the millions of Kenyans just getting by will go back to their dreary existence while awaiting government progress that will probably not materialize in this lifetime. We do have viable options though.
Citizens United for Progress (C.U.P)
The above name will be one of our initiatives but locals are free to pick any name, the idea here is what is important.
This will be a grouping of local citizens, known to each other either through friendship, need or just banded together as neighbors. Their task will be to implement self help projects in their neighborhoods that will have an immediate impact on their day to day lives. Examples abound but they will be peculiar to specific localities. A previous article we did about neighborhood organizations can be found HERE.
‘Revolution’ through the ballot
If, as many Kenyans insist, progress has to come from the government, then we will definitely need a new set of leaders at the next General Election. In the premiere article of this blog we tackled the issue of what qualities a good leader ought to have. Here we will briefly reiterate what was previously said by posing a set of questions that may help guide the voter to make an informed decision come election time.
-Is the voter better off now as compared to the time their local government official was elected into office?
-Are there tangible public projects the official has initiated and followed through to completion that directly impact the voter?
-Will the prospective candidate’s record on matters affecting public issues be able to stand to scrutiny? Did they speak out when their fellow legislators adopted a stand that the rest of the country did not agree with? An example here would be the attempt by parliament for members to increase their pay to exorbitant amounts.
-How assessable is the official to the average voter? What is the response time if one were to inquire for information or assistance?
-What development ideas, concisely presented, does the candidate have when he comes vote hunting?
-What plans does the candidate have for including the voter in future development plans? For my part I intend to engage the citizenry in a form of participatory democracy where regular town hall style meetings will be held together with individual and interest group meetings held regularly. More details to be released after the registration of our party.
Conclusion
We as Kenyans have always been imbued with endless optimism even in the bleakest of times. It would be our wish that we use this state of euphoria we are enjoying to be vigilant, demanding and relentless as to the speedy implementation of this new constitution. The political class should not be allowed to use our goodwill to prolong, derail or skew the process of implementation in their favor.
Between now and the next General Elections, we need to seriously think about how we as individuals can help the country move forward economically and socially. Do we retain the old guard that will continue to fatten both belly and bank account on misappropriated public funds? Or do we pick someone with no corruption record and brimming with ideas on how to develop our nation?
Reader responses welcome.

Greed and Insecurity: Disparate brothers joined at the hip

Two events were reported by the local media recently that though appearing unrelated, are actually bedfellows, united in concert to incessantly deny us the ability to initiate and sustain progress and development.
The first news item concerned a proposal by Parliamentarians to hike their pay from the basic salary of Ksh 871,000 to Ksh 1.2 million. The Prime minister and the Vice President would each earn Ksh 3.2 million and Ksh 2.7 million respectively. Lawmakers debated and unanimously approved the report by the Public Service Commission in a record 30 minutes! If this proposal is signed into law, it would put the MPs salaries on par with members of the United States Congress, with the Prime Minister making more than the President of the United States!Story HERE
The other news story was from a suburb outside the capital city, Nairobi. A neighborhood in Ongata Rongai was raided by machete wielding thugs at night. The thugs demanded that the residents open their doors whereby they were robbed. Neighbors who answered the distress calls were set upon by the thugs and two residents succumbed to their injuries. This particular story touches this writer on a personal level because we settled in this area having moved from Nairobi to escape the hustle and bustle of the big city and adopt a homesteading lifestyle. My parents were victims of a raid previously. Incidences such as these are on the rise in major urban areas of the country whereby idlers raid homes of hard working decent people in a bid to acquire minus the labor. This is a method of enrichment taken from the politicians, only that they, the politicians rob us minus the violence while in office. But during election time, the bloated politician and the scrawny thug sport no difference in their use of violence to attain their nefarious means.

Unbridled unabashed greed permeates all levels of Kenyan society from our lawmakers to the clerks in the civil service to the police force. From the theft of public resources, practiced and refined to a fine art by politicians to the ‘toa kitu kidogo’ (give something small) demanded by the police force manning unauthorized traffic checkpoints. This ingrained culture of impunity threatens to derail us from moving forward as a nation imbued with the capacity to provide for its citizens the basic economic and social necessities.
The private sector has not been spared from this insidious avarice. National exams are being leaked to students for a price. Employers are demanding a bribe from potential employees. We no longer have a nation of supportive and caring neighbors.
How then do we move forward to ensure a peaceful Kenya with hope and promise for the youth and assured security for those that have labored to attain a semblance of relative comfort amid the deplorable squalor suffered by many?
Some ideas
Police reform
-We propose that the government recruits the police force from the universities and high schools. Perhaps a course such as Criminal Justice could be introduced to focus on investigative techniques, evidence gathering, surveillance and other modern methods of combating crime.
- We also propose that police recruits have a minimum educational background and are proficient in both English and Swahili.
-We propose that community awareness be a mandatory course of police training. Topics to be covered would include: polite interaction with the public, how to deescalate a non violent altercation, humane treatment of offenders among others.
-We propose a salary increase commiserate with the risks involved.
-We propose, most importantly, that police officers live in the locality they have been posted to. In addition, the government should actively recruit locally with the aim of sending recruits to their home towns as active duty officers upon graduation. The advantages of this are: the new recruits are familiar with their surroundings and more or less know who local trouble makers are and will be quick to spot visitors with suspicious intentions. They would also be more vigilant as they would be working among relatives, friends and neighbors they grew up with.
-We also propose that significant and severe deterrents be imposed to those officers found to be engaging in misconduct. Sting operations and tip lines to an independent body to report police abuses of power would be helpful.
-We also propose that police officers be well equipped with the latest equipment. In the above story of the raid, two officers ran quite a distance to respond to the victims. The Minister for Internal Security visited the victims the next day in an imposing contingent of escort and security vehicles. All this while local police do not have even one vehicle to respond to the woes of taxpayers!
Youth Empowerment
The population of Kenya is mainly made up of the youth. The politicians in power now are not a representative sample of the people they purport to represent. It would therefore be prudent to take any advice from these rulers with a hefty dose of cynicism and a side of wariness. The bungled elections of 2007 and the violence that followed after, shows us how the youth is vulnerable to the machinations of our nefarious rulers. The attempts made by this government to uplift their living standards have failed. An example is the Kazi Kwa Vijana (work for the youth) program. Its aim was to engage the youth in activities such as digging trenches, environmental clean ups such as the Nairobi River and also tree planting. Some projects were started but there was no follow up, an example, trees being planted but not watered only for them to dry later on. Also payment has not been forthcoming for a majority of the participants with the money either being withheld in bureaucratic tie-ups or embezzled altogether.
Some ideas
-A massive effort needs to be exerted at the local level to educate the youth on civics and the role of law in their lives. This should not be a nationally driven effort but a local undertaking focusing on the needs of the particular locality. The perils befalling the urban youth are not the same as those experienced by the rural youth. Urban youth may need to be enlightened on how to live peacefully with neighbors from different backgrounds despite exhortations by tribal leaders to engage in genocidal mayhem. Rural youth may need to be enlightened on the futility of gang life and the benefits of abiding by the law.
-We propose the establishment of village level polytechnic institutions where budding entrepreneurs and talented inventors may be provided an avenue to learn and flourish. They would be funded by the local government and local business people with an aim to employing them or taking a stake in their innovations.
-To diffuse the latent restlessness in our youth, we propose every locality has a year round calendar of sporting, social and cultural events that will fill up their spare time in a positive manner. Regional tournaments would be a way to further engage the youth in pastimes such as sports, drama, music and dance showcases and other cultural events.
-Regarding employment, there are no obvious or easy solutions. The government has proven unable to provide for our youth so we should instead try to approach the private sector to secure economic opportunities.
-We would suggest unpaid internship/mentorship programs for the youth. Local trades-people would take in students as apprentices to study trades like mechanics, green house farming or environmental trades like making and installing solar panels among others. Upon the successful completion of the apprenticeship period, the graduate would get some kind of certification or stamp of approval from their mentors. Local banks would then issue start-up capital or they would be employed by their mentors. The business of the mentors would then grow and things that used to be made far away would now be manufactured locally. Less inter-regional trucking would mean lower prices and customized options for the consumer.
Conclusion
We will leave the task of trying to reform our moribund civil service to weightier minds than ours. What we do know is that our rulers today are not serving the people who elected them thus a revolution is needed at the next general election to elect leaders with the moral fortitude to eradicate corruption in government.
The above ideas are but a sample of what can be done in a participatory form of democracy whereby all participants are vested in the success of the society at the local level. To this end, I will be offering my candidature for the position of a local area councilor or assembly man if the proposed constitution passes. We will register our budding movement, the African Economic Democracy Party as a political party next year. Economic revolutionaries are welcome to join us as we retake and reform our nation. People Power and progress for all!