Some followers of Kenyan activities over the last few weeks are not a very happy lot. While the children sat home as victims of a battle between the country's teaching profession and its employers, the President of the Republic was sitting pretty in New York.
He was seen hobnobbing with other world leaders laughing and generally not caring about their needs. It turns out the leaders were working on the Sustainable Development Goals aka SDGs – the next phase of structured world growth. This was a follow up on the Millennium Development Goals aka MDGs that were enacted in 2000, and were supposed to guide world development over a 15-year period.
As I read more about these SDGs, I had to really wonder how these plans world leaders were putting pen to paper would turn out. After all, the MDGs turned out to be a pyramid scheme that wasn't followed through by so many countries that signed on to them.
Then I remembered this week we are going into the 10th month of the year and everyone in the beginning of the year had loudly announced their resolutions. Everyone was like: “This year I go back to school", "I'll lose weight", "I'll get married", "I'll get a child", "I'll stop getting pregnant every year", "I'll move out of my parents house", "I'll move into a new home", "I'll buy a car", "I'll stop spending all my time getting annoyed when Facebook status updates are posted", or "I'll eat more healthy”.
If you look at my list you know you fall into one of the categories, and you know you have failed to meet most if not all of them. If an individual can fail in their own resolutions or goals, then countries which are inhabited and led by people can have the same problems.
Even if countries are failing to meet their goals for the longest time, it doesn't prevent us, Nairobi folks, from setting goals to ensure their lives are better in future. These goals wouldn't be for 15 years but for five.
This comes from the questions that we all get from all questionnaires or interviews: where do you see yourself in five years? There will be four thematic areas that apply to the lives of Nairobians:
a) Health:
We need a healthy Nairobi resident. So it only makes sense we ensure they have the best in care from those who provide it. In the next five years, all Nairobi phones will have free Google on them. This means when someone feels unwell, all they need to is to log on and type in their symptoms. If they have a cold they will self medicate; if they need surgery they need their friends to go with the available household tools.
b) Education:
The crisis in the education sector has been going on for a long while with the teachers feeling unfairly treated by their employer, the government. This means until the government feels that teachers are a valuable part of the Kenyan workforce, this is unlikely to change any time soon. The crisis will end within five years as the government phases out teachers and decides to use the new teachers called “Dunia” (the world). With Dunia and the laptops that were promised, the education system will finally be sorted.
c) Employment:
We have too many people in Nairobi who are said to be jobless in this town; conversely there are too many others walking around with business cards in their wallets for different companies. This latter fellow will be seen walking around with a variety of cards written “Jack Mkenya MD Tents4Kenya,” “Jack Kenya, Operations Director, Healthy Cereals” and “Jack Mkenya, Director, Managu Real Estate.” This variance is at the heart of the Nairobi unemployment problem and within five years, all those who have more than one business card will have to share with those lacking, ending the job crisis.
d) Energy:
In five years, we shall stop complaining about Kenya Power whenever there is no power in our homes. No longer shall a Nairobian complain about low battery on their phones as we shall all be carrying bulky diesel-powered generators in our bags around town. That will be the end of complaints about phones unless one is trying to escape the attention of their significant others as they engage their mpango wa kando.