Imagine this. One night you suddenly wake up from your otherwise catatonic slumber to catch that son of an old friend who you have been accommodating as he looks for a job, in the process of ‘helping’ one of his friends to steal your electronics.
Now riddle me this. Will you wait for them to finish stealing since, well, they had already started anyway, or will you do everything possible to stop the thieves, and if possible even recover what they had already taken?
I would opt for the latter, as most, if not all, of my countrymen would. This is what President Uhuru Kenyatta did a few days ago when he cancelled the Sh22.2 billion Kimwarer Dam project, a move that has drawn a lot of angst from some political quarters.
Now, let’s be clear. The President did not just wake up on that particular day and as he went through his closet trying to choose which tie to wear, suddenly and arbitrarily decided it was a good day to cancel a multi-billion shilling project that would have significantly transformed the lives and livelihoods of tens of thousands of Kenyans.
No. This decision by the president to cancel the contract was arrived at following the findings of a technical committee set up to look into both the Kimwarer and Arror dam projects.
The decision is, therefore, not random or discriminative as some of our political leaders would like us to believe. It was informed by hard cold facts, as it should be.
First, the report by the technical committee states that the Kimwarer Dam was overpriced. For a country whose economy has been and continues to choke from the effects of corruption engineered through inflated government contracts, the decision to cancel this contract is definitely good news. It is a step in the right direction in the fight against corruption.
The team that reviewed the designs, technical sustainability and financial proposals also established that no current reliable feasibility study had been done. The last such study had been done 28 years ago and had discovered a faultline in the area that would negatively affect the structural soundness of the dam.
The team also pointed out that it would cost additional money to resettle the people from the area and that the project’s water supply system would require pumping, meaning extra financing rendering the project unsustainable.
But even away from the report by the technical committee, the Kimwarer Dam contract still emits black choking smoke. The Italian company that was awarded the contract, CMC di Ravenna, filed for bankruptcy in December of last year, meaning that they do not have the financial capacity to honor the contract. This is the same company that even after being paid billions of shillings by the Treasury has nothing to show on the ground four years down the line.
Former Treasury CS Henry Rotich and his Principal Secretary Kamau Thugge are also in court with others facing abuse of office, breach of procurement laws and regulations among other corruption-related charges linked to the Kimwarer and Arror Dams contracts.
Treasury paid out billions of shillings ostensibly to go towards the dams, but the money was used on items such as towels and bedsheets and buying generators that were diverted to personal homes and businesses.
Any way you look at it, this contract simply stinks to the high heavens, and it is a stink that we cannot afford to ignore.
It is, therefore, quite baffling to me to see some political leaders criticising the President’s cancellation of the project. Instead of objectively countering the committee’s report with solid facts, they have predictably fallen back on the age-old trick used by Kenyan politicians, “They are targeting our community. It is unfair. They are being malicious and biased”.
It has now become a Us vs Them affair.
These politicians want us to ignore all the facts and continue throwing good money after bad money based on nothing else but feelings. Get me right. I understand the frustration and disappointment. This project had been expected to bring positive economic change to the area, but at the same time, any worthy development initiative needs to be sustainable as well as fiscally and technically sound. The Kimwarer Dam project, as it stands, is neither of these.
Haven’t we, as a country, lost enough money through corrupt deals? Listen, even my seven-year-old will not just sit back and watch quietly as another child on the playground steals his toys away. He will act swiftly and definitively. It is common sense. It would be immoral for the President to ignore the committee’s report and give the project a go-ahead.
We have sat around and done nothing for far too long, the time for sitting and watching as our precious country is pillaged to the ground is over. We have been driving in a car with worn-out tires for decades now, hoping that somehow through some miracle our journey will not end in catastrophe. Lies. It is not Us vs Them: We are all in this together. It is time to act, Kenyans. It is time to fix and remove that which is not working and that is what the President did, acted in the best interest of this beautiful country
The writer is a political analyst and PR professional
