Your Excellency,
Welcome to the lakeside counties when you visit next week. Welcome to Homa Bay, the county of unalloyed corruption. Your message of accountability is yet to arrive here.
The Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission could be waiting for your direction to investigate graft claims in the county executive. The people have been knocking against closed doors at Integrity Centre. Homa Bay is far from Nairobi, you may not have heard the outrage.
Your Excellency, listen to the plight of the people. You will understand their struggle for muddy water with animals, 55 years after Independence. Devolution remains a tragedy of great expectations for the masses. But it is a boon for power wielders. They have the opportunity, means, and motive to pilfer public money. Individuals are getting richer, but the masses are desperate.The devolved regime does not care about public priorities. If it did, there would be clean water in the lakeside town. Climate change has worsened the situation, which is a good excuse for deferring solutions to urgent challenges.
There was apocalyptic drought in 2015 around here.
Livestock died in copious numbers. Losses were quantified, but compensation did not come.
Karachuonyo is the place to begin. Last year, your government launched the Presidency Delivery Portal, quoting a Sh78 million completed and operational water project in West Karachuonyo. This is a ghost investment for which the people have been taxed.
Homa Bay county commissioner Irungu Macharia can confirm this to you. Forget politicians. They lie most of the time to flatter. When they do, the esteem of your Government plummets. You can advance the war against corruption by ordering Director of Criminal Investigations George Kinoti, Director of Public Prosecutions Noordin Haji, and the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Common to investigate. Kinoti and Haji are doing a good job, but they have an opportunity to do better.
Your Excellency, welcome to the county that has no commissioned public project, even with devolution entering the seventh year. There is a bottomless pit here, which swallows devolved funds.
There is nothing to show this county has received about Sh30 billion since 2013. Look at Homa Bay Stadium — a grassless, grazing yard for stray animals. Homa Bay Teaching and Referral Hospital is in ruins. You won’t figure out who is being taught or referred to the dilapidated facility.
Mr President, you hardly read newspapers whose value is known to butchers.
I hope this page does not wrap meat before you get the message. You will understand the struggle of a people against corruption.
This is the epicentre of HIV infection, child and maternal mortality, child Labour, and teenage pregnancies. All are consequences of insular leadership.
The blue economy is dead if your government does not rehabilitate Lake Victoria. The second largest fresh water lake in the world is a cesspool of environmental degradation. It has been this way since 1991, when the Forum for Restoration of Democracy ruled the opposition.
Water hyacinth was then named ‘Ford’. The lake is a swamp of lifeless green carpet. The evil beauty has destroyed livelihoods: The marine economy is wobbling. Lake transport is stalled; scarce fish stocks are suffocating under the deathly hyacinth carpet. The Homa assembly and the Governor’s office are a few metres from the lake. But the lake is not a priority to policymakers. They prefer benchmarking and bed-marking trips to earn allowances.Your Excellency, the lake is integral to the blue economy. It’s is a national and regional asset, with the potential to transform lives.
A weed harvester is not the solution. Weed-eating insects are not the solution. There should be a new thinking, without reinventing the wheel.
This challenge, the single-most threat to blue economy, can be turned into an opportunity. This gives urgency to addressing the water hyacinth challenge on a national and regional platform. You have the wherewithal to do it — do it for the legacy. Do it for food security. You don’t
visit the lake region often. Now that you are coming, command your government to turn this challenge into raw material for cottage industries. High-value furniture and handicraft can come from here.