• Just when Northern Kenya is beginning to catch up with the rest of the country, the catastrophic effects of climate change are starting to be felt
About 15 years ago, I was involved in a debate on NEPAD – the New Partnership for African Development – which was hosted by a diplomatic mission right here in Nairobi.
I was at that time an established critic of NEPAD. This put me in opposition to the high levels of enthusiasm for NEPAD in official circles.
For NEPAD had been sold as being some kind of “Marshall Plan” and was supposedly a programme “by Africans and for Africans”: And transformational change had been promised.
But my focus here is not in NEPAD since – as far as I am aware – it has long been (predictably) consigned to the dustbin of history.
Rather it is in my recollection of the much younger man who debated the issue with me, and who answered my well-informed cynicism with a passionate conviction that NEPAD would transform Kenya in general – and in particular his own native Northeastern Province (as it was then known).
Over lunch, he told me of his recent failure to take advantage of a valuable scholarship. The blame for his misfortune lay, he said, in the near-complete absence of public infrastructure in semi-arid Northern Kenya. The kind of infrastructure that he believed NEPAD would bring to even the small remote villages of that region.
What happened is that he had – most unfortunately – travelled back home to visit his parents while waiting to do the oral interviews for the scholarship he had been short-listed for. And it was while he was there that the village and its environs were hit by unseasonable torrential rains.
Back then, neither of us had heard of climate change. We agreed that his misfortune had been due to the lack of proper roads, bridges, dams and telecommunications services
Even the oldest members of his clan could hardly remember seeing such heavy rains before. Large tracts of low-lying land were effectively submerged, cutting the villagers off from the rest of the country. In various places, what had for years been just sandy depressions on the arid plains, suddenly turned into raging rivers, sweeping all in their path, and making travel impossible even after the rains subsided.
That is how this young scholar had missed his opportunity: this once-in-a-generation flood marooned him in Northern Kenya, and he never got to travel back to Nairobi in time for the oral interview which he believed to have been all that stood between him and the scholarship he craved.
At the time he told me his story, he was preparing to make fresh applications for various scholarships – he was not going to give up that easily.
Back then, neither of us had heard of climate change. We agreed that his misfortune had been due to the lack of proper roads, bridges, dams and telecommunications services.
And certainly, it did not occur to us that what he had just described so vividly was a classic example an “extreme weather event” of the kind that we are now told will be more and more frequent, as a result of climate change.
To quote an online source, “In general climate models show that with climate change, the planet will experience more extreme weather. In particular temperature record highs outpace record lows and some types of extreme weather such as extreme heat, intense precipitation, and drought have become more frequent and severe in recent decades.”
Well, it was “intense precipitation” that forced my friend to postpone his hopes for advanced studies.
And is it not tragic that after all those years of neglect and marginalisation. After decades of Northern Kenya not seeing even the smallest part of “the fruits of Independence” and not once being invited to partake of what Kenyans uniquely define as “the national cake”.
Just when the era of devolved government, at last, allows Northern Kenya to begin on the long and arduous journey of “catching up” with the rest of the country; all this happens just as the catastrophic effects of climate change are starting to be felt.
The bad news for the leaders and the residents of this climatically vulnerable part of Kenya is that they can expect to be subjected to more and more prolonged droughts; and more and more epic floods.
And the “devolved funds” that they and others fought so long and hard to obtain, will not really make much difference.