Like just about everyone else in Kenya, I like to give my opinions on whatever projects the government undertakes and to criticise what I see as the manifest failings of such development initiatives.
But about 18 years ago, I learnt that most of us laymen are not really equipped to assess the potential long-term benefits (or risks) of major infrastructure projects. This was when I made some unflattering remarks about the Turkwel Gorge Hydroelectric Dam project in the course of some criticism of Kenya’s extremely high electricity costs.
It is one of my favourite stories that in past years I have sometimes used in lectures to aspiring writers, to illustrate the importance of fact-checking. So, I may well have written about it in this column before.
Right from the moment the Turkwel Gorge project was mooted by the government, criticism poured out from every quarter. This was partly because the dam was in many minds associated with the then Minister for Regional Development, Nicolas Biwott, the indispensable confidant of President Daniel Moi, and the man so often blamed for anything that went wrong in the country in those days.
Currently, the Cabinet Secretary for the Ministry of Interior and Coordination of National Government, Dr Fred Matiang’i, is considered to be the most influential of all the serving Cabinet secretaries.
But I have seen no evidence that Dr Matiang'i can toy with the careers of his Cabinet colleagues as though they were but children – getting them moved around, appointed and dropped on his whims, etc – as Biwott was believed to be capable of doing back in the late 1980s, if he set his mind to it.
So Biwott was both feared and hated on a scale that no subsequent members of any Kenyan cabinet have ever been.
I should add that the late Biwott was also alleged to be at the centre of any major corruption scandals in Kenya – though no evidence was ever adduced to support this. And it was also believed that due to his share of the proceeds of such corruption, he was the master of fabulous wealth.
Such then were the rumours and speculations about Nicolas Kipyator Biwott.
And given this reputation, it was assumed by many ordinary Kenyans that the whole point of this huge Turkwel Gorge Dam infrastructure project was to divert a substantial portion of the project funding into private bank accounts – much as has been alleged more recently, over the standard gauge railway.
When you have heard such claims made routinely over a number of years, you begin to take it for granted that there must be some truth in the allegations.
And so, it came to pass that in an opinion column analysing the tragic setbacks to Kenya’s dreams of industrialisation – and with it the lack of job opportunities for millions of young Kenyans – I made a reference to “the famous white elephant of Turkwel Gorge Dam”.
Now it so happens that the Turkwel Gorge Dam was built by Spie Batignolles, a somewhat iconic French construction company that specialises in very large infrastructure projects. The French government also had a hand in financing the project.
And shortly after the publication of my opinion column, the Press Officer of the French Embassy of the time came out with a well-argued response, in which he effectively demolished my claim that this was a white elephant project.
The fact is the kind of criticisms that I had heard – raising doubts over the viability of this dam to generate electricity – depended more on the fact that the dam was located in a remote and semi-arid part of the country; the suspicions that the dam reservoir had taken far too long to fill; and the fears that come the first prolonged dry spell, the dam reservoir would possibly dry out and cease to generate power completely.
Well, the dam was to prove remarkably effective as a hydroelectric power producer.
And around this time last year, the kind of headlines we had in the papers were not of the previously feared drying-out of the giant dam reservoir, but rather of “Fears of looming floods at Turkwel Gorge” and “Imminent Dam Spillage at Turkwel”.
