With the return to multiparty politics in 1991, the serving president, Daniel Moi, for the first time ever, faced an electoral challenge for the top seat.
And with this came our first taste of what a presidential manifesto – which would necessarily include some kind of vision of what the candidate hoped to deliver for the whole nation – looked like.
Prior to that, political manifestos were limited to individual constituencies, as Kanu was the de facto sole political party, and votes were only cast for MPs and councillors.
I remember little of what the many manifestos that were liberally distributed at the time had to say. Except for one: the manifesto of a leading presidential candidate, Kenneth Matiba, with its emphasis on producing a comprehensive solution to Kenya’s perennial water shortages.
I suppose it is the images of all those dead cows and goats – killed by the recent drought – that made me remember that pledge by the presidential candidate that even if he were to fall short in other respects, in this one profound problem, he would provide Kenyans with a lasting solution.
And he was not only talking about adequate supplies of drinking water for man and beast. He further specified that his government would undertake vast irrigation projects, particularly in Northern Kenya where this problem of insufficient water supplies was most acute.
Perhaps he had in mind the verse from the Bible in the Book of Isaiah Chapter 35 Verse 1: “The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad; the desert shall rejoice and blossom like the rose.”
But here is the problem with this electoral promise: As Kenyans now seem to be discovering anew, political campaign promises rarely turn out to be that easy to fulfil, even with the best of intentions by key players in any new government.
If indeed Matiba had been elected president and somehow managed to follow up on his pledge, no doubt we would not have been haunted by those images of hundreds of dead goats and cows. But this was one promise that could not have been kept, in the circumstances.
The reason for this is that the water Matiba had in mind to utilise for his grand irrigation projects was to have come from Lake Victoria. And as it happens, the extraction of fresh water from that lake is severely restricted by a colonial-era agreement between Egypt and Britain (of which Kenya was then a colony).
And every attempt since then to renegotiate this agreement has failed, with the latest failed effort being as recently as 2010.
For while being able to use the waters of Lake Victoria for massive irrigation projects would be of immense benefit to Kenya, we can hardly claim that without such projects, Kenya would be doomed.
The same cannot be said for Egypt. As an article in the New York Times once put it, in 2020, when Egypt’s population reached 100 million, “Egypt’s population crisis is amplified by its unforgiving geography: 95 percent of the population lives on about 4 percent of the land, a green belt…that follows the Nile as it snakes through the desert then fans out into the lush Nile Delta.”
With this in mind, it is easy to see why Egyptian leaders, no matter what their other policies and convictions might be, have always regarded any threat of reduction of the water reaching their country through the River Nile, as “a matter of national security” and worthy of a military response, if they were left with no other choice.
My point then is that before actually coming into high office, during the heat of election campaigns all and any of the candidates are likely to be overwhelmed by delusions of power. They imagine that if they ascend to the office they seek – and if they only try hard enough – they will deliver miracles of “development”.
They may well believe that these challenges have not been addressed due to the incompetence of the previous regime.
But once in office, they will usually find that there are limits to political power.
Some promises simply cannot be fulfilled, and – in most cases – you cannot make the desert rejoice and blossom like the rose.