Official reactions to evolving extreme weather events would have been humorous if they were not a tragic climax of perennial false promises of adaptation to climate change. The latest reactions are ridiculous, coming two years into the reign of a regime that claimed it had a plan.
Where is the plan to address the cyclical devastations from floods and droughts? There have been no sustainable post-flooding or post-drought initiatives across regimes. It’s a challenge ending flooding, or drought, but it’s possible to mitigate their effects on vulnerable communities and infrastructure.
Africa Climate Summit, which Nairobi hosted last year, would have succeeded if it gave Kenya bragging rights as the continent’s exemplar of adaptation to climate change. The current fumbling offers no evidence of lessons learnt.
Too much water is going to waste nationally. In about three months, there will likely be a devastating drought in most of the drowning counties.
Two incidents expose the folly of planning deficits, especially in Nairobi city county. It’s under a governor who had a ‘plan’ to turn around the drowning metropolis into a ‘first world city’.
The mediocre reactions to flooding is a first: A bulldozer was deployed to drain water on one side of the Thika highway, and then dump it on the drier side of the roadway. The unlucky driver was a subject of public pity.
City residents assembled along a footbridge to watch the spectacle underneath. They couldn’t understand what the plant operator was doing. It was worse than trying to drain a swimming pool with a spoon. It was a hopeless assignment at best, and an official illustration of incompetence at worst.
A baffled observer messaged: “When Kenyans are told that a governor should be, at minimum, a university graduate, they never understood. Now they should know that the levels of thinking can be different.”
The decision to deploy the bulldozer to drain the flooded highway was not one person’s order to mobilise. The collective thinking of those who did exposes the drought of leadership in the metropolitan county.
Then there was a caricature of the Nairobi Governor ‘touring’ a flood-ravaged section of the city on a boat. It was not clear whether the entourage was ‘assessing’ the situation to plan a response, or it was expressing solidarity with the victims of the flooding.
A city cynic summed up the situation in a placard, ‘Let Nairobi Swim’. A caricature of Governor Johnson Sakaja carried the placard.
The mediocre reactions to flooding, however, spread much farther afield. State Department for ASALs and Regional Development Principal Secretary Harsama Kello was on national television, last week, talking like this was the first extreme weather event of this magnitude.
The PS assigns the disaster to climate change, without an idea of how victims can adapt to changing weather patterns. He knows it’s timely to distribute mattresses to the displaced. He also knows dredging blocked waterways and harvesting and storing water take time. But he should also know governments before the one he serves, have reacted impulsively to emergencies, instead of planning sustainable solutions.
Distributing relief food, mattresses and blankets is a temporary response to situations that require long-term planning for mitigation. Yet for generations, Kenyans have been stranded, with emergency reactions, at the nexus of flooding and droughts. The relief mentality illustrates leadership drought.
Kenya has had a succession of regimes through sham elections. The elections have not translated into better governance, planning and people-centred policies that could boost resilience to the effects of climate change.
The successive subversion of priorities offers the context of the current fumbling. There are no plans to turn adversities into opportunities for national development.
Governments are reacting to emergencies, rather than planning to make communities resilient, and adaptive to extreme weather events. The official advice is always to ask people in flood-prone areas to move to higher grounds.
There must be a better way of addressing floods, droughts, water scarcity, and other disasters. Constructing boreholes, pans, and dams for water harvesting and storage for irrigation are better ways of addressing the vicious cycle of floods and droughts.