The notion that marginalised areas should not get more government allocations than they actually deserve is preposterous and jaundiced.
The provenance of this sick and bigoted narrative are a group of politicians from the developed regions of the country who are somehow anxious about the rise of the marginalised areas due to the reasonably fair national resource distribution formula.
Skewed development and resource distribution policies have been a tragic hallmark of Kenya's governance in the last four decades wherein land fertility was a key determinant for the amount of allocations given to a region.
This arability model under the sessional paper no. 10 of 1965 on African socialism and its application to national planning immensely benefited agrarian regions such as Central and Western Kenya at the expense of arid and semi- arid lands which were excluded from much economic considerations, hence suffered a sequence of marginalisation and neglect under the previous governments.
The negative effects of this long-standing marginalisation in ASAL areas is so elephantine that in spite of the current improved resource allocations, these areas are still far from adequately fixing the foundational aspects of development such as security, education, infrastructure, healthcare, water and sanitation as well as the basic human resource. This in itself tellingly explains why this vast area still easily dominates the charts of every statistics of misery.
Therefore, to try to paint marginalised areas as "developed" while portraying the areas that have historically benefited not only from the unequal development of the past decades but also the unfair parochial goodies from high power as being poor is the height of hypocrisy and political fraudulence which can only come from narrow-minded and famous for being famous politicians who think Kenya is limited to their villages where they impudently seek to be regarded as tribal activists while disgracing the country and creating disharmony among Kenyans through their hateful rhetoric.
Time has come to show such politicians who are driven by malevolent tribal instincts, arrogance and a poor sense of history that they cannot have their way since there are no second and third-class citizens or children of lesser deities in this country.
As Martin Luther King Jr said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere".
Mohamed is a social commentator in Garissa town.
