At some point in the late1980s, I accompanied a friend of mine to the “launch” of a water project in a rural part of Kenya.
My friend had the ambition of being elected the next MP of that constituency. But he had not begun to campaign yet and indeed posed as a great supporter of the serving MP to disguise this ambition.
Hence he had been invited to the official launch of that project. On our way back from the launch ceremony, I told my friend that I was deeply impressed to see that the MP, just two years into his term in office, had managed to get the government to complete such a significant water supply system for his constituents.
And my friend, who fortunately was not the one driving, bent over with laughter. As he then explained it, the project had been initiated just over 10 years ago, in the early 1970s, by the MP of the time, who happened to have an older brother who served as a deputy Permanent Secretary (what we would now call, a Principal Secretary) and had friends in the Ministry of Water.
Through such connections, the water project was conceived; feasibility studies conducted; and a blueprint drawn up. This far-sighted MP then lost his seat just about the time that the blueprint was ready.
But his successor, aware of how much the residents were looking forward to the day when women did not have to trek for miles to collect pond water or river water, for their domestic use, then spent many hours in the corridors of the Ministry of Water, urging the technocrats and engineers there, to kindly prioritise the water project in his constituency.
As a result of these exertions, there was an official groundbreaking ceremony at the very site where we had just seen the project’s plaque being unveiled.
But it came too late to save this next MP’s career, as he too lost the seat, to the next “Mheshimiwa”: the man who had been our host at the ceremony we had just attended. In other words, it had taken about 12 years for the water project to be completed, and to benefit the residents.
The serving MP was really just lucky that he was in a position to profit from the labour of his two predecessors.
This is what my friend found to be so hilarious. I recently thought of this occasion from a distant past, since in the US as in Kenya, there has been much discussion lately on this issue of political promises, which are so often not fulfilled.
Admittedly the MPs, who – one after another – pushed this project through the labyrinth of the Moi-era Ministry of Water, were what we might define as “ordinary MPs” with no particular capacity to accelerate the pace of infrastructure development in the constituency. Had either of those two previous MPs been elevated to the Moi Cabinet, things would have moved a lot faster, at the request of “Bwana Waziri.”
All the same this story illustrates just how tricky it is to deliver on political promises within a single parliamentary term. And yet what are election campaigns, parliamentary, gubernatorial, or presidential, if not the proclamation of a series of extravagant promises? It poses a challenge to aspiring politicians, which few manage to resolve.
On the one hand, you have to sell yourself to the electorate as a bringer of hope: a person who will bring about real and impactful change in their lives.
And for a relatively poor country like Kenya, with a mostly rural population, such impactful change mostly involves the extension of public infrastructure to the many places, which barely have any.
And yet, I am sure every candidate for an elective seat is aware that the good things that they are promising so freely during the campaign period can most likely not be provided within a single five-year term.
That even if they try really hard, they will end their term in office – at best – with a partially complete road, or building, or water and sanitation system. And that is not the worst of it. Back in the 1980s, in what now seems like a different country, a newly elected MP would move swiftly to complete the half-finished projects left by his predecessor.
Nowadays, if I am to believe what I read in the local press, an incoming governor, for example, will not go anywhere near the incomplete projects that the former governor had just barely launched before ending his term in office.
Rather, the new governor will want to “launch” his own totally new projects; projects for which he (or she) alone can receive any credit. I see no way out of this terrible waste of limited resources.
And I would say that for the foreseeable future, the Kenyan countryside would continue to be a landscape littered with the shells of incomplete white elephant projects.
