It is music to the ears of anyone who cares about the environment when a leader of any country prioritises the protection of the environment. President William Ruto recently showcased his government’s enthusiasm and readiness to do the necessary to protect the environment. According to the President, his government’s vision is to have 15 billion trees planted by 2032.
This is a commendable and worthy vision.
Trees help in fighting climate change by removing carbon dioxide from the air. Climate change is a phenomenon many don’t ‘get’ but simply put, unless governments employ strong collective action to combat this global warming, the world as we know it will turn into a huge oven roasting and burning everyone and everything in it.
Planting and growing trees is a major and critical component of this fight against climate change or global warming as the problem is more aptly described. On the other hand, cutting trees or not growing any leads to deforestation, which accelerates climate change, and tree burning produces carbon dioxide with its own set of health problems that can lead to avoidable deaths.
Climate change is already making its presence felt by worsening droughts in the Horn of Africa, including Kenya, where rains have failed for five seasons in a row. To be sure, climate change is a global issue, but Africa is already suffering disproportionately more than other parts of the world, Kenya being no exception.
It is therefore a good thing that the President has put a spotlight on this problem.
However, much as the President’s vision is highly commendable and worth pursuing, how the president is going about it has left many scratching their heads, others loudly wondering in social media and elsewhere how the President can be so tone-deaf.
Those questioning how the President went about this are not without grounds.
First, at a time when the country is still struggling with the high cost of leaving, it is absolutely the wrong time to have Cabinet Secretaries and other state officers shuttling across the country in choppers and gas guzzlers upon arrival and on departure. Nobody knows how much the entire operation cost, but it will surprise no one to know more money was spent on this unnecessary travel than was spent on planting trees.
Second, what exactly is the rationale — forget about logic, of sending a CS from their native county across the country just to plant a tree? Why couldn’t the President just order all these CSs to coordinate among themselves and travel at their own expense to wherever they choose to go and plant trees? Who among them would have turned the President down under those circumstances? No one. Not one.
Third, why couldn’t the President utilise all governors and other county offices to mobilise and participate in the tree-planting exercise and give them ownership of what happens after the one-day exercise? Couldn’t doing so be in the best of intentions for devolution or is that not a thing anymore?
Finally — and the biggest puzzle of all these questions, instead of the money a good case can be made was wasted on unnecessary travel expenses by the CSs and others, why didn’t the president instead use that money to employ the suffering youth to do the planting and follow-up?
It is doubtful these questions will get any answers from the government, but they are questions that need not just answers, but corrective action.
The next time the president wishes to launch a nationwide effort, he must keep the youth and devolution in mind. He must also be keenly aware of the optics of what he does, not just in events like this, but in everything else that involves spending money when the shilling is free-falling against the dollar and the cost of living is still as high as it is.
Doing otherwise opens the President to increased criticism and no doubt increased disillusionment among even some of his strong supporters.
Historically, these things are known to take a critical mass and once that happens, the toothpaste is out of the tube, and impossible to put it all back in a flattened empty tube.