logo

MUGA: Two lessons from the floods

Criticism and scorn have been heaped on the current Kenyan administration.

image
by Josephine Mayuya

Opinion09 May 2024 - 03:45

In Summary


  • The first lesson I took away from this flooding in Kenya is that we have certainly come a long way in building a viable democracy.
  • The second is that any leadership team must expect to be blamed even when faced with a problem which clearly had its origins outside the national boundaries and could not possibly have been planned for.

On a visit to Germany roughly 10 years ago, the group I was part of went by a long and winding road to an industrial park that was many miles from any major city which might have an international airport.

This provided me with the only opportunity I have ever had, in trips to Europe, to enjoy a long drive through the countryside of a highly industrialised nation.

It was incredibly beautiful. Green rolling hills and plains; flawless tarmac roads winding through the landscape; small towns with impeccably neat, picturesque buildings which (to judge by the architecture) seemed to have been in place for centuries; etc.

Imagine then my alarm when a few years ago, international news websites carried images of places where floods had swept away cars and residential buildings, and also destroyed roads, bridges and power lines, in that same part of Germany through which we had driven.

It was a reminder that even a country as famous for its meticulous forward planning as Germany, is helpless when the fury of Mother Nature is unleashed.

And I remembered all this as Kenya succumbed to the full force of what we are told are the worst floods in about 50 years.

Which brings me to the first lesson I took away from this flooding in Kenya: that we have certainly come a long way in building a viable democracy. For if you were to judge by newspaper headlines as well as comments by ordinary Kenyans both in print and on social media, you could hardly guess that what is happening to us now, happens to people in other countries as well. Or that even the governments of the richest nations cannot effectively plan for such extreme weather events.

On the contrary, criticism and scorn have been heaped on the current Kenyan administration, and the devastating accusations of incompetence and corruption – usually reserved for medical supplies and fertiliser imports – have been repurposed to contemptuously dismiss the efforts by the government to limit the suffering of those directly affected.

That is how it must be in a democracy. You can only rise to power through the votes cast by ordinary citizens. But those same citizens will be revealed – with your signature barely dry on your oath of office – to be bitterly critical of just about anything you attempt to do as their leader and will rarely show any appreciation for the limits of what any government can do in a crisis.

Which brings me to the second lesson from the current crisis brought about by this flooding. And it is that any leadership team must expect to be blamed even when faced with a problem which clearly had its origins outside the national boundaries and could not possibly have been planned for.

I am thinking here of the year 2022, when Kenya faced the worst invasion of desert locusts in 70 years. Scientists repeatedly explained that the locusts had actually been hatched in the Arabian Peninsula, and not in Northern Kenya.

But in the regions affected, hardly anyone took note of this. And it did not help matters that at about this same time, there was an epic drought in much the same arid and semi-arid parts of Kenya which faced these endless hordes of desert locusts.

What the locals wanted to know was what the government was going to do to protect their crops from this plague of locusts. Also, how much relief food they could get (and how soon), along with compensation for their dead livestock.

And in this case, too, a regional leader who accused the government of corruption and incompetence was likely to get a more favourable response from the locals than one who tried to explain that no government can be reasonably expected to set aside resources in anticipation of an ecological disaster which might occur only twice in every century.


logo© The Star 2024. All rights reserved