The first recorded extreme weather event in Kenya was in 1961, two years before political independence. About 2,000 square miles of the country was under water. Floods swept across farmlands that remained idle for a year.
Everything that could fly was mobilised to deliver relief supplies. The army and navy joined emergency responses. Relief supplies arrived from the United States, Britain, Canada, and Australia. The ‘relief’ mentality persists — Kenya is still on the dole.
A 20-month-old government, though, cannot take full responsibility for mistakes spanning six decades. But it’s not enough to hide under inherited failures of successive regimes.
The incumbent system has the political responsibility to reimagine public governance, especially strategic investment of public funds. Inherited false hopes and wasted dawns should not guide the Kenya Kwanza regime into the third year of its welcome.
This regime claimed it had a plan to reimagine national development and set the country on a progressive trajectory. The electoral win should have come with plans to mitigate the effects of extreme weather events, for example. To whom much is given, much is expected.
It is not about re-inventing the wheel. It is about replicating tested post-drought and post-flooding reconstruction initiatives to mitigate the effects of such disasters.
The current extreme climate-induced pain illustrates the truism governments have betrayed hapless Kenyans since Independence. Consequently, poverty fuels continuing deprivation and manipulation of the masses.
The ultimate beneficiaries of relief mentality are power cravers, whose continuity rides on mass deprivation. Instead of empowering communities, the tendency has been impulsive responses that don’t go beyond emergency aid.
The 1961 calamity was described as the worst flooding in 70 years, coming at the end of a devastating drought. The extreme weather event of 63 years ago was named ‘Rains of Independence’ or ‘Koth Uhuru’.
Koth Uhuru is the subject of folklore among many communities. Yet no lasting lesson was learnt. The chorus of ‘serikali saidia’ continues to ring with appalling perennial monotony.
The current devastation might not teach national misplanners much. Then, as now, the reaction was impulsive. The colonial regime of 1961 had no compulsion to save Africans from impoverishing disasters.
The founding regime of Jomo Kenyatta gave promises that are memorable in breach. The false dawn of 1963 remains darkness after midnight. The promise to fight mass poverty, disease and ignorance collapsed, as individual greed grew among the Jomo elite.
Taming poverty should come with heavy investments among rural agricultural communities around the Tana River Delta and the Nyando River Basin, for example. The two areas perennially suffer impoverishing consequence of extreme weather events.
A poor villager’s key investment is a home on ancestral land. On the land lie graves, heritage and culture. The Kabonyo Kanyagwal of Kisumu county knows this better than any community in Kenya.
Lake Victoria has reclaimed much of their heritage. Floods swamp their rice farms in Kano Plains every year. There is no safe higher ground in the plains. And, moreover, they have no wherewithal to relocate. The drowning of their homesteads kills their heritage.
They take refuge in schools or church compounds when overwhelmed. They return when floods subside. This has been their reality for generations. Poverty is a fellow voyager in the endless cycle of dispossession.
The losses and damages from devastating floods in Maai Mahiu or Tana River can be mitigated. The response requires more than impulsive rush with blankets and mattresses.
The shattering images of children shivering in the rain, with empty cups, in makeshift camps for climate refugees should be a lesson: human beings are not birds that can take flight at a whim.
The regime should invest on transformative water harvesting and storage projects to boost food security. There is no better way of building resilience, adapting, and mitigating the effects of climate change.