Asking about phantom projects for voters

What you need to know:

  • The question is why an abattoir has not been built in the region to absorb the animals and spare pastoralists.
  • Mr Guleid should have told us why such issues were not raised before embarking on the giant abattoir.

At a media breakfast, yours truly challenged a guest speaker, Isiolo Deputy Governor Mohammed Guleid, to say why the northeastern region remains poor despite its vast livestock resources.

The discussion topic at the Strathmore Business School monthly event was, ‘Strategies to enhance Kenya’s competitiveness’.

Given Kenya was ranked 99 out of 140 countries in the Global Competitiveness Index 2015–2016, after dropping from position 90, and only seven positions away from the last quarter, the topic was apt.

The vast resources at Kenya’s disposal, which Mr Guleid’s co-guest, Ms Betty Maina — Principal Secretary for East African Affairs — also addressed, raise the question of why it should not be one of the world’s most competitive countries.

The World Economic Forum, which produces the Global Competitiveness Report, defines global competitiveness as an assessment of “the ability of countries to provide high levels of prosperity to their citizens”.

This, in turn, depends on how productively a country uses its resources.

Granted, the 2015-2016 report acknowledges that seven years after the global financial crisis, “the world economy is evolving against the background of the “new normal” of lower economic growth, lower productivity growth, and high unemployment”.

However, various factors in Kenya’s economic management, which is by and large politically-driven, would compel us to take a tougher, more inward look at ourselves than simply hiding behind the more escapist global economic climate.

Kenya has been in the throes of one of those devastating droughts since independence.

The most distressing thing is that they wipe out whole herds — the mainstay of the pastoral north.

UNDERUTILISED ABATTOIR
The question is why an abattoir has not been built in the region to absorb the animals and spare pastoralists — and TV viewers — grotesque images of dead animals.

While the good news from Mr Guleid was that a giant slaughterhouse is coming up in Isiolo, the flipside is the lack of capacity to keep the factory running.

The deputy governor gave two reasons that Isiolo — and Samburu, Garissa, Tana River, Kitui, Meru, Marsabit and Wajir counties — cannot produce enough livestock to feed the slaughterhouse.

The first was that pastoralists love their cattle too well to raise them for slaughter.

They would rather, he said, beg for bursaries instead of selling livestock to raise school fees for their children.

The second is that Isiolo, and by extension, its neighbours, cannot meet the stringent European Union standards to buy the products the factory would produce.

Mr Guleid should have told us why such issues were not raised before embarking on the giant abattoir.

Our problem as Kenyans is that we are so beholden to ill-thought-out projects. That is why, for instance, Kenya’s landscape is littered with health centres built to buy votes that don’t factor in medical personnel to run them.

As an ardent reader of Saturday Nation’s award-winning pullout magazine, Seeds of Gold, I am convinced we have the capacity to transform the north into thriving cattle ranches that meet stringent EU standards.

One of Mr Guleid’s giveaways was that the cattle we slaughter are from war-ravished Somalia.

VOTE WISELY

I have few questions for the Isiolo high brass: was a feasibility study done before construction of the abattoir?

If so, how come construction went ahead? Isiolo voters should ask politicians such questions ahead of the August poll.

Sadly, with 50 per cent of school-age children in northern Kenya not in school, and an even higher percentage not in secondary school, who will ask tough questions, assuming development is an electoral issue?

The ‘it’s-our-turn-to-eat’ philosophy reigns. The people would rather vote their own even if they dangle phantom projects at them.

Ms Kweyu is a freelance writer and consulting editor. [email protected]