How infrastructure can change our lives

In the eyes of my kinsmen, our hometown of Butere has joined the league of developed parts of the country. For the first time, there is a tarmac road linking up our hamlet to the rest of the world.

Add this to the fact that the little hamlet is connected to the national electricity grid and most schools have concrete walls and floors. We are ‘developing’!

In the wisdom of my people, development is not having to endure muddy roads during the rainy season. It is having lit-up shopping centres where we can take our phones for charging and grind our maize into flour.

It is granting our school-children the luxury of not having to carry cow-dung to school every morning for smearing the classroom floors and walls.

Roads, and infrastructure development in general, remain a big deal – and not just in my village. A promise of any of these is a seductive ruse by many an aspirant for political office.

The parliamentary hopefuls were wont to promise to tarmac our main roads while the aspiring councillors (now MCAs) would regale us with grand plans to murram the footpaths in the village.

For many people, smooth tarmacked roads and electricity, on their own, should be a potent charm against poverty. This is the basis that those who dismiss mega-projects as not pro-poor base their arguments on,.

Infrastructure is actually a foundation, a catalyst and a critical enabler of development. It is a facilitator of enterprise that eventually translates into wealth and lifts communities out of poverty.

Smooth roads should enable poultry farmers in the hinterland to ferry their eggs more efficiently to the market. It will make the investor, who every county is busy wooing at conferences and forums, to select a well-served area to set up a factory that will create jobs and market.

Nonetheless, infrastructure is not a panacea for all developmental shortcomings. Rather, it should be viewed as a basis, which, if harnessed well and backed by incentives and pro-enterprise measures, is bound to transform lives.

Fixing our infrastructure is in itself a step forward on our path towards the promised land of development. Perhaps, the only challenge we face in our rush to upgrade infrastructure is efficiency in the allocation of resource. We sometimes allocate too much to infrastructure that ends up eating into what we would have invested in the social infrastructure which deals with immediate needs of the poor.

Nonetheless, with more and more parts of the country ‘developing’, it is incumbent upon county governments to rise up to the challenge and fashion policies that will encourage enterprise.

Contrary to popular opinion, we do not have to court foreigners to come and invest in our villages and create jobs.

We can also create jobs by encouraging local homegrown businesses to thrive while leveraging off the superior infrastructure that we are fortunate to have.

Creating the right circumstances for enterprise to thrive is critical. It empowers citizens to build wealth, and to realise their full aspirations.

If anything, it is in the interest of the devolved governments that each county has a strong enterprise base. These governments have to generate revenue to supplement funds received from the National Government.

Mr Butunyi is a communications consultant. [email protected].