#KideroMustGo aside, disaster recovery must be designed into government systems
What you need to know:
- South Africa for example has deliberately shared the three arms of government across Pretoria, Cape Town and Bloemfontein respectively.
- The County government and Kidero may not have caused the floods, but they score a big zero for lack of preparation.
- We must urgently have multiple, competing power providers and ensure they are interconnected such that when either of their substations gets submerged by floods, they can switch the load to a competitor’s supply.
This past week has seen the Green City in the Sun become the Green City in the Floods. Many parts of Nairobi were literally swamped and some pictures went viral, with South C, being christened "South Sea”.
But it really wasn't funny, especially if your kid was one of those marooned in a bus throughout that night and rescued by the controversial Sonko Rescue Team. Neither was it funny for those who were stuck in the jam – sorry, stuck in the floods till the early hours of the following morning.
As usual, we needed a scapegoat for all our suffering. The County government came in handy and Governor Kidero became an easy target for the ever-active and merciless Kenyans on Twitter.
But those who were born and bred in Nairobi will attest to the fact that flooding in Nairobi was not brought in by Mr Kidero. Flooding in Nairobi has been around courtesy of decades of mismanagement by former City Council dons, who gave the green light for constructions of flats, malls and offices along river beds and wetlands.
Flooding in Nairobi is also caused by its residents, most of whom fit the cliché – you can bring a man from the village (into the city), but you cannot take the village out of him.
This is demonstrated every other day when you spot an impressive, late-model car in traffic, only to be depressed when the occupants start throwing all manner of refuse onto the streets.
The fellow imagines that plastic bags, among other refuse, will disappear into the environment, the same way banana peels used to disappear while he was in the village. The same fellow will be shouting the loudest on twitter #KideroMustGo, yet the plastic he keeps offloading onto the streets clogs up the drainage.
But this is not say the County government and Kidero are blameless. They may not have caused the floods, but they score a big zero for lack of preparation. In the ICT world, it’s called lacking a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP). One must always plan on how to recover from different types of disasters, in order to ensure continuity of services.
SINGLE POINT OF FAILURE
Some of the recovery strategies for ICT operations include creating backups for the data and its processes. This may be done in real-time to a remote location or regularly at the end of the day. Of course one may argue that we cannot have a backup for the capital city, but on the contrary we should.
Most progressive economies have incorporated backups within their cities by design. South Africa for example has deliberately shared the three arms of government Executive, Legislature and Judiciary across Pretoria, Cape Town and Bloemfontein respectively.
In case of a disaster in one of the three cities, services would be moved and restored from any of the other two cities. For us in Nairobi, we live in what we call a single point of failure in IT – with absolutely no backups.
In other words, another two or so weeks of sustained flooding may have caused all our three arms of government to fold due to an inability to function.
Another common disaster recovery element in ICT involves creating redundancy. For critical services, say internet service, companies with online operations must have redundant or duplicate routes to the internet. In case one link, another takes over the load of the first.
COMPETING POWER PROVIDERS
In the case of Nairobi, critical services like power supply and the road network clearly lack redundancy. It is unacceptable for a country supposedly putting up a world-class technopolis by the name Konza City to comfortably explain away blackouts with flimsy reasons like “it has rained”.
So what if it has rained? More often than not, it rains every other day in miserable-weathered European cities, yet they do not experience blackouts.
We must urgently have multiple, competing power providers and ensure they are interconnected such that when either of their substations gets submerged by floods, they can switch the load to a competitor’s supply.
This, of course, presupposes that such a competitor has diverse, alternate sources of energy such as wind, oil or geothermal.
Lack of redundancy in our road network is another reason many Nairobians arrived home the following day; if there is only one route to Rongai and it is flooded, you can only wait for the water levels to go down before you move.
The road network redundancy, long planned by colonialists is only recently being revived in terms of ring-roads and by-passes.
But until then, all we can do – of course is keep shouting #KideroMustGo on Twitter. But unfortunately his departure won’t solve the problem, unless we all do what is necessary to keep the green city in the sun out of the raging floods.
Mr Walubengo is a lecturer at the Multimedia University of Kenya, Faculty of Computing and IT. Twitter:@jwalu email: [email protected]
