The presence of water dispensers in the offices of public servants, whether they be Cabinet Secretaries, Principle Secretaries or the rank and file, or the presence of uncountable bottles of bottled-water on the high tables of high-level chinwags attended by the aforementioned personages of the Government of Kenya are an indictment of over thirty-five years of the Clean Water for All Pledge that the Government of Kenya made to the people of Kenya.
It is symptomatic of the sloth with which the Government of Kenya has completed its projects for the improvement of the lives of the people. Since 1962, Kenya has metronomically held regular elections, and replaced one administration with another with only one or two major electoral crises. But the elections have not transformed the lives of the people all that much. There are those who are proud of the legacy left by Baba Moi in the education sector: all those schools, especially girls' schools, that he built and staffed. There are those who believe that Baba Jimmi's accomplishments in the rods sector trump all the achievements of Baba Moi and Mzee Kenyatta combined. Yet none are able to demonstrate that Kenyans are all that better off for all the schools Baba Moi built or the hundreds of kilometres of roads that Baba Jimmi built.
Many more Kenyans are less poor today than there were in 1963; more Kenyans have been educated and have educated their children that in 1963. The quality of life for hundreds of thousands is quite good; that of millions more is in the toilet (only that millions of Kenyans do not have toilets.) The big-ticket programmes that are and should be the concern of the Government of Kenya are education, healthcare, public safety...and potable water. A casual assessment of the situation leaves one with the sense that the Government of Kenya is stuck in the Egyptian dessert of want, without a Moses to lead it to the Promised Land of plenty.
If the Government of Kenya, whether at the national level or the county level, is unable to assure the people of potable water, affordable and reliable healthcare, or public safety, there is little that it can boast of to its neighbours. We are praised as a dynamic economy, the engine of East Africa, but this praise damns us to perpetual mediocrity it does not lead to the upliftment of the quality of life for the millions of Kenya still stuck in an agriculture-based economy that barely sustains livelihoods in the rural backwaters policy-makers never visit.
If Kenyan agriculture were the pride of East Africa, it would guarantee clean drinking water for the millions that it employs; dispensaries would be fully-staffed, well-stoked and efficient. But none of this is true. Agriculture, especially commercial industrial agriculture, seems to benefit an elite that lives in the swankiest palaces in Kenya while the labour that makes agriculture the economic engine of Kenya languish in smoke-filled hovels, barely able to send all their children to school and who die like flies every time there is an outbreak of one affliction or the other.
Therefore, when the President and Deputy President, the forty-seven governors and the army of functionaries and factotums host their visitors and offer them water dispensed from a machine or packaged in plastic, they should take a moment to wonder why the tap water in their offices is not to be trusted fifty years after Kenya decided to rule itself. If they cannot supply their own offices with clean water, it is almost certain that they cannot supply the people of Kenya with clean water...or clean anything, for that matter. They should hang their heads in shame and admit they have failed the people.
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