If you fail to plan you are definitely going to fail or so it goes.And looking at the things our leaders are really good at,one of them is their lack of planning.
Samburu is always the first place we look to when drought strike and as sure as dawn will come , there are stories in all TV station of the dire straits these people are in due to the drought ravaging this region.People are hungry and women are walking for miles in search of water.It sounds the warning bell that hunger in other part of the country will soon follow.
Just this past week i watched as a 65+ year old man with 12 wives and 60 children begged the government for help before they all died.As i watched him i couldn't help but cry for the children of this man,what was a man like him thinking!60 children!and about a dozen of them seemed to be under the age of five years.Maybe he was hoping that with more children their rate of survival in the harsh climate that Samburu is would be higher if anything(God forbid) happened.But wouldn't it be more reasonable to have fewer kids ,so that you are able to provide with them with the best care better rather than have a coterie that you can barely feed when disaster strikes.
Anyway back to our lack of planning.......even after a warning was issued by the meteorological department about the looming drought that would face the country this year,our leaders were too busy traversing the country ,lambasting their opponents on their plans to finish them politically .
It should be time that we Kenyans took leadership seriously and sued our representatives for taking us for a ride.We are paying them and its about time we demanded value for our money,someone needs to get fired Donald Trump style,no velvet glove approach ,just a plain three word sentence"you are fired" will do.With a slew of ministries like Agriculture,Special programs,planning,Finance and even provincial administration how did they miss all the signs of an impending drought?do these people watch local news ?
If you read the Bible you are familiar with the story of Joseph's smart thinking and planning when God spoke to him through a dream that not only saved him from the hangman's noose but the people in the land of the pharaohs too from famine.Now if only we had 2 Josephs sitting in the cabinet someone would have noticed the bumper harvest we had last year and they would have thought of buying off the bags of grain from farmers whose maize went to waste because there was no space to store them.Someone somewhere would have come up with a way to prolong the life of the gallons of milk that went to waste in the KCC factories all over the country because they factories lacked storage facilities.Instead of putting up palatial residences for our leaders we would be better off spending the money on building more grain storage facilities and modernizing our milk and meat processing facilities.
Come next year we will be having elections and apart from the usual suspects campaigning for the top seat we haven't had any new entrants throwing their hats into the ring.A few months to the elections some people will wake up in the morning and call a press conference surrounded by a few side kicks and tell us they want to run for the top seat.No thought will have been put to their manifesto because it will be a matter of copy pasting another manifesto from some party outfit from five years ago,the only thing that will change is the party logo.
Maybe this is just a reflection of how we as Kenyans eschew planning ,but just take a look at the mad rush that goes on when schools open in January yet there was a whole month between the time when schools close and when they open.Lack of planning is a national disease and it is time we changed the way we run our lives or we shall be like dogs chasing our own tails.
Lets pray help comes to the the old man and his family of 70 in Samburu and soon before things get worse and lets plan to elect leaders with fore sight and vision next year.
