Cycle of Famine - the Cry of a Region

It happens every year, almost without fail... First, there is drought, with the inevitable famine. Then comes torrential rains resulting in floods that sweep people and animals away.. There's an outcry, an outcry to harvest this water.. Why so much waste? We just emerged from drought, someone please save and store this water..

A half-hearted attempt at dam-construction here, a minimal effort at a storage tank there... Silence the public, then down the tools, till next year..

And on and on, till the next drought.

It's heartbreaking to say the least watching Kenyans die of hunger. Heartbreaking because it doesn't have to be so, heartbreaking because every year we go through the cycle, every year we hear the government rhetoric, 'no Kenyan will die of hunger', 'lessons have been learnt', 'this will never happen again': Heartbreaking because so much money is allocated to these causes, taxpayers money (read the common man, what with the political class for so long exempted from tax!) Heartbreaking because the country produces so much food, yet somehow the distribution has never been properly mustered, properly managed. Even the food importation to avert crisis usually ends up being a way for the rich to get even richer...

My heart goes out to fellow Kenyans in the northern region. They have a country, they work hard rearing their cattle, but when they cry out to their government to create an enabling environment both for sustenance and development, it seems to fall on deaf ears.

I hope the new system of devolvement and County government will change things, I hope it will not be another cash cow for the greedy at the expense of the long suffering..  


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