This past week, a community group in my county called Imenti Development Forum was launching two ICT centres in various villages. These are places where young people can learn and practice digital skills and access content that can potentially change their lives. They are also spaces where they can do remote jobs, make a little money, interact and learn from each other; a safe space to keep them away from temptations of our villages which are hotbeds of drunkenness and drug abuse.
The group works with local people to identify, conceive and implement projects that have the potential to impact lives. They don’t use public money; they raise it from among themselves and are not involved in politics.
All development is local. The national brouhaha is largely a crime scene of misplaced priorities, corruption, over-invoicing, waste on “empowerment” freak-offs and more pilferage than gropes at a Diddy cocaine party.
Anybody who tells you that some sleepy bureaucrat at Treasury (with sore body parts and a massive hangover from partying at endless seminars in Naivasha) knows more about your needs than you is just pastronising you.
I have often said that we inherited and left intact the colonial state without understanding what we had been gifted by the wily colonial, without a clue whether what we are riding is a horse, a donkey or a porcupine. The primary purpose of the provincial administration, for example, is control of a people by a system that is suspicious of their motives and intentions. A more relaxed and people-anchored system would have allowed the people more autonomy and responsibility.
Development is “the process of growth, improvement or evolution”, according to a generic definition I looked up on the Internet. Who is best placed to develop oneself and his or her environs? Some expert a hundred miles away or you who has the benefit of the lived experience?
“Development” has become a propaganda prompt, a stimuli administered to generate love, veneration, surrender and worship of the politician. It is the bell and we are Pavlov’s dogs; it leaves us panting with tribal love and salivating political support, yet we get no joy. We end up paying for services twice: first through taxes and secondly by having to buy the same services in the open market because they were not provided in the first place.
The national government should be vested with authority over defence, national security, international relations and a select supra-county functions that are best performed for the whole. But there is no reason on earth why issues like health are being fondled by some thief at Afya House.
Yes, a lot of folks in the county governments are thieves and total goats, but thieves can be jailed and goats can be eaten. The people are better off in charge of their own development than relying on some grandmaster at a ministry.
Power-drunk political figure
The magic, the absolute cure for dictatorship and bad management of public affairs, is civic engagement. If people are passionate about their own welfare, they are informed of their rights and the responsibilities of those to whom they have entrusted authority over their resources, and they are resolute about punishing those who joke around with their stuff, then looting, theft, corruption and dictatorship melt away like dew in the morning sun.
If the people are not involved, the opposite happens. Autonomy is the beginning of democracy and development; a people who think and act for themselves are impossible to politically enslave.
Community development groups are catalysts for change; they demonstrate that even on their own, even without public money, a community can take care of its own needs. When you look at the South of England as you descend into London, the country is neat and lovely. A lot of it is not developed, it is still woods and open fields, every road hedged with trees; it is beautiful and healthy. The kings of England didn’t do that, neither did their prime ministers. The national government may have passed the law, or formulated the policy, but enforcement is local.
If you land somewhere in Somerset, buy an acre of land and start putting up a Parklands-type apartment, before the police or the ministry of this or that get to you, you will have had a word with your neighbours, the borough, the council and a whole battery of civic-minded folk. The people are the custodians of their own welfare.
Artificial intelligence offers underdeveloped communities an opportunity to fold the space-time of progress and travel long distances in the blink of an eye. People should not wait for elephant-milking county politicians, some disinterested joker in Nairobi or other distant, power-drunk political figure to come and take care of their lives. They should follow the example of the Imenti Development Forum and take matters in their own hands. And like the hummingbird made famous by the late Prof Wangari Maathai, they should not be afraid to try and put out the forest fire, one drop of water at a time.
