Water and Power

We're just back from a three-week odyssey around the remoter parts of Britain and Ireland. After our overnight flight from Nairobi, we stepped into the sunshine outside Heathrow's Terminal Five and marvelled at an amazing water feature made up of scores of spurting jets lit individually from underneath with glorious shades of pink, purple and gold. Our girls shrieked with delight as the jets rose and fell while we pondered the bizarre sight of water and electricity being used for art. It was like an out-of-body experience after weeks of rationing. We felt like running around with buckets.
Mind you, after three weeks, we agreed that there was water a-plenty in Europe's western reaches. After much thought, I decided the only word for the weather in Ireland was "atrocious".
Back home in Nairobi, our garden is parched and brown, emaciated cows are meandering along the busy roads, rhinos are being moved from Nakuru national park to Nairobi national park because of the drought, friends of friends say the elephants have left Amboseli, the zebra are falling down and hippos are keeling over in ankle-deep mud. The drought is biting everywhere it seems -- except in the west where land is green and lush and flooded.
The power rationing is worse than when we left. We have no power during the day on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. (The Kenyan Power and Lighting Company said today the power cuts would end in October . I wonder if electricity bills will go back to normal then -- somehow I don't think so. The irony is that bills are going up even during rationing because the KPLC is using costly emergency generators.) Landlords in the poorer areas of Nairobi are drilling boreholes and charging their tenants for the water, which apparently often tastes bad.
The very tangible consequences of the drought have sharpened a political debate over the Mau forest -- a vital water tower which has been illegally settled and deforested over decades. Politicians are debating how to evict those settled there and, as so often here, the debate may be more about political alliances and allegiances ahead of 2012 than the actual environmental problems caused by the destruction of the Mau.
Other sturdy perennials are also making the news. Today, parliament was voting on whether or not to go into recess -- many MPs first want to debate President Mwai Kibaki's decision to reappoint Aaron Ringera as head of the Kenyan Anti-Corruption Commission. Some have decried Kibaki's decision as illegal and unconstitutional -- although there is some debate about the exact technicalities of the relevant law. Ringera is widely seen to have been ineffective and, well, Kenya's track record on corruption speaks for itself.
The Kenyan branch of Transparency International and the African Centre for Open Governance (AFRICOG) accused Kibaki of breaking the law.
"By unilaterally purporting to reappoint Ringera, Mwai Kibaki has attempted to deal the independence of the commission and its advisory board the decisive death-blow," AFRICOG's Gladwell Otieno told reporters.
Some might say the KACC had long been written off in many Kenyan minds, given the failure of this administration to seriously tackle endemic corruption.