EDITORIAL: Drought could be the last straw for Jubilee

On Tuesday, Kenya Meteorological Department acting deputy director Bernard Chanzu uttered the grim words that every well-meaning Kenyan hoped never to hear: The rains have failed.

The area of low pressure — the Intertropical Convergence Zone — which sucks in rain-bearing air from the oceans, is not moving between the tropics as it should. It is stuck over the southern reaches and it is highly unlikely that it will bring us rain.

Mr Chanzu added another telling gem: The pattern of extreme weather is symptomatic of climate change.

The long rains of March to May give Kenya 70 per cent of its rainfall. Their failure is disastrous and cause for celebration only for the brutal cartel that profits from hoarding food, manipulating prices and corruptly importing food, which is then stolen by those distributing it.

Nations, like individuals, have to learn important survival skills: Effectively protect, feed, heal and preserve themselves.

It appears that Kenya has a learning disability. Its most devastating natural disaster is drought and it comes with a predictable regularity: 1991/1992, 1995/1996, 1998-2000, 2004/2005, 2008-2011. The dry spells are so regular you could almost set your watch by it.

Weather shocks are so bad for this country that they should be receiving as much, if not more, attention as other threats such as terrorism.

Climate change is making the droughts more extreme and the longer dry spells rendering as much as 80 per cent of the total land area into arid and semi-arid conditions. That destroys livelihoods and the ability of communities to produce food.

The 2008-2011 drought cost an estimated Sh968.6 billion and slowed down the economy by 2.8 per cent annually.

Flooding, according to the government’s estimates, costs 5.5 per cent of gross domestic product every seven years and drought 5.5 per cent every five years.

The National Climate Change Action Plan says severe weather events, on average, cost 2.4 per cent of GDP yearly.

That is another way of saying that natural disasters take as much as corrupt public servants from the economy every year.

The government and its partners have done a lot of work to understand vulnerabilities to climate shock and the adaptations — the changes required to absorb those shocks — necessary to keep Kenyans safe and sound.

For example, it is known that frequent droughts are decimating rain-fed agriculture, strangling pastoral communities, harming and changing the environment, causing power shortages and pushing up costs, piling pressure on the financial system, hurting tourism, harming the health of the people through additional stress, heat, vector-borne diseases and so on.

The actions required to mitigate this impact and make communities more resilient are also well documented: Farm insurance, irrigation and large-scale food production, proper food storage and distribution, fodder banking, research and extension, vaccination of livestock, water capture and retention, and so forth.

Sadly, the corruption in the Jubilee regime has massively impeded these survival strategies and greatly harmed the ability of ordinary people to produce food, maintain healthy herds and survive in a hostile environment.

For example, the plan to put a million acres under irrigation in the Galana-Kulalu project would have transformed food security.

But at the end of the day, only 5,000 acres were put under crop and, even with a Sh7 billion budget, the government could only produce 22,000 bags of maize in a country which eats 3.4 million bags a month.

Then there is water capture and storage in dams. There are five dams under construction, at Sh142.5 billion, and the Daily Nation estimated that dam deals worth Sh700 billion have been entered into.

Recent developments would tend to suggest that, in the minds of many people in the public service and their business partners in the real world, these dams, as with all projects, are not viewed as critical infrastructure but opportunities to make immense wealth at the expense of lives and the future of the country.

Even simple processes like safe storage of food are a challenge for our institutions. The National Cereals and Produce Board is supposed to buy and keep maize for situations such as these.

Late last year, there was a scandal when three million bags of maize is believed to have gone bad in storage.

A country that cannot store water and food will not survive the vagaries of climate change. A system that cannot set up honest food distribution during shortages cannot preserve the lives of citizens.

This is a moment for leadership, if any is left in Kenya, to shine through. No one should be allowed to profit from the misery of those whose lives are at risk.

And the strategy to mitigate the impact of climate change must be brought to the fore.