Turkana Has Turned Into Political Circus

Confucius once told his followers that three things are required for government: weapons, food and trust.
If correct, the coalition government may have to resort to force to maintain its grip on power, as it presently lacks both public trust and sufficient means to feed its hungry citizens.
That became apparent in the angry public reaction to Government spokesman Alfred Mutua's trivialisation of the current food crisis.

Media owners together with a few corporations launched their own initiative, Kenyans for Kenya, as a rapid response to the indifference of the government to Kenyans' suffering.

Politicians, however, quickly recovered and flew their private helicopters high above the potholed roads to arrive in Turkana before the relief food convoy.
Thanks to their own press service - paid by you the taxpayers - and modern technology, we all saw them on the evening news dishing out dry maize to hungry pastoralists.
By then the politicians were already back in the capital planning the next move to turn tragedy into votes.
Not a hint of shame or embarrassment that half a century after independence droughts become famines because regimes fail to heed the early warning signs and plan accordingly.

In October last year I wrote that food is politics and politics is food in Turkana.

Now it appears that the dozen or so presidential aspirants have discovered that food influences local and national politics.
Turkana has had little or no rain for five years and up to 70 per cent of the livestock have been wiped out in some parts of the county.
In January this year, 27 per cent of the population were already receiving food assistance from WFP.
Long before Red Cross led the relief convoy, Unicef had warned in a June 2011 survey that 30 per cent of children below five were malnourished.

Yet the government remained unmoved until they saw the hungry images on foreign TV channels.

But when international and local media houses move on to the next big story, what will remain?
Turkanas have been victims of bad politics for decades, beginning with President Moi's expulsion of Noraid in 1989 because of Norway's decision to grant asylum to Koigi wa Wamwere.
Noraid had funded the construction of the Kitale-Lodwar road -- completed in 1983 -- as well as assisting many educational and health programmes.
The Catholic Church currently has a huge investment in the county providing over 200 medical personnel as well as constructing hundreds of schools and providing various social services, ranging from boreholes to local radio.

Yet the government's failure to maintain the main road linking the county with Kitale and Sudan has led to Turkana becoming a frontier zone again.
Uganda now benefits much more from business opportunities in South Sudan because of its superior infrastructure.
The cradle of mankind may have once been the Garden of Eden but it is now a vast desert of missed opportunities.
Relief food will temporarily save the Turkana yet their greatest famine is one of leadership, imagination and planning.
Elected representatives who survive on relief politics must be replaced by leaders who believe that their people's dignity deserves more than handouts.