Wednesday, May 15, 2013

First Things First...


My feelings on government (UhuRuto) promises have featured elsewhere on this forum before- even before the 'Jubilant government' had landed the job officially . I have strictly no problem with the said promises but my feelings are that we as a nation need to deliberate and come into some form of consensus on our priorities.

Job creation is certainly a good objective because it is a backbone for affordable livelihood for most Kenyans living in abject poverty. Security, both national and civil is another goal that we need not loose sight of. Kenyans are hard working and it waters down their aspirations if they create fear among themselves simply by working hard to alleviate their circumstances. We do not want a situation where people are forced to migrate from certain regions simply because they are targets of marauding gangs who target well-to-do citizens, be it in the Northern, North eastern, Coast, Kiambu, Bungoma, Kisumu or Baragoi. We all need to feel safe wherever we are, whatever we are doing or whatever our standing in society.

With attainment of adequate job levels- and we need to make sure that jobs created fit all strata of society- citizens will be able to afford basic livelihoods. There should not be the consequent mass migration by a cowed population to apparently secure regions like urban centers. Let us feel safe to live and work in all regions.

When most of these (goals) and others that Kenyans definitely will come up with are attained, our school children will be studying in proper classrooms equipped with basic amenities and facilities of learning, roofs probably fitted with functional solar panels and bore-holes (or artesian wells) supplying clean running water. Trees and rocks will be subjects of study not shelter and furniture in the schools. Well-fed and dressed children will be playing on well maintained and manicured fields in the schools, chasing and kicking real soccer balls not 'sodom apple' fruits between two rocks on a dusty, stony field. Then, and only then will they be nearly ready for a laptop apiece.

One wild card agenda I would like to throw out there for consideration- because I am a thinking Kenyan like most of us- is that instead of the direction we are taking towards nuclear energy (a certain American president could not differentiate it from 'new killer' energy), and that was before Fukushima Daiichi, how about working on either acquiring an eye in space that would maintain surveillance on our region round the clock so that we can see stuff, like cattle rustlers herding thousands of livestock across large expanses of terrain, scores of marauding gangs ransacking villages, swarms of locusts, among other national disasters that we seem so helpless at 'seeing'. We could either lease one of those up there or we could launch one of our own- Now this may be a far-fetched idea but it is my submission that we have not fully exploited the available sources of energy in the region to warrant venturing into nuclear energy.

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