In many ways, we’re a failed State (Kenya)

[SoCalDem]

Climate change is ravaging Kenya & Uganda.. People are already "on the move", as livestock starves & dies of thirst, and crops fail yet again..



DAILY NATION



By ALLAN NGUGI posted Sunday, August 23 2009 at 15:50

Both the conservative American organisation, Fund for Peace, and the prestigious journal, Foreign Policy, have routinely been rubbished for depicting Kenya as a failed state. Nobody could fail to read gross misrepresentation of facts when, between 2003 and 2007, they always considered Kenya as such. You just don’t call a country ‘‘failed’’ when its economy is galloping at 7 per cent growth, when its new government has instituted free basic education, provided drugs to hospitals where they were none, rebuilt long-dilapidated roads, and rejuvenated agriculture.

But now, there has to be a great deal of rethinking when the same bodies declare Kenya to be in the top 20 club of pariah states as they did recently. The original positives have been overshadowed by nightmares unparalleled in Kenya’s 46 years of independence.

First, last year’s violence reduced Kenya to a rubble, one needing foreign intervention to save us from ourselves. This was shortly followed by crippling food shortages, partly caused by this violence. Those problems are still with us, fuelled by severe institutional weaknesses that have made the country dependent on relief food when we should be exporting it. No nation can be proud when a third of its population is starving.

Of late, there has been water shortage that has seen places like Nairobi relapse to the 1960s rural life, with tens of thousands of its residents moving around seeking whatever tap may be available.

Today, it is power shortages that has led to inconveniencing rationing.

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