Friends of Clean Kenya,
Yesterday, while watching news, I
happened on a news feature about Rwanda, The Journey of Resilience which was carried on Citizen TV.
What caught my attention is
related to what I wrote about yesterday, the parameters of clean cities. In my
article, I belabored the point which that news feature brought out very
clearly and simply; the correlation between quality service delivery and better cities.
Now, Kigali
has cut its place among the top clean cities in Africa.
It is not by default, it is difficult to establish the correlation between efficient, timely and
quality service delivery and the joy of living in a town or city.
As argued in my article
yesterday, the moment we begin looking at the bigger matrix of service delivery
as complementary to improving our physical, social and economic environments,
we will realize a positive transformation in our towns and cities.
This is why we are focusing this
initiative not only on physical cleanliness as a parameter to determine how
successful we are at attaining cleaner towns and cities but also how efficient and
timely services are delivered. It is this aspect that complements achievement
of cleaner environments.
The Rwanda Revenue Authority-RAA
has already automated revenue collection, saving citizens’ time on queues but
more so, collecting that revenue efficiently which in turn reduces tax evasion
and increases the tax bracket. With increased revenue, your guess is as good as
mine what the results would be to an economy. If the process is tedious, time
consuming and frustrating, you can only imagine the result of the efforts of
RRA and the services that will follow towards making life better.
Inefficiency in service delivery becomes an
anathema to public office, once the public loose confidence in the quality of
such service; it becomes Herculean to convince it to participate in enhancing
development through that avenue.
However much we clean and secure
waste in receptacles, if such waste is not collected and processed in a timely
manner, it will eventually become a dump-site. This is what many of our councils
face; the public looses the trust in their ability to deliver timely service
and such lethargy quickly catches on with the residents. The result is the huge
mounds of garbage we see around. On the converse, if you woke up to find
garbage collected on time, streets spotlessly clean, litter bins placed all
around, you would be a mad man to throw your litter anyhow, even your
subconscious mind would not allow you!
As we head to Kisumu on Monday the 6th of
August to meet His Worship the Mayor of Kisumu and the Town Clerk of The
Municipal Council of Kisumu, we hope these are some of the issues we will
be putting on the table as the trans-formative agenda of The Clean Kenya Campaign-TCKC. Incidentally,
The Mayor of Kisumu, is one
among the very pragmatic public servants who has a vision for Kisumu City;
to make Kisumu the cleanest town in the Great Lakes
region. TCKC and
our partners wish to work with him to achieve this.
We are hopeful that as we visit
our towns and cities, we will take this trans-formative agenda to the ground,
ensure we not only make our cities clean, build investor confidence through quality
service delivery but also tourist attractions through scenic and captivating
environments; cities clean and fresh enough worth visiting.
Nairobi is already ranked 4th
in Africa by the MasterCard Destination
Cities Index as a popular destination, we need to work harder to clean it
up to enable it compete outside Africa as a business and leisure destination.
The Municipal Council of Eldoret is already investing Ksh 700 million in waste recycling
plants, we can only applaud them for these practical steps in line with what we
will be discussing at KICC courtesy of The
Public Service Transformation Department at OPM on the 28th
August 2012; Practical Steps towards Separation and Recycling of Waste. We
appreciate the efforts of this department in shaping this trans-formative agenda
for our towns and cities.
As our President spends time in London wooing investors,
we must do the bit we can to ensure the investor environment is conducive and
true to the commitments he makes.
We ought to partner with
government through the Public Private
Partnerships to implement government policy, especially the achievement of Vision 2030.
Best,
Otieno Sungu,
Programs Manager,
The Clean Kenya
Campaign-TCKC
Blogspot; http://kcdnkomarockswatch.blogspot.com
Facebook;
Website; http://www.kcdnkenya.org
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment