Tale of Three Cities- Unep

Friends,
We paid a Courtesy Call on Unep- Kenya Country Programme this morning at the UN Gigiri and we joined in a discussion with Mr. Henry Ndede and Mr. Moses Mbego on Waste Management in Kenya and beyond. You will remember Mr. Mbego did attend The 1st and the 2nd Consultative Meeting on Waste Management that we hosted at Charter Hall and KICC.
We were also joined by Ms Catherine Mwangi from Merck Millipore East Africa. I was accompanied by our Finance and Administration Officer Mr. Henry Jack K'Ongogo.
This is Nairobi and it is a reflection of our Cities across Kenya
In what is turning out to be a Tale of Our Cities, and this was amply captured by Mr. Ndede, Garbage is running amok. There has been little effort put in place to help manage Waste in our Metropolis. We have only been engaged in shifting Waste and Garbage from one place to the next and calling that Waste Management, and then conferencing a lot on the same.
To help us focus on this, and we will be focusing on the Three Major Cities in Kenya- Nairobi, Mombasa and Kisumu, the Unep Team under Mr. Ndede have developed an Integrated Solid Waste Management Plan that has already been shared with Dr Gov Evans Kidero of Nairobi for his intervention. There has also been contact made with Mr. Jack Ranguma- the Kisumu County Governor while plans are in place for a meeting with Gov Hassan Joho of Mombasa.
To help us move this process forward as we celebrate our Silver Jubilee on the 1st June 2013, we want to move with speed and put in place interim measures that will help us remove all the offensive waste and garbage from our neighbourhoods even as we plan for sustainable measures to help handle the same.
We at The Clean Africa Campaign are looking at the Integrated Solid Waste Management Plan by the Unep and we will be inviting partnerships that can help implement the same immediately in consultations with the Governors of Nairobi, Mombasa and Kisumu.
We will be inviting them to immediately overhaul the Departments of Environment in Nairobi and Mombasa and replace the current teams with teams that will be committed to service delivery and results. The current teams managing waste in Nairobi and Mombasa have developed some thick skins and for them, they would rather the status quo remained. They are busy thinking of 2020 at a time Nairobi and Mombasa need some immediate interventions. They have failed to make our Cities Clean and for them, it is time to ship out, not to shape up. They have failed to shape up for so long.
Kenyans are ready and willing to play their part. We only need Leadership
Secondly, we will be inviting a Stakeholders Forum on Waste Management on the 24th April 2013 at the Unep in Nairobi where the Waste End Users will share on the way forward. These End Users can get in touch with me to enable us plan well for the said meeting.
We will then thereafter invite a meeting with the Waste Collectors to discuss the Way forward. The end result will be a Massive Onslaught on Waste and Garbage in Nairobi in the Month of May that will drastically reduce and/or remove Waste and Garbage from our Streets, neighbourhoods and Road sides.
Lastly, we will be inviting all Kenyans to join in the Process of Separation of Waste at Source. It is surprising that Kenya is spending Billions of Shilling in treating opportunistic diseases at a time when proper Waste Management can actually reduce these costs drastically. We must make clear choices as Kenyans as we move forward.
Our Towns and Cities will not become Clean just by themselves. In Mali, they are harvesting Human urine and making good use of the same. In Kigali, we can all see what focused Leadership can achieve. It will hence need some collective efforts where the professionals will have to stand out and be counted, the Partners will hove to step forward and play their part and the Citizens must rise to the occasion.
In all these, the leadership of the Governors will be put to test. Is it business as usual as we approach the Silver Jubilee, or, can we all join hands in making a difference?

Peace and blessings as we work for a Clean Kenya, a Clean Africa and a Better World.

 

Odhiambo T Oketch,

Executive Director,

The Clean Africa Campaign-TCAC,

Tel; 0724 365 557,

http://kcdnkomarockswatch.blogspot.com

Nairobi Kenya.

The Clean Africa Campaign is an Initiative of KCDN Kenya.

Governors and The Waste Revolution in Africa

Friends,
Kenya will be witnessing the swearing in of many Governors tomorrow across the Country. In Nairobi, Dr Evans Kidero will be sworn into office at Uhuru Park in a ceremony that will start at about 10am.
Dr Kidero has promised that he is going to address the question on garbage that has ran amok in Nairobi.
This is refreshing because, waste is such a huge resource that must be tapped into. Many Environmental Managers in Kenya have simply refused to address the question of managing waste on the simple reason that they have massive personal returns in shifting waste from one point to the next.
Garbage in Nairobi
We all now know that Nairobi spends Kshs 40m every month in paying 20 Contracted Garbage Truckers who collect no garbage as they routinely queue for their pay cheque. This Kshs 40m is easy money for the Environment Managers and the Garbage Collection Constructors. It is such a lucrative business that simply lulls all one has read in Waste Management. It places extra bread on the table at a time the Council is unable to pay her employees.
The situation is the same across all our Councils and this presents a sad scenario.
We have refused to invest in human capital, in equipment and in modern waste handling technics, and we have chosen the easy way out; live with the rot as a small team skim the cream.
With the swearing in of this new breed of Managers, we are eager and hopeful that Waste and Waste Management is going to be the next frontier for National Development.
At The Clean Africa Campaign-TCAC, we are ready to work with these new breed of managers to help make a difference. We are developing our next 5 Year Strategic Plan and we are aligning this to the electoral circle, to enable us feed in with the new Governors and their Programmes. We are going to be available to work with all our new Governors and help make our Towns and Counties Clean.
There are various benefits that come with waste, and we will not engage in empty rhetorics where people talk about waste being wealth without actualizing the same. We will want to encourage the Governors to institute the concept of Separation of Waste at Source and enforce the same.
We will be inviting the Governors to register and train all Waste Handlers with the one singular aim of benefiting from the Waste Value Chain- from the generators to the collectors, transporters to the end consumers of Waste.
No. This is not acceptable
The Western World did not just become Clean. Efforts were made towards this and in Africa, we can also make efforts to make Africa Clean.
We must move from being the Dark and Dirty Continent to one of Hope and Imagination. And our New Governors must be men who can dream new dreams for Africa. Not the lost dreams from our Fathers, the dreams that led us to poverty, disease, ignorance, corruption, impunity and tribalism.
Our Governors must dream new dreams that will lead Africa to a new healing process where all will unite in working for plenty, peace and growth.
We must join the Governors in working for cleaner Towns, Cities and Neighbourhoods, and we must all join in the Waste Revolution in Africa.

Peace and blessings as we work for a Clean Kenya, a Clean Africa and a Better World.

 

Odhiambo T Oketch,

Executive Director,

The Clean Africa Campaign-TCAC,

Tel; 0724 365 557,

http://kcdnkomarockswatch.blogspot.com

Nairobi Kenya.

The Clean Africa Campaign is an Initiative of KCDN Kenya.

Celebrating Mediocrity of the Kenyan Media

Friends,
We have come full circle and today, after some thorough soul searching, I want to ask: of what value is the Kenyan Media to Kenyans and the World?
As I was posing this question to colleagues at the office this morning, Wex pointed out to me an article by Clay Muganda, an article which escaped me but one worth reading- An inspiring article worth reading by Clay Muganda...
Now, in the US, sorry to give this reference again, I was so impressed by the CNN Journalists who were able to give us clear projections as Americans went to the ballot in November 2012. Through the Exit Polls, they were able to call the Elections in favour of President Barrack Obama, and they did this in real time. Within minutes of the last man casting his votes, their equivalent of our Dependent Electoral and Boundaries Commission announced Barrack Obama as having won back his seat and with a landslide. The Elections were never as projected by Opinion Polls- too close to call. It was a clear Usain Bolt win, where one can never dispute.
In Kenya, our Journalists were glued to returns as posted by the IEBC at a time when they had the capacity to report on results as recorded from Form 34s across all the polling stations in the Country. As Journalist, it was their responsibility to inform Kenyans on what was going on and on who was getting what where.
That the IEBC could gag the Media on releasing results is something that calls to question the independence of our Journalists and the Media Houses. How can we trust the Media if they can be this easily compromised and restricted?

The Kenyan Media is rapidly also becoming part of our Dirty Environment that we must all join hands in Cleaning

Was there a Conspiracy of Silence between the Media, the IEBC and the Dark Forces that were hell-bent on turning the wheels of change and reforms backwards? Can we find the Media complicit in the mass electoral fraud that Kenyans witnessed?
I am convinced that our Media Houses need to apologize to Kenyans and the World on their incompetence and sloppy handling of the Kenyan General Elections of 4th March 2013. I am also taking offense that The Standars Newspaper can have the audacity to use my Photo with Chairman Isaac Hassan in todays issue of The Standard at page 7 on a matter that I have no idea about. This is simply professional incompetence which I want to condemn. 
That photo was taken on the 13th December 2012 when we as The Clean Africa Campaign joined in helping to mobilize Kenyans to Register as Voters and it has no relevance to the current situation in which Chairman Hassan has found himself in. To use the same photo now would create the impression that I am also enjoined in the electoral deceit that the whole World is witnessing. I am not party to that and I am having my Lawyers write to The Standard about this.
Lastly, even as the IEBC was releasing what they called Final Results, they read results from all the 290 Constituencies across Kenya. How come no Journalist interrogated this? The best a smart Journalist could have done was simply to play the tapes again and tally the results as they were announced and match this to the phantoms that IEBC posted as their last results.
I accuse the Kenyan Media and our Journalists for taking Kenyans and the whole World for fools.

Odhiambo T Oketch,
Executive Director,
The Clean Africa Campaign-TCAC,
Tel; 0724 365 557,
http://kcdnkomarockswatch.blogspot.com
Nairobi Kenya.

The Clean Africa Campaign is an Initiative of KCDN Kenya.

An inspiring article worth reading by Clay Muganda

An inspiring article worth reading by Clay Muganda.
Early last week, I was asked by a local television journalist if ever there was a person who was as cynical of local journalists as I was.

Call it deliberate memory loss, but I purposefully refuse to remember what remark I had made to elicit that question.

In reply, though, I told him that my cynicism was informed by the fact that I know us, the journalists, the media. I know our strengths and shortcomings in equal measure and I am not afraid to point them out when paeans are sung in our honour or when invectives are hurled at us.

There was no further exchange and I have no idea whether my inquisitor was satisfied or not, but what he did not know was that, for quite some time, I have been asking myself what it is that makes me, us, Kenyan journalists, so fickle, so feeble-minded, so narcissistic that we think the sun rises out of our bedrooms.

If ever there were an exemplification of the Biblical phrase “many were called but few were chosen”, we are it. We are the untouchables, the sharpest pens in the drawer, the best brains that ever came out of Africa.

We cannot stand being told to change direction even when we have been blindfolded by the Government and are being pushed in to an abyss.

You do not have to be an opportunistic foreign journalist to realise that the Kenyan media is not only in bed with the Government, but is also living in a make-believe world where milk and honey flow from diamond-encrusted faucets built by the gods themselves.

The accusations that we numbed ourselves with messages of peace, slept on the job, censored ourselves or preached peace at the expense of justice during the recent elections are neither here nor there. After all most, if not all, of our investments, kith and kin are in this country and we had to employ all means to protect them.

But by numbing ourselves with messages of peace and censoring ourselves, we were just admitting that, ever since the “hostilities” ended in 2008, there has never been peace, that what we have had is just a tinderbox waiting for the smallest spark to explode.

By censoring ourselves, and, by extension, the people, we were conspiring with the Government to hide the fact that, through its lopsided resettlement and compensation schemes, it had failed to foster peace among different communities since the chaos of five years ago.

Instead of being a watchdog, the media has turned into a partner, a collaborator of the Government, a feat which the latter achieved — knowingly or inadvertently — by continuously heaping praises on the former as was witnessed during the recent elections, or with semi-autonomous Government bodies incessantly dishing out awards to the media, so much so that our work is nowadays not for viewers, listeners or readers, but for media awards panelists.

As a matter of fact, the impact of our work is nowadays not measured by how much it has helped change the lives of Kenyans, but by the number of awards it has won.

It is, therefore, not uncommon for journalists to say they are working on stories to be submitted for different awards, or for them to take to the social media and start remarking how a story is so going to win an award even before all of it is aired.

Of course there is nothing wrong with winning awards, aiming to win awards or even being ambitious, but when you are blinded by personal gain and bias and the urge to be ahead of an imagined competition as opposed to informing and educating the public, then you lose focus.

Let us not lie to ourselves, we are doing this country more harm than good and we are not becoming better professionals by continuously patting ourselves on the back, sometimes literally, during live news broadcasts or by attacking those who point out our shortcomings.

We are so fast in casting stones at others but we lack the wherewithal to look within and see that the reports by foreign journalists say more about our low level of understanding of the world around us than about their high standards of journalism, considering that they are called upon and paid more than double our yearly wage to train us for less than a month.

For all the noise that we make about our professionalism and independence, we have never remembered that we do not even have a professional media body or a Press Club where we can meet and share ideas or compare notes.

I will not write anything about the Editors’ Guild, Media Council of Kenya and Media Owners Association.

Dictatorship slowly creeping in as we all watch

Friends,
A few things have been disturbing me, and as is in my nature, I will not keep quiet.
Is Kenya becoming a Police Dictatorship? Why is the Inspector General of Police keen on gagging Kenyans and denying us our freedom to assemble, talk and associate?
We have come a long way with our fight for democracy and reforms. Many Kenyans have been killed in this journey, while many more have been maimed, tortured beyond repair and suffered stints in detention for agitating for change and reforms.
The more garbage we clear, the more garbage we generate.
We have come full circle and going by the results of the last General Elections which have been disputed, many Kenyans care less about reforms and democracy. But we all care about our freedoms.
The Civil Society have effectively undergone a complete metamorphosis and no one cares about the tenets of democracy any more. Many care only about the many hotel seminars that they attend and the attendant perks that come with such lofty engagements.
This is why many issues of Governance and Peace are only held in seminars and in hotels where the people who attend are the same same people who keep meeting about such things. They move to congregate from one hotel to another in different locations and they have largely remained isolated from the common reality.
Who is going to talk for the common man whose rights of speech, association and assembly is now being slowly eroded by the new Sherrif in Town? Is the Sherrif acting within the law when he declares all meetings illegal? Is he acting on behalf of some other unseen face? Or, is he afraid of something we all do not know?
Our agitation for repeal of Section 2A led to the first Multi Party elections where the Professor of Kenyan politics Mzee President [rtd] Daniel Arap Moi won albeit with a slim majority the General Elections of 1992. He again won in 1997 to complete his two terms in office.
During this time, there was acceleration of reforms and the gains we had made were never eroded.
Then in 2002, we all rallied behind Mzee President Mwai Kibaki. We started seeing systemic attempts to erode the gains we had made. The first such attempt was in 2005 when we were saddled with a watered down version of a Constitution which we effectively rejected.
The second such attempt has been the question of the County Commissioners. The Courts nullified their appointments but the Executive Wing of Government simply ignored those orders. They have now ordered the Ministers who won other posts to resign and that will be effected. It does not matter how much noise the Prime Minister may make on this.
We have seen nothing in the form of national healing and cohesion. Jobs have been given out in a manner that left many people wondering where Kenya was heading to. And the constant rejoinder was that people were being appointed based on their competency. Competency hence become the justification. And Kenyans watched with baited breath as some key State Offices become a preserve of competencies from the appointing authority.
We then went through a General Election that was generally flawed in 2007 and Mzee KIbaki reached a common agreement with Raila Odinga and they formed a Coalition Government. They forgot to punish the people who messed the election that severely caused friction between them. 1,133 Kenyans were killed at that time, 600,000 more were uprooted from their homes and property of unknown value was destroyed across all Kenya. And no one has been punished for this! And now, we are being warned not to talk, not to assemble and not to freely associate!
The International Criminal Court is also now realizing how tough it is to deal with the dark forces of impunity.
As we speak, there is a game of cats and mice going on with regard to resettling those who were Internally displaced. I thought these people were displaced from somewhere, and now that we have peace between the then protagonists, people can just happily go back to where they were displaced from.
I bet Kenya is facing more serious problems and the attempts by the IGP are simply therapeutic. I do not want to believe that we have gone full circle and all that we fought for have come to nothing.
It is also good to realize that material wealth has replaced ideals. Many people have at long realized that ideals do not place bread on the table, while money does. Many are hence throwing all caution to the wind in pursuit of power, raw power and money. And with it, Kenya is being saddled with a leadership that will shame the whole country.
Pray, why must we elect journeymen into our Legislative Bodies- the National Assembly and the Senate? What is the problem with us? The gods must be absolutely crazy and they must be dancing on the graves of all those gallant sons and daughters of Kenya who fought for reforms and return to Multy Party Politics.
I really would not want to imagine that the Police are willing to be major players in silencing Kenyans, or, clubbing Kenyans into submission at a time thugs are running amok across Kenya!
Crime is escalating and the Police are looking helpless about it. Yet, they have the audacity to come policing innocent Kenyans whose only crime seems to be Freedoms of association, assembly and speech.
I would want to believe that their hands are tied and they have enough to justify for their existence.
The dark clouds are gathering and everyone seems to be taking off as the Inspector General of Police assumes new powers hitherto not known in Kenya.

Odhiambo T Oketch,
Komarock Nairobi

Africa must rise and shine.

Africa must rise and shine.
We must re-live the dreams of our fathers,
The men who fought for our Independence.
We must rise and make Africa shine.
For so long we have been a Dark Continent,
and now, we are increasingly becoming The Dirty Continent.
Dark and Dirty,
Yet,
We have Leaders, Leaders who have refused to Dream for Africa.
Our Fathers dreamt for Africa,
Even if their dreams were never realized.
They were dreams.
Do we have dreamers now?
How many of us are dreaming big dreams for Africa?
What with the immense opportunities waste and garbage is presenting us?
Africa must rise and shine,
And we must dream huge dreams for Africa.
Africa must stop being small and intimidated,
Rooming the World with huge begging bowls,
At a time when all wee need is discipline,
Financial discipline to help manage the huge mineral resources we have in Africa.
Africa has enough wealth for all of us,
But she does not have enough wealth for the greed of our leaders.
Routinely we troop to the ballot,
Only to elect thieves, pimps, drug pushers and charlatans,
For our leaders.
Africa must rise and shine,
And we must start respecting the huge human resource we have.
Let us start new dreams for Africa,
Dreams that will see us clean our Cities and Towns.
dreams that will see us see Waste as huge Investment Opportunities.
Dreams that will help clean Africa of ineptness and impunity,
And usher in hope and satisfaction.
We must re-live the shuttered dreams of our Fathers.
We must have our own new dreams for Africa,
Not dreams to entrench impunity, greed and tribalism.
Those are worthless Dreams.
Oto

I will wake up every morning and go to my garden.

I will wake up every morning and go to my garden.
I will clear the bush in readiness of the planting season.
I will plant in time for the rains.
I will weed my crops and God willing, some will bear fruits and some will not.
Some seedlings will fall on hard rock and will be eaten by the birds,
Some will fall on thorns and will dry up.
But some will fall on moist land and will bear fruit.
I will win some fights in life and loose a few as well.
But my farm I shall tend,
And my spirit will remain strong.
Anybody who wants to help me better join me in my farm.
For in me I see the new African spirit,
Where love is more professed in abject poverty,
As,
Your will is derailed as you watch.
I will wake up every morning and go to my garden,
For in me I see the new African spirit.
Oto