Shocking return to northern Kenya after 20 years
In December 1982, I moved to Kenya. For three years I worked for UNICEF, before becoming a journalist based in Nairobi.
Since I left in 1989, I’ve visited every year or so, but this is the first time I’ve been back to the arid north where Samburu, Turkana, Pokot and other people herd their cattle, goats and camels.
I’m shocked and angry at what I’ve seen. We bounced along rocky, rutted tracks – in the quarter of a century since I was last here, the Kenyan government has done nothing to improve the roads. People remain cut off from services and supplies.
We went to a village called Mpagas where skinny, malnourished children were sitting listlessly under a tree. No health worker had visited them and the nearest clinic was 20km away.
The older children received a free school meal but the under-fives, the most vulnerable, were getting nothing apart from occasional general food aid deliveries.
The only change I could see is that the Samburu warriors in their beads and finery now have mobile phones, and more of them carry AK 47s to supplement their spears and traditional knives, so raiding over water, cattle and pasture is more deadly.
It’s a world away from Nairobi, where Kenyan MPs – who are, incidentally, paid more than their British counterparts – drive around in fancy cars and plot for the next election.
“The government isn’t focussed on the dry areas where pastoralists live,” said Joseph Lepariyo, who runs a local non-governmental organisation in the small town of Maralal. “Our problems don’t get any attention.”
Drought has ravaged northern Kenya; the land is littered with the carcasses of cattle and goats. In the Samburu Game Reserve we saw the corpse of a baby elephant, and desperate impala dying of thirst in the dry bed of the Uasin Giru river.
Lindsey Hilsum’s route through Kenya.
Climate change scientists say northern Kenya, Ethiopia, Sudan and Somalia can expect more extreme weather events like this. Later this month heavy rains associated with El Nino are expected, but they may not improve the pasture so much as cause erosion by flooding.
The aid agencies call this a “climate and poverty hotspot”, a desperate conjunction of misfortune. The people here need money to build dams to conserve water when the rains come. They need new laws on land tenure to minimise the risk of conflict between different groups and tribes over scarce resources. They need alternative employment opportunities, or they’ll end up leaving pastoralism, which remains the best way of using this arid land, and add to Kenya’s growing population of unemployed slum-dwellers.
Aid agencies, both foreign and national, can help alleviate the worst of the suffering but in the end a government is responsible for the welfare of its people.
As we drove south I thought how China has lifted 400m people out of poverty in the last 30 years. That’s the population equivalent of 10 Kenyas. What has the Kenyan government done in that time? It hasn’t even built a decent road from Baragoi to Maralal.