Ah, this was funny: On the 9pm news, there was Franklin Bett, bless his cotton socks, all dapper and with a carefully manicured beardlet, telling the camera with an impressively straight face that 'the quality of our roads is in accordance with international standards.' Not quite on the level of Eddie Izzard, but it sure had comedy value.
Just a regrettable misunderstanding? Or possibly the standards to be applied under Vision 2030, and sometime in 2030? My neighbourhood is actually not doing too badly on roads, but a good photographic memory still helps so that you learn to avoid the odd pothole of the size that would accommodate a small pig, especially on those nights when the streetlights also have ‘international standards’ as KPLC currently seem a little fragile, too.
Are the bouncy, freshly refilled dams just too exuberant for the creaking system? With the surge in power cuts in the recent weeks, I can’t even be sure to catch the endless repeats of KPLC’s little CSR feature on how many trees they have been planting. And, pertinent to the current season, how to build drainage must be the more arcane, hidden knowledge of road construction not currently included in the international road standards in Kenya. Thinking along the same lines, the TV news producer had helpfully edited in some interesting aerial footage of roads submerged and washed away to frame Bett’s statement.
It’s difficult to avoid all those niggling infrastructure issues – they are not, to use former president Moi’s terminology, ‘academic’, and whatever the standards of Kenya’s roads, they are clearly different from, say, South Africa’s where a friend just received a speeding ticket. Inside Kruger National Park, that is. The World Bank who, for all their faults, often sit on very useful data, point out that paved road density in Kenya is just 16 kilometres per 100 square kilometres, compared to an average of 31 kilometres for sub-Saharan Africa. That should be a bit of a worry for a country positioning itself as a regional business and transport hub.
If you look for the story, follow the money, and it’s nearly budget time again. Improving infrastructure requires spending, but do you get your money’s worth, which is really where the problem is? I was intrigued to learn that the Treasury’s Permanent Secretary Joseph Kinyua told the Public Accounts Committee that KES30bn allocated for expenditures in the current fiscal year still sit around unused, a good month before the end of the fiscal year. Much of this appears to have been set aside for education and healthcare – intriguing, given the halt in donor funding for free primary education, and all the complaints about spending cuts for anti-retrovirals. But allocating money on paper isn’t enough if it’s either not spent, or if it’s badly spent. However impressive a budget looks on paper, it is execution, and the quality of budget execution, that matters.
Infrastructure investments were a big part of the economic stimulus programme that Finance Minister Uhuru Kenyatta had included in his last budget for the current fiscal year, but that was a little slow to get started. According to the just published Economic Survey 2010, the increase in cement consumption indicates infrastructure spending has been part of the 2009 acceleration in GDP growth to 2.6% - still not exactly astronomical, and still lower than the population growth rate, but at least better than the 1.7% of 2008.
So I’m curious to learn more on infrastructure spending from Mr Kenyatta or his colleagues next month: what has been spent on which projects and if they are on schedule. I doubt that he will shed light on that odd awarded-yet-cancelled-now-reissued tender for the railway feasibility study, but I’d be keen to find out, for example, if there are any specific project that the government infrastructure bond has financed, especially since those funds had never been ringfenced in any special-purpose vehicle that would ensure that they actually do go into infrastructure investments, and not to, say, for the KES2.6m flying lessons that nominated ODM councillor George Mwangangi, better known as Mwongolo, has asked the Nairobi City Council to pay for. Now Mwongolo really is a comedian. Maybe Mr Bett has been hanging out with him too much recently?
Republished with kind permission by The Star.
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