Learning From the Invisible World

We can learn a lot from the invisible world around us. The naked eye can only see so much but once you go to a microscope you begin appreciating the millions of tiny organisms that have the ability to kill us and which have for millions of years.
I want to tell the story of a very famous nasty microorganism; Mycobacterium tuberculosis. The organism is spread from person to person through infected aerosol droplets. One droplet may contain only a few of these bugs.
Once inhaled the bacterium are transported to the lung where they are released from the droplet. But conditions in the lung are not favourable for this bacterium for immidietly it is attacked and ingested by macrophages ( a white blood cell). Now the body may think that it is over. That the macrophage whose main work is to destroy microorganisms has done its job. Think again.
The macrophage then moves to the nearest lymph node. But inside it the bacterium is able to sabotage the main mechanism of its destruction (digestion by lysosomes) and thus this bacteria continues dividing inside the macrophage until it destroys it. The new bacteria invade other macrophages and continue the process of multiplication inside the macrophage and its eventual destruction.
Once the number of bacteria reach a certain level they spill over into the blood stream and cause a bacteremia. The body responds with vehemence using the T-cells (the same ones destroyed by the H.I.V. virus but that is another story) and most of the bacteria are destroyed.
The few remaining survivors travel to a well oxygenated portion of the lungs e.g. the apical lobe and here they wall themselves off and lay low. They lay low and wait. One day when there will be a physical injury to the body e.g. trauma, immunodeficiency e.t.c. these bacteria come alive again and now proceed to wreak the greatest havoc possible on the lungs. It is this stage where you have the coughs, the bloody sputum, granulomas in various body organs e.t.c.
So, compare this to how enemies may want to invade a country. First a few of them arrive with genuine refugees or emigrants and set camp in the country. At the camp they recruit and recruit until their numbers are more than the security apparatus can handle and they spill over into the country and set up bases countrywide.
The government then responds with vehemence and sets up elite units and such. This causes the imprisonment and extrajudicial killings of many of them. The few that survive go underground and lie low. Here they wait. They wait until a day when things go wrong with the country e.g. coups, election violence, riots, popular uprisings e.t.c
They then come out from hiding and ingratiate themselves into the people and consequently into positions of power from where they can control everything without the need for hiding!

Of Development

I was reading Miguna Miguna's book: Peeling Back the Mask: A quest for Justice in Kenya and a comment Raila made got me thinking. In the book when he was defending his choice in the ministries he got under the coalition government mainly water, health, roads, agriculture etc, he told Miguna that these ministries were closer to the people and it is these ministries that interacted with the mwananchi more. It got me to thinking about development in kenya.
Everywhere  we see projects being started and sometimes completed, from roads, classrooms, water boreholes, ports and others. This is well and good but I tend to wonder what will happen to all these nice things in 10, 20 years to come. Will it be the same same story of slow degradation of once new things until 20 years from now you will look at what was once new and shake your head in disappointment?
We have a poor record of maintaining things. An example is about a tree nursery started by a district in Kenya. In the beginning the tree seedlings were beautiful with their lush greenery and health. The soil was tended to every day and they were selling like hot cakes because of their subsidized prices. And then the person overseeing the project got transferred to another place. What happened then was that the nursery was totally abandoned. It was like the workers thought that the nursery could take care of itself because it was so beautiful. Today dried tree stems dot the once beautiful nursery and the greatest irony of it is that the sign board that announced the project complete with the ministry name still stands tall as if saying: "I am responsible for this mess you see here.
There is need for the government to set up a maintenance department in each ministry/department to oversee maintenance of everything that the ministry has done and is responsible of. Some fickle minded people may say that it is a waste of money when that money could be used to start newer projects! This thinking is like that of a man who was crossing a  river. He looked for two rocks and he placed one in front of him in the river and stepped on it avoiding the rushing waters. He then took the other rock and placed it in front of the other and stepped on it. He then took the rock behind him and placed it in front of him and so on and so forth until he was crossing the river at good speed. When he got to the middle he suddenly remembered that the had forgotten a most important thing on the bank he had just left! So in order to get back to the side he had come from he had to stop his forward movement and start moving backward again. That is how development in Kenya is, whenever anyone in the government wants to use a facility or institution that was built previously, he finds that it is gone and he has to build it anew.
The second issue I thought about was how we run development in this country. In this country it is easy to see super highways while on the other hand people are trekking 2 km to buy water in Nairobi. It is easy to hear that a railway line has been funded from JKIA to the city center yet the feeder roads deep in the country side that supply food to Nairobi are un-passable. These leaders are ignoring the basic needs of the citizenry like food, water, housing, health and clothing while creating development projects that even if completed will help the common mwananchi at a later date or never at all! I thought that first you build the foundation first; a healthy, satisfied citizenry, and then you built the ports and the Konza's? And to cap it all, aren't these the responsible ministries that Raila got as part of the coalition government? Do the people at vision 2030 see us achieving it without first catering to the basic needs of the populace?