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?