By Anyang’ Nyong’o
There used to be a common belief – at least when we were growing up as young men – that a family is as neat as its bathroom. When I stayed in Livingston Hall at Makerere University in the late 1960s, our hall was known as a hall of gentlemen.
Whenever ‘boxers’ visited us – women students from Mary Stuart Hall, which was built like a box – they were always impressed by how clean our bathrooms were. No wonder our hall dances were always oversubscribed by the fairer sex!
To keep our cities and towns clean and civilised, we need to invest in public facilities where people can report when nature calls. The idea of walking through dark alleys behind tall buildings where the stench of urine can blow your nostrils asunder is extremely nauseating and downright uncivilised.
In this day and age, it is a matter of simple planning and proper resource allocation to get such things done. If only city and municipal councils devoted an adequate percentage of their revenues to maintaining proper social amenities we would have clean cities and towns.
Such simple things can spoil the reputation of a city, as the difficulty to access a clean toilet when walking along the streets. In like manner, Nairobi almost became synonymous with a damping ground during the last years of the Nyayo era. Then rubbish littered the city everywhere, including the CBD. Today, although the CBD is reasonably well looked after, most residential areas still stink.
The risk of both communicable and non-communicable diseases spreading in our cities and towns will continue to bedevil our lives, as long as we ignore having proper social amenities and keeping our cities and towns clean.
The surest source of preventing health care is cleanliness. Washing hands before we eat is not enough. What about if the goat meat we are just about to have came from an animal, which, all its life, fed, on heaps of rotten matter in Dandora or Mathare?
The same concern we need to extend to our highways and major transport routes. I will forever be grateful to the many petrol stations along our highways, which are gracious enough to allow passengers to use their bathrooms every now and again.
Surely the petrol stations bear costs of keeping those bathrooms clean as a matter of corporate social responsibility.
The Kenya Highways Authority should realise that it is its duty to keep the highways both safe and clean. Part of the safety and cleanliness involves building, or causing to be built, proper social amenities at adequate intervals along the highways.
The six times I have been to the Peoples’ Republic of China I have always been impressed by their concern for having proper social amenities along highways, in cities and towns and even in some of the remotest villages. The Americans, on the other hand, rely on "rest places" and some motels. Both serve the same purpose.
In Kenya we have resigned our fate to the kindness and benevolence of a few petrol stations, which get oversubscribed by over pressed women and men whenever Nyar Ugenya and Eldoret Express arrive at their facilities at the same time.
As we move into county governments, that county will be best which takes up the issue of social amenities in public places and transport routes as its first agenda.
It will not cost much, especially if a public-private model is also considered. It will be obviously a "quick win" which will be cashed in by the governor in the legitimacy account.
A city or a town can be clean but when people do not see where they are going at night, or how they can find their way to social amenities at night, then cleanliness alone does not help them. Lighting our cities, towns and highways must also be our agenda as we move into our next stage of development as a civilised people.
When Esther Passaris came up with the ‘Adopt A Light’ idea I have always wondered why she was so viciously fought by some established interests. Yet that idea seemed very good to make our cities and towns more amenable to human movement and habitation at night.
In any case lights are a source of security as we are currently seeing in Nairobi’s CBD. What is so difficult in extending the CBD lighting programme to the whole of Nairobi City, and avoiding the insecurity that arises in certain corners of the city simply because they are dark?
Obviously at the present rate by which KPLC bills people even bodies like the City Council of Nairobi can find their budgets constrained were they to embark on this ambitious public lighting enterprise.
High energy charges are not only bad for doing business they are also detrimental to the lives of the people for which business is done.
In my humble view, Kenya’s future is imperiled by the tremendous increase in energy costs. The increase in costs simply amount to a national crisis and should be viewed as such.
The writer is Minister for Medical Services
