By Wainaina Ngu'ngu
A consultative meeting for Sh8 billion Kieni water project was cancelled yesterday over Sh500,000 attendance allowance for an earlier meeting.
The stakeholders’ consultative meeting was set for the morning at the Outspan Hotel in Nyeri but only the area MP Nemesyus Warugongo and two representatives of residents turned up.
Warugongo said his constituents had protested after they were paid Sh500 instead of Sh1,500 during a consultative meeting with the project agency, the National Irrigation Board (NIB) and the consultants Coda and Partners last Monday.
Not enough
The MP said the consultants were supposed to pay travelling and lunch allowance to residents who had travelled to Nanyuki’s Bantu Lodge from the width and breadth of the semi-arid constituency.
“We told them Sh500 they paid the attendants was not even enough to cater for travelling from the furthest end of the constituency through Nyeri to Nanyuki,” the MP said yesterday.
Yesterday’s meeting at the Outspan Hotel would have involved NIB, the consultants, representatives of residents, the provincial administration as well as Kenya Wildlife Services (KWS) and Kenya Forest Services on whose land the seven planned dams would be built.
Warugongo said they would iron out the differences and convene the meeting at a later date. The Coda and Partners Engineer in charge of the project was not immediately available for comment.
The seven dams planned for the Kieni Mega Water Project will be located in Mt Kenya and Aberdare forests supplying water for irrigation and domestic use to Kieni’s 170,000 residents through gravity.
The MP said the dams would stretch for as long as two kilometres with the largest on Kariminu River holding 30 million cubic litres of water.
