Lessons from Murang’a tunnel row

Assessed outside the realm of the usual CORD and Jubilee political antagonism, the debate generated by the Northern Water Collector Tunnel points to an emerging consciousness. One aspect of this consciousness is the rising ecological awareness; questioning the allocation of natural resources and the balance between conservation and development.

Citizens demand free prior and informed consent before ecologically sensitive resource utilisation and development projects are initiated. Secondly is the question of benefit sharing, particularly monetary proceeds emanating from utilisation of resources in which they have a legitimate stake. 

Naturally, some counties have complex ecosystem linkages, mutually accessing and benefiting from vital provisioning, regulating, cycling and cultural ecosystem service bundles. In other situations, inter-county ecosystem services linkages are symbiotic in nature. However, access to ecosystem service in other scenarios exhibits elements of parasitism.

A case in point is abstraction of water resources for supply to cities and towns outside the county where the resource is located. Although counties are not in economic growth and development competition with each other, it is important that benefit sharing mechanisms are considered where this kind of skewed resource allocation is discernible.

The question on compensation and rewards for water supply is not entirely new. It arose three years ago. Back then (which could still be their position today) Taita Taveta, Kilifi and Kwale counties felt that Mombasa County should offer compensation for water provision.

Similar undertones could be heard from counties in the Mt Kenya region and which have been amplified by the intrigues around the Northern Water Collector Tunnel brought to the fore by CORD leader Raila Odinga. Governor Ali Hassan Joho was emphatically opposed to the idea of payment. The argument advanced by Joho that residents of Taita-Taveta, Kilifi and Kwale have found employment in Mombasa makes economic sense. However, a form of barter trading in form of jobs for water is economically imprudent.

At around the same period, Coast Water Services Board decried the loss of revenue from water through leakages occasioned by old, poorly serviced pipes, illegal connections and default of payment by consumers. This mismanagement and wastage of water in Mombasa can easily be correlated to the fact that water is tapped ‘free’ from its neighbouring counties. It therefore naturally follows that should this vital commodity come at a price from the ‘supplier’, proper mechanisms for distribution and revenue collection would be put in place.

Another valid economic argument would claim that water supply to the cities promotes economic activities in the hubs of revenue generation (cities) which goes to the central government kitty. The revenue is in turn transferred to the counties through annual budgetary allocations as well as services offered by the national government directly to the counties.

But water should not be treated differently from other ecosystem services such as wildlife where county government hosting Game Parks and National Reserves get a share of tourism revenue. Both wildlife and water are national resources just like many other resources, but they are endowed to a particular area where a fraction of benefits needs to accrue as a consequence of custodianship.

The water supplier counties incur an opportunity cost in the provision of water to cities particularly. Most appreciably, some residents of these counties are faced with water scarcity while the commodity goes to augment the revenue base of a city county. The challenge then, in the wake of a new governance dispensation and consciousness on resource allocation, is to provoke the Kenyan society to acknowledge the value of ecosystem services.

The most effective, efficient and equitable way to address this gaping imbalance in the allocation of natures’ commodities is a benefit sharing arrangement negotiated as a Payment for Ecosystems Service (PES) scheme.

The devolved system of governance ought to come in handy in developing frameworks that can guide compensation and rewards for some crucial environmental commodities such as water. Trading in abstracted water between counties will play a crucial role in the success of the county governance system.

Therefore, Taita-Taveta, Kilifi, Kwale Kiambu, Muranga, Nyandarua, Turkana and other counties where water has/can be abstracted to support commercial activities elsewhere should be lobbying for constitutional amendments to put in place mechanisms for implementation of compensation and reward schemes.

This will demand realignment of the regulatory framework in the water sector where limiting institutional architecture and weak property rights will require to be addressed. Agencies such as the Water Resource Management Authority, Kenya Forest Service, Kenya water Towers Agency, Revenue Allocation Commission, and the Legislature can play a lead role in this.

It may also warrant establishment of a commission on ecosystem services and markets to develop new technical guidelines and science-based methods to assess the sources and flows of environmental services and markets mechanisms particularly in the water sector and the now emerging forest carbon markets.