The trouble with Kenya is our half-baked ideas

Spur-of-the-moment decisions and half-baked execution are the hallmark of Kenyan bureaucracy.

Government officials are notorious for making decisions from ivory towers, insulated from reality and informed only by ‘best practice’ aped entirely from the West or East. We engage all our gears in these policies only to suffer loss and see our institutions begin to waste away under the weight of unworkable schemes.

This past week we were treated to one such spectacle. The linking of teenage pregnancy rates to pornography. It was a reasonable leap in thought as indeed our teens receive more sex education from porn than they do from books, teachers and family.

This is not the kind of education that they need, but given the low levels of adult engagement with our teens, it is obvious that they will seek it where they can find it: in porn.

From that point, the information becomes the norm, affirmed by the second-in-command to advise them: their peers. As a result, we have a teenage population that is immune from our morals and religious codes.

Therefore the Government is right on the effects of pornography on our teens, but woefully wrong on how to handle it. Assuming that restricting websites is equal to restricting porn is to live in 1998 in your mind when it is 2018 on the calendar.

Cinderella land

Allow me to explain. Porn is everywhere on the internet - on Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, WhatsApp. There are also millions of porn websites tucked away in the darkest corners of the web. To even imagine that you can block all these sites is to live in Cinderella land.

It is simply impossible to do that - there are too many sites for one, and there are so many ways of delivering the content that it would be futile to try to stop it. The only logical path is not technical but much simpler: let parents parent. Let parents talk to their children about sex, let parents educate their own.

That way we don’t need a task force and extra taxpayer shillings to address teenage pregnancy; we just need common sense.

But common sense seems to be a scarce resource. We keep coming up with more and more half-baked ideas that we implement with zeal.

What inspired the idea of stopping matatus miles from town and allowing in even more jam-causing personal cars? I will tell you why; because the idea is half-thought-out and half-baked.

The half that is missing is that we have not yet deployed the bus rapid transport system, which is so easy to do and maintain that even Tanzania has one very functional one.

It is uncaring and inconsiderate to assume someone can make it from Eastlands to Westlands for work without the connecting matatus being in proximity.

We increased fares and now we want them to find even more money to make connections. This was a half-baked idea that was executed because someone insulated from reality made a decision.

Sweeping changes

This tendency is also true in our universities. In our haste to implement sweeping changes, we got rid of the parallel programme, all in an effort to have an all-inclusive tertiary education system. Again, a good idea as education should be accessible to all despite economic status. But now what we have is universities that used to handle 12,000 students now receiving half of those students and the Government only paying 30 per cent of the required sum to educate them.

This means that universities today have less money and fewer students, and as a result the infrastructure they had put in place is under threat of going to waste.

Some universities have trouble paying staff.

In some cases, the staff has gone for three or four months without pay. Surely, won’t half-baked universities produce even more half-baked graduates?

The same ‘half-bakedness’ is applied in the conferences we hold. There was TICAD and, most recently, the Blue Economy Conference. Social media was awash with questions on what a blue economy is.

The conference became a centre for taking selfies for the few who attended. There was been little pre- and post-publicity on the meeting.

Never mind that Kenya had the distinct pleasure of being the first to host such a conference and its potential was huge.

All this was as a result of the fact that we were not bothered to explain better, devolve the conference into mini county-based meetings before bringing the best of our nation to Nairobi for the international one.

Such lapses are what make good ideas half-baked.

In Kenya we have many good ideas. Botswana, I am told, runs its beef industry using a paper we prepared for the Kenya Meat Commission. We are a brilliant people and we have brilliant technocrats - now if we could only learn to bake.

Our national cake, which we often allude to, is woefully under-cooked. Always with a nice golden icing but its innards are still a mess of good ideas mixed with bad execution.

To move forward, we must be more practical, more sensitive to reality. Every so often, the powerful must walk a mile in our shoes, preferably from Muthurwa to town every week.

Mr Bichachi is a communication consultant [email protected]