By JAINDI KISERO
Posted Tuesday, April 13 2010 at 22:52

I commend the National Tax Payers Association (NTA) for the work they are doing on the Constituency Development Fund. Kenya needs more of such associations to keep tabs on what the State is doing at the grassroots level.

The strongest point of the association is its devolved structure; the fact that it has created a network of public-spirited grassroots of citizens all over the country to monitor projects by CDF committees.

The NTA is not your usual urban-based elite non-governmental organisations working from some carpeted office and operating under terms of reference drawn by some foreign foundation.

The work of this organisation stands out especially when you compare the quality of what it does to the work by all those NGOs that are mushrooming in their hundreds by the day: urban-based owner-occupier entities without convincing mandates.

The NTA has actual people you can count as belonging to its membership.

Indeed, most of what poses as development NGOs right now are one-man entities; mere consultancies but in name, they’re a donor-led phenomenon.

When NTA compiles a report of its findings, it is not the usual waffle from smooth-taking NGO official in power point presentations usually made before a group of selected donors in a hotel conference room in Nairobi.

NTA shows you real pictures: incomplete rural dispensaries, half-finished school buildings, haphazardly designed foot path bridges and incomplete cattle dips.

As usual, what the recent NTA report exposed about corruption and about how the CDF has emerged as the new instrument of patronage is what captured the headlines.

We have been tickled with the story about how a rural elite has emerged to capture the CDF and how the institution has been turned into another source of largesse.

Yet the truth of the matter is that there are other issues and trends you will find in NTA’s report that should interest anyone interested in rural development trends in Kenya.

As a people, we suffer from an attitude that equates rural development with concrete and buildings.

That is why we will raise millions of shillings to build cattle dips without thinking where the money to run it will come from; money to buy chemicals and maintain the facility.

We are always more than willing to raise money to fund capital expenditure to build new churches and construct new class rooms and dining halls — but will not bother about how to finance recurrent costs.

IN A RECENT ARTICLE IN OUR SISTER publication, Business Daily, reporter Alan Odhiambo counted several CDF-funded rural health centre buildings in a constituency in Kisumu area, which have remained non-operational for years simply because no nurses have been posted to the dispensaries.

Neither have medicines been supplied to these beautifully designed structures and buildings.

Our people just love new buildings. That is why rural Kenya is today literally littered with concrete: ugly unfinished buildings and bridges that when juxtaposed against the backdrop of the serene landscapes in rural Kenya, resembles cathedrals built in the middle of a desert.

CDF as an institution should be made to see the difference between quantitative growth and qualitative development.

Where my parents live, deep in the rural areas of South Nyanza, some Americans have been supporting an income- generating project by a women group.

The project has taken off very well. And, one of the activities the women’s group has invested in is a business in tents, plastic chairs and loud speakers. They rent them out during funerals, weddings and political meetings.

The business has been very profitable and they have been buying more and more chairs and tents to target the season of political meetings and gatherings for the upcoming constitutional referendum campaigns.

The questions I pose are the following: What is the point of leading a women’s group owned by rural folk into accumulating one asset after another when half of the membership are suffering from malnutrition?

Is rural development about accumulating assets for the women groups per se or is it about alleviating rural poverty?

What is the point of accumulating wealth that does not trickle down to the rural poor?

I bet that when officials from the National Statistics Bureau visit my village next time, they will count the assets — the chairs, the tents — and proceed to record an improvement in the standards of living of the people there.

History will record that the greatest mistake the CDF made was to make far less investment in human resources — family planning, nutrition and public health than in brick and mortar.

The Gross National Product increases, but not the Gross National Happiness.

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