Ideas & Debate

Dams mess just shows graft war isn’t for real

dams

When dams are between 150 and 500 percent above base estimates, there’s a cash cow in the background. PHOTO | FOTOSEARCH

Without prejudice, putative evidence suggests two multi-purpose dam enterprises - Arror and Kimwarer – do not currently exist as physical objects. But let’s think bigger, about Vision 2030, “katiba” and water.

Water matters for Kenyans in four simple ways — hydro-power, irrigation, domestic and industrial use, and flood control. Actually, that’s wrong, it’s not water that helps, but dams, or more seriously, capture, storage and distribution (including transfers between locations, known as “catchment areas”). No surprises “water for life by 2000” was our public service mantra in the days of different government.

Fast forward to Vision 2030’s vision of the water (our fresh) and sanitation (our dirty) sector “to ensure water and improved sanitation availability and access to all by 2030”. Add our Article 43 constitutional demands for “accessible and adequate sanitation” and “clean and safe water in adequate quantities”.

With Vision 2030, we accepted Kenya as “a water-scarce country with renewable freshwater per capita at 647 cubic metres against a UN recommended 1,000 per capita minimus... compared (terribly) with neighbouring Uganda’s and Tanzania’s per capita levels of 2,940 m3 and 2,696 m3 respectively”.

It is striking that our “black gold” - oil - is nationally prioritised over our potential 75-year Turkana water reservoir. Consequence follows choice as easily as night follows day. Add wind power from Lake Turkana’s fantastic natural geography that a humble teacher messaged me a generation ago; then consider green energy as now being subservient to second-hand “diesel cartels”. Disturbing? Yep!

But this is a very short story about water. It begins with a plan in context of our “mega-project agenda”. From water master plans we will next time move to least cost energy development plans, roads “vision xxx” road maps and everything else that inspires tomfoolery and malfeasance. Water is simply a start.

Let’s torture some data into submission. The dams we hear about are not random. In fact, they are a big part of Kenya’s national water master plan to 2030 written for us by Japan (JICA), not some election manifesto. Here are a couple of things the plan says, based on its 200-plus page executive summary.

On urban development, we’re talking 137 centres for new water supply, and 93 centres for fresh sewerage. Add 34 viable large-scale irrigation projects. Throw in irrigation plans for every county, plus 10 transfer facilities to transport water from point X to Y across Kenya.

Factor in 14 dam plans expected to deliver 1,400 megawatts of new hydro-power, including Arror and Kimwarer (total 100 megawatts). The big boy here is the High Grand Falls Dam; half of that total.

Financial estimates were Sh3 trillion in total development costs, and Sh 80 billion in annual running costs all the way to 2030, including about 18,000 (not 120,000 as some politicos suggest) small dams and water pans, and around 5,000 boreholes. This master plan was quietly launched in 2014.

Dams, you say? The 59 dams in the master plan were supposed to cost about Sh 500 billion, roughly Sh 9 billion a dam. Yet, one credible estimate tells us that the Jubilee administration spent Sh 160 billion on dams during its first term. A “Googled” collation of recent and ongoing dam projects in Kenya comes out at over 100 in number, many in “feasibility or design”.

Let’s delve further. Of currently known cost estimates versus originals in the master plan, of which only 21 of the original 59 projects apparently remain (with almost 30 new projects since), average costs have quadrupled. Think Sh 32 billion per dam versus Sh 9 billion originally. Talk about “sticking to the plan”.

So Sh5 billion Itare will now cost Sh28 billion, Sh 89 billion High Grand Falls just had a winning tender controversially rejected at Sh200 billion, a couple of Kiambu dams (Ndaragu and Karimeno II) have 500 percent variations on original cost, and Thwake is now ten times the original estimate (despite a complete detailed design). When the press reports 33 dam projects as off-schedule, we wonder.

Without prejudice, again, it’s fair to question our approach to public infrastructure investment. When dams are between 150 and 500 percent above base estimates, there’s a cash cow in the background. Arror and Kimwarer are plausible culprits, but there’s clearly much more than meets the eye.

Is our graft war for real? Let’s look at least cost energy investment next time, then move to roads.