The year was 1986. Former President Moi challenged the University of Nairobi to manufacture a car, “however ugly or slow”. The team responsible comprised experts from Kenya Railways, Kenya Polytechnic, the Department of Defence, the National Council of Science and Technology, and Nairobi University.
The cars were to be an example of how Kenya, then a much-mouthed “island of peace”, could use locally produced materials and expertise to its advantage, industrially speaking.
Four years later, the president launched the cars at the Kasarani Sports Complex in a televised ceremony. It was a comedy of errors. The jalopies could not even peddle a lap of honour around the stadium, much to the embarrassment of government mandarins.
But, undaunted, the Moi administration went ahead to establish the Nyayo Motor Corporation for mass production at an estimated cost of Sh7.8 billion — initially forking out Sh750 million to vroom the project.
Of the 11 plants required for the ambitious undertaking, the government only managed to form the General Machining Complex, starring advanced computerised equipment, lathe machines, and a ductile iron foundry that, 25 years on, remains the largest of its kind on the continent.
Come the late 1980s and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank demanded that the Moi government sell off non-performing parastatals as a condition for foreign aid. That, in turn, meant no funds for the Nyayo Car, despite an annual allocation that was never disbursed.
The Nyayo bus service
The history of the transport sector in Kenya stretches back to 1934, when London-based Overseas Trading Company (OTC) introduced the first buses — a fleet of 13 on 12 routes.
But the 1970s saw an upsurge in the number of matatu operators when President Jomo Kenyatta allowed private ownership of transport vehicles to compete liberally with established outfits as part of encouraging indigenous entrepreneurship.
Then, in one inspired moment in 1986, President Moi established the Nyayo buses to provide affordable transport for Kenyans. At the time, the Kenya Bus Service (KBS) had a franchise agreement with the City Council of Nairobi which the introduction of the Nyayo buses contravened. The buses were, in essence, competing with KBS and matatus.
The Nyayo buses were a donation from the Dutch government in 1980, and were initially meant for transporting personnel of the National Youth Service (NYS), a paramilitary youth organisation. By 1988, the service operated by NYS boasted a fleet of 89 buses, including Isuzu, Leyland, and the then famous DAF brand.
The service became too big for NYS, hence the formation of the Nyayo Bus Service in 1988. Within a few years, the new parastatal received more buses from the Italian, Dutch, and Belgian governments, gassing the fleet to over 300 buses that plied routes in Nairobi, Mombasa, Nakuru, Eldoret, Kisii, and Meru.
Lack of experience and oversight saw the corporation screech to a halt in mid-1995, when the Controller and Auditor-General declared Nyayo Bus Service insolvent.
Nyayo School Milk programme
Under Kenyatta, Moi had been a non-entity; many Kenyans did not even know his name. So his first move was to cut a populist figure,” writes Blaine Harden in Africa: Dispatches from a Fragile Continent.
“He travelled constantly around rural Kenya, dropping on every tribe, introducing a free milk programme for school children…. He made a particular effort to identify with the wananchi. Populism sold well.”
All primary school children in Kenya were to get at least a packet of milk weekly. This programme, established in May 1979 under the Ministry of Education, was one of the many initiated to popularise Moi’s presidency.
Over three million children aged below 13 benefited despite scares here and there that the milk had been laced with chemicals to render children in Central Kenya infertile.
The Nyayo milk programme was not confined to schools, though. Health centres also creamed from the largesse, as was evident in 1987 when Samburu district commissioner Zachary Ogongo distributed 450 cartons of milk to patients at Maralal District Hospital and wished them “a quick recovery”, while his Nanyuki counterpart, John Nandasaba, donated 100 cartons to Nanyuki Children’s Home.
Towards the late 1980s, the supply of Nyayo milk was irregular. At times it arrived in schools when already expired, and there was no warning when Maziwa ya Nyayo powdered to a halt.
Nyayo Wards
Constructed to provide affordable and accessible health care to Kenyans, the Nyayo Wards were a healthy idea which, like most Nyayo-era projects, developed mismanagement tumours, financial tetanus, and sick foresight.
The Nyayo Ward at Pumwani, for instance, is yet to be completed. It housed a family inside the windowless desolate structure opposite Pumwani Maternity Hospital (above) for years. Today, it has a corrugated iron roof fence surrounded by a heap of garbage and dwarfed by the high-rise residential buildings sprouting all around the area.
For financial implications of such neglect, consider the Embu Provincial General Hospital, which is to be renovated at a cost of Sh630 million so that “it can offer referral services and treat trauma cases”, with Sh180 million meant for the purchase of medical equipment.
The institution has a Nyayo Ward meant to ease congestion, but which stalled at the foundation stage.
Turkwel Gorge Hydro-electric Power Station
Turkwel Dam is located on the Turkwel River in northwestern Kenya, 550 kilometres from Nairobi, and stands as a project that never ran to full capacity.
It was nicknamed the “whitest of white elephants”, considering that it cost almost four times its initial projection.
The project, a multipurpose initiative aimed at developing hydropower, agriculture, fishery, and tourism, was constructed from 1986 to 1991, under the control of the Kerio Valley Development Authority.
Mr Achim Kratz, then chief delegate of the European Economy Community (EEC) in Kenya, wrote a stinging memorandum to the EEC headquarters in Brussels, lamenting the corruption surrounding the deal and saying the “dam was not in Kenya’s best interest.” Shortly afterwards, Mr Kratz was transferred to Lesotho.
More than 800 people were moved to pave the way for the construction of Kenya’s largest dam, with little, if any, compensation. Never mind its damage to the environment, like upsetting River Turkwel’s seasonal flooding and the ripple effect on the ecology of the area, adversely affecting vegetation on which the Turkana fed their livestock during drought.
The 115-metre dam was to open up 30,000 acres of land for irrigation despite the failure of such schemes to protect the Turkana against famine in the previous decade.
The “stinking scandal” was also built on an earthquake fault line, and would “silt up in less than 50 years”, according to feasibility studies at the time.
When former President Moi opened it in October 1993, its reservoir was less than quarter-full. Today, Kenya’s largest hydro-power plant generates 106 megawatts (half its capacity), a 10 per cent contribution to the national grid.
The dam, which Harden calls “a bastard issue of indifference and greed”, was dogged by controversy: No environmental impact assessment study was carried out although Norway funded one.
Also, Kenya has a policy of competitive bidding for international tenders. No open bids were effected in the case of Turkwel Gorge. The government signed a $270 million, (Sh25 billion at current exchange rates) contract with French contractors, according to figures from the EEC at the time.
That was twice the actual figures, and it was to cost more “because of large kickbacks paid to senior government officials”, Harden says. Despite state-controlled media calling it “a landmark in Kenya’s economic development… a big step forward”, Turkwel Gorge “was the richest dirty deal in Kenya’s history”.
It was the era of unbridled greed
Besides projects that did not make economic sense in the long term, others did make cents to well-connected wheeler-dealers in the short term. In 1987, some senior government officials imported 33 million gunny sacks, which were sold to the government-owned National Cereals and Produce Board for a killing.
The Kenya Bag and Cordage Company that manufactured gunny sacks lost its local market, occasioned by the flooding of the 33 million bags. It went broke, kicking 3,000 workers to the curb.
That aside, unclassified diplomatic cables to Washington from the US Embassy on August 8, 1988, (before WikiLeaks) were to the effect that “the gap between local and world sugar prices allowed politically-connected importers to reap huge profits by inundating the government-controlled distribution system with large stocks of sugar that helped bankrupt the only two privately-owned sugar companies”.
At the time, Kenya boasted — on paper — one of the most progressive investment policies in Africa. But it was releasing 15,000 job seekers annually into a market that could only generate 3,000 jobs, noted World Bank’s Industrial Sector Adjustment Programme of April 1988.
Clearly, to say Kenya went to the dogs in the Moi years is to insult man’s best friend.
We lived to Tell is a book by the Citizens For Justice, which documents experiences of Kenyans
who went through the infamous Nyayo House Torture Chambers. They tell harrowing stories of
scary hounding by security agents, arrests, torture, jail and detention. Their experiences reveal an
intolerant, oppressive and paranoid government that could not stand criticism.
Surprisingly, the government’s flagrant disregard for the law and the blatant violation of the
survivors’ and victims’ human rights happened in the glare and watchful eyes of the donor and
international community.
Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES) supported the development and publication of We Lived to Tell.
The Foundation supports initiatives that promote democracy and the rule of law. We support the
promotion of a tolerant culture where dialogue is encouraged as one of the ways of resolving
thorny issues. We share in the declaration of the survivors that what they went through “should
never happen again in Kenya!” However, the contents and opinions expressed in this book are
those of the Citizens For Justice and not of FES.
Moi’s ‘kids’ are in power and from the look Kanu is back with a different fashion. They claim to fight for democracy but it the opposite. Where were they during Njoya’s trying moments.
Maasai Morans has Woken Up !Here They are telling PNU Mafia Thugs With a Big No>To settling Idps on their Land>http://www.ktnkenya.tv/new/?page_id=1&id=2000033977
I think people will simply stop having big families and go for the 1 kid families.
The cost of living is skyrocketing.
1 tomato is 15 bob.
1 mango is 40 bob.
1 orange in 30 bob
1 litre milk is 80 bob.
all supermarket prices.
So feetsubishi is becoming popular.
_________________
The Premier Real Estate and Property guide in Kenya
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5oxPp7eM8A&feature=player_embedded#at=54
Kweli Kenya is a failed -state!
White elephants from the Nyayo Era
By KAMAU MUTUNGA kmutunga@ke.nationmedia.com
The Nyayo Pioneer Car
The year was 1986. Former President Moi challenged the University of Nairobi to manufacture a car, “however ugly or slow”. The team responsible comprised experts from Kenya Railways, Kenya Polytechnic, the Department of Defence, the National Council of Science and Technology, and Nairobi University.
The cars were to be an example of how Kenya, then a much-mouthed “island of peace”, could use locally produced materials and expertise to its advantage, industrially speaking.
Four years later, the president launched the cars at the Kasarani Sports Complex in a televised ceremony. It was a comedy of errors. The jalopies could not even peddle a lap of honour around the stadium, much to the embarrassment of government mandarins.
But, undaunted, the Moi administration went ahead to establish the Nyayo Motor Corporation for mass production at an estimated cost of Sh7.8 billion — initially forking out Sh750 million to vroom the project.
Of the 11 plants required for the ambitious undertaking, the government only managed to form the General Machining Complex, starring advanced computerised equipment, lathe machines, and a ductile iron foundry that, 25 years on, remains the largest of its kind on the continent.
Come the late 1980s and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank demanded that the Moi government sell off non-performing parastatals as a condition for foreign aid. That, in turn, meant no funds for the Nyayo Car, despite an annual allocation that was never disbursed.
The Nyayo bus service
The history of the transport sector in Kenya stretches back to 1934, when London-based Overseas Trading Company (OTC) introduced the first buses — a fleet of 13 on 12 routes.
But the 1970s saw an upsurge in the number of matatu operators when President Jomo Kenyatta allowed private ownership of transport vehicles to compete liberally with established outfits as part of encouraging indigenous entrepreneurship.
Then, in one inspired moment in 1986, President Moi established the Nyayo buses to provide affordable transport for Kenyans. At the time, the Kenya Bus Service (KBS) had a franchise agreement with the City Council of Nairobi which the introduction of the Nyayo buses contravened. The buses were, in essence, competing with KBS and matatus.
The Nyayo buses were a donation from the Dutch government in 1980, and were initially meant for transporting personnel of the National Youth Service (NYS), a paramilitary youth organisation. By 1988, the service operated by NYS boasted a fleet of 89 buses, including Isuzu, Leyland, and the then famous DAF brand.
The service became too big for NYS, hence the formation of the Nyayo Bus Service in 1988. Within a few years, the new parastatal received more buses from the Italian, Dutch, and Belgian governments, gassing the fleet to over 300 buses that plied routes in Nairobi, Mombasa, Nakuru, Eldoret, Kisii, and Meru.
Lack of experience and oversight saw the corporation screech to a halt in mid-1995, when the Controller and Auditor-General declared Nyayo Bus Service insolvent.
Nyayo School Milk programme
Under Kenyatta, Moi had been a non-entity; many Kenyans did not even know his name. So his first move was to cut a populist figure,” writes Blaine Harden in Africa: Dispatches from a Fragile Continent.
“He travelled constantly around rural Kenya, dropping on every tribe, introducing a free milk programme for school children…. He made a particular effort to identify with the wananchi. Populism sold well.”
All primary school children in Kenya were to get at least a packet of milk weekly. This programme, established in May 1979 under the Ministry of Education, was one of the many initiated to popularise Moi’s presidency.
Over three million children aged below 13 benefited despite scares here and there that the milk had been laced with chemicals to render children in Central Kenya infertile.
The Nyayo milk programme was not confined to schools, though. Health centres also creamed from the largesse, as was evident in 1987 when Samburu district commissioner Zachary Ogongo distributed 450 cartons of milk to patients at Maralal District Hospital and wished them “a quick recovery”, while his Nanyuki counterpart, John Nandasaba, donated 100 cartons to Nanyuki Children’s Home.
Towards the late 1980s, the supply of Nyayo milk was irregular. At times it arrived in schools when already expired, and there was no warning when Maziwa ya Nyayo powdered to a halt.
Nyayo Wards
Constructed to provide affordable and accessible health care to Kenyans, the Nyayo Wards were a healthy idea which, like most Nyayo-era projects, developed mismanagement tumours, financial tetanus, and sick foresight.
The Nyayo Ward at Pumwani, for instance, is yet to be completed. It housed a family inside the windowless desolate structure opposite Pumwani Maternity Hospital (above) for years. Today, it has a corrugated iron roof fence surrounded by a heap of garbage and dwarfed by the high-rise residential buildings sprouting all around the area.
For financial implications of such neglect, consider the Embu Provincial General Hospital, which is to be renovated at a cost of Sh630 million so that “it can offer referral services and treat trauma cases”, with Sh180 million meant for the purchase of medical equipment.
The institution has a Nyayo Ward meant to ease congestion, but which stalled at the foundation stage.
Turkwel Gorge Hydro-electric Power Station
Turkwel Dam is located on the Turkwel River in northwestern Kenya, 550 kilometres from Nairobi, and stands as a project that never ran to full capacity.
It was nicknamed the “whitest of white elephants”, considering that it cost almost four times its initial projection.
The project, a multipurpose initiative aimed at developing hydropower, agriculture, fishery, and tourism, was constructed from 1986 to 1991, under the control of the Kerio Valley Development Authority.
Mr Achim Kratz, then chief delegate of the European Economy Community (EEC) in Kenya, wrote a stinging memorandum to the EEC headquarters in Brussels, lamenting the corruption surrounding the deal and saying the “dam was not in Kenya’s best interest.” Shortly afterwards, Mr Kratz was transferred to Lesotho.
More than 800 people were moved to pave the way for the construction of Kenya’s largest dam, with little, if any, compensation. Never mind its damage to the environment, like upsetting River Turkwel’s seasonal flooding and the ripple effect on the ecology of the area, adversely affecting vegetation on which the Turkana fed their livestock during drought.
The 115-metre dam was to open up 30,000 acres of land for irrigation despite the failure of such schemes to protect the Turkana against famine in the previous decade.
The “stinking scandal” was also built on an earthquake fault line, and would “silt up in less than 50 years”, according to feasibility studies at the time.
When former President Moi opened it in October 1993, its reservoir was less than quarter-full. Today, Kenya’s largest hydro-power plant generates 106 megawatts (half its capacity), a 10 per cent contribution to the national grid.
The dam, which Harden calls “a bastard issue of indifference and greed”, was dogged by controversy: No environmental impact assessment study was carried out although Norway funded one.
Also, Kenya has a policy of competitive bidding for international tenders. No open bids were effected in the case of Turkwel Gorge. The government signed a $270 million, (Sh25 billion at current exchange rates) contract with French contractors, according to figures from the EEC at the time.
That was twice the actual figures, and it was to cost more “because of large kickbacks paid to senior government officials”, Harden says. Despite state-controlled media calling it “a landmark in Kenya’s economic development… a big step forward”, Turkwel Gorge “was the richest dirty deal in Kenya’s history”.
It was the era of unbridled greed
Besides projects that did not make economic sense in the long term, others did make cents to well-connected wheeler-dealers in the short term. In 1987, some senior government officials imported 33 million gunny sacks, which were sold to the government-owned National Cereals and Produce Board for a killing.
The Kenya Bag and Cordage Company that manufactured gunny sacks lost its local market, occasioned by the flooding of the 33 million bags. It went broke, kicking 3,000 workers to the curb.
That aside, unclassified diplomatic cables to Washington from the US Embassy on August 8, 1988, (before WikiLeaks) were to the effect that “the gap between local and world sugar prices allowed politically-connected importers to reap huge profits by inundating the government-controlled distribution system with large stocks of sugar that helped bankrupt the only two privately-owned sugar companies”.
At the time, Kenya boasted — on paper — one of the most progressive investment policies in Africa. But it was releasing 15,000 job seekers annually into a market that could only generate 3,000 jobs, noted World Bank’s Industrial Sector Adjustment Programme of April 1988.
Clearly, to say Kenya went to the dogs in the Moi years is to insult man’s best friend.
We Lived To Tell – The Nyayo House Story
We lived to Tell is a book by the Citizens For Justice, which documents experiences of Kenyans
who went through the infamous Nyayo House Torture Chambers. They tell harrowing stories of
scary hounding by security agents, arrests, torture, jail and detention. Their experiences reveal an
intolerant, oppressive and paranoid government that could not stand criticism.
Surprisingly, the government’s flagrant disregard for the law and the blatant violation of the
survivors’ and victims’ human rights happened in the glare and watchful eyes of the donor and
international community.
Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES) supported the development and publication of We Lived to Tell.
The Foundation supports initiatives that promote democracy and the rule of law. We support the
promotion of a tolerant culture where dialogue is encouraged as one of the ways of resolving
thorny issues. We share in the declaration of the survivors that what they went through “should
never happen again in Kenya!” However, the contents and opinions expressed in this book are
those of the Citizens For Justice and not of FES.
http://library.fes.de/pdf-files/bueros/kenia/01828.pdf
Moi’s ‘kids’ are in power and from the look Kanu is back with a different fashion. They claim to fight for democracy but it the opposite. Where were they during Njoya’s trying moments.
Reblogged this on samiahdotco and commented:
timothy njoya on saba saba day…