Author: A4KENYA

Going green in these harsh climes
By MWAURA SAMORA msamora@ke.nationmedia.com
Posted Wednesday, February 29 2012 at 16:25

Buildings account for at least 40 per cent of a country’s energy consumption, and one of the best ways to cut down on these huge energy needs lies in our roofs and walls. Discerning architects could create energy-saving concepts because those same walls and roofs are the links between the building and the outer environment

The collective attention of conservationists was last month directed towards Gigiri, Nairobi, where the United Nations Environmental Programme’s (Unep) global ministerial environmental forum debated ways to make the world as “green” as possible. Before this, Unep had already declared 2012 the International Year of Sustainable Energy for All.

But while the world’s attention is fixed on these lofty plans on how to reverse the wanton destruction of global habitats in years past and prevent — what scientists have called an ‘environmental Armageddon’ — a local architect says the journey to a sustainable world starts with the small steps of adjusting our building styles.

“Green architecture is not only aesthetically appealing and environmentally friendly, but also economically viable in the long run since it embraces methods that save on power and water usage,” explains Francis Gichuhi, an architectural consultant who specialises in designing green buildings.

“New structures are rapidly adopting this concept, not just because of its resource-friendly nature and cost-cutting, but also the now popular global obsession with matters green.”

Sustainable construction is a relatively new concept in Kenya, where the first truly green building is the Unep headquarters in Gigiri. Although several other projects are underway across the city, the Unep building remains one of the greenest beacons across Africa.

Through his company, Prism Designs Africa, Gichuhi has drawn from his 11-year experience of designing green houses across Africa and parts of India to come up with a concept called Diamond Eco-House, where one can complete an entire bungalow at a competitive rate by building in stages of one room at a time as long as one has a piece of land.

“One only needs to have a piece of land and Sh80,000 to get a one-room house in three weeks,” explains the architect, who says the house is called Diamond because of the shape it takes when all the rooms are complete. “The reason the house is affordable is that it utilises interlocking stabilised soil blocks which are much cheaper than ordinary stones.”

The blocks are made of sand that is pressed to a rock-hard status using a machine, hence it’s much cheaper than the ordinary stone while having the same hardiness and hardness. Although the stabilised soil blocks are better suited for residential buildings that rarely exceed one or two storeys, they are recommended for in-fills and partitions in high-rise commercial structures.
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“Another economic plus for using the stabilised soil blocks is the fact that you don’t need plaster since the blocks are made in such a way that they join by interlocking,” he observes. “The blocks can also be made on site if the soil quality is good, which, besides lowering the costs further, increases environmental relevance since no carbon is released during transportation.”

Unlike most standard homes, the Diamond Eco-House has a twin waste-water piping system, with one carrying foul water from the toilet while the other drains the grey water from kitchen sinks and washbasins. Gichuhi points out that while the foul water is hard to recycle since it needs complex specialised treatment, the grey water can be re-used — after simple filtration — in the toilet and to irrigate gardens.

“A 10-storey building with 50 tenants per floor, each using five litres of water per day for non-drinking purposes, leads to a total water consumption of around 2,500 litres on a daily basis,” the architect notes. “Recycling 30 per cent of this amount across the Nairobi Central Business District, for instance, would translate into hundreds of thousands of shillings in savings besides conserving many litres of the precious commodity”.

This, combined with run-off collections, which he says should be made mandatory for every building, would go very far in ensuring residents’ water needs are met even when the taps run dry.

Unfortunately, no building in the city has implemented an efficient recycling system, which means all the water flushed down the drains goes to waste.

According to Green Building Workgroup, an American environmental architecture organisation, buildings account for at least 40 per cent of a country’s energy consumption. This percentage is higher in countries that experience extreme winter conditions in the Northern Hemisphere.

One of the biggest solutions to cutting down drastically the energy consumption of a building, according to Gichuhi, lies in its roof and walls. These are the main areas where the architect can create energy-saving concepts because walls and roofs are the links between the building and the outer environment.

“When called upon to adopt green designs, one of the options is a technology called building integrated photovoltaic (BIP) system, where solar panels replace a piece of the wall, window or roof,” he says.

“While the solar panel still serves the purpose of the part it has replaced, it has the added value of generating energy.”

However, the popularity of this concept is still very low because solar panels are relatively expensive compared to other building materials. This is because, Gichuhi laments, they have to be imported, mostly from Asian countries, despite the fact that the technology required to make them is very basic and simple.

“In China, for instance, by the time children complete their primary studies, they are able to cobble together a fully functioning solar cell using a simple wire and a piece of silicon,” the architect says.

“By the time they get to university as architects, they have accumulated enough technical know-how to design complex photovoltaic designs that are exported to Africa for sale.”

Although there is no institution in Kenya that teaches students how to make solar panels, tutorial materials explaining the step-by-step procedure abound online, and these, Gichuhi says, should be used by the government to popularise the technology through the education system.

“The concept should be legislated so that every citizen who has electricity in their house is required by law to contribute power to the grid by mounting solar panels on their roof. This will help the country move away from weather-reliant power generation methods and reduce the frequent power blackouts.”

In Germany, one of the world’s greenest economies, elaborate government initiatives have triggered a national interest in green energy production by the citizenry in the last five years. As a result, 50 per cent of solar energy production, which contributes around three per cent to the national grid, is in the hands of private individuals.
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Through a system known as feed-in tariffs, grid operators are required by law to pay for renewable energy supplied to them by citizens for a fixed price in a period of 15 to 20 years, and this has created a surge in the production of renewable energy by citizens. The payment can either be in cash or electricity bill subsidies.

The German renewable energy production policy is backed by a legal requirement where every new house built should not waste more than 75kWh/m2 per year. With no meaningful energy-saving measures put in place in many Kenyan houses, it is obvious that we waste far much more than this annually.

“Assuming a metre square of solar panel in Kenya produces approximately 2kW per day after 10 hours of daylight — Kenya is right in the tropics — if just one per cent of the country’s total surface area is put under this system, it would produce approximately 14,000 MW daily,” Gichuhi analyses. “Nairobi consumes around 5,000 MW on a daily basis. Therefore the total energy generated by solar from one per cent of the country’s total surface area in a day can sustain the capital’s total energy needs for three days.”

Taking into consideration that Kenya enjoys more hours of sunshine per day than Germany, such a people-driven power production programme would be a huge boost to Kenya Power’s output.

“The blackouts that Kenyans have to endure on a daily basis would be drastically reduced while individuals and corporate entities will have their power bills drastically reduced.”

Another green initiative that high-rise building designers are gradually embracing is the concept of rooftop gardens, or “green roofs”. Although still not very popular in Kenya, Gichuhi says architectural consultants have been selling the idea aggressively to investors.

“Besides reducing carbon footprints and regulating the buildings’ temperatures, roof gardens improve the scenery by cutting the monotony of run-on mabatis and tiles,” he observes. “For these reasons, high-rise developers should be compelled to dedicate a fraction of their buildings to a garden, especially in the roofs.”

To jump-start the culture of green roofs in Kenyan urban centres, he says the up-coming Konza and Tatu cities should stipulate that every roof should have some greenery. “If need be, the Ruiru and Mavoko county councils, under whose jurisdiction these mega projects fall, should draft a law that will make green roofs mandatory,” Gichuhi adds.

Through simulations, Japanese scientists established that, if 50 per cent of high-rise buildings in Tokyo had roof gardens, they would reduce their internal air temperatures by almost a degree, with owners saving about $1.6 million dollars (Sh128 million) per day in electricity bills.

Construction of roof gardens is only possible where the roofing is flat, a concept that most green architects advocate for because, besides the ability to accommodate a garden, flat roofs also use less timber, hence reducing the number of trees that have to be felled.

Unlike in Southern Africa, where roofing styles are influenced by traditional flat-roofed concepts, East, Central and Western African building designs have high roof pitches which are more costly.

“Most of our styles follow the 1967 Building Code, which was heavily influenced by Europeans, whose roofs are made steeper in order to shed off snow during winter,” he says. “My hope is that the current Building Code that is awaiting approval by Parliament is drafted to reflect methods that are appropriate to our environment.”

Francis Gichuhi Kamau, Architect.
www.a4architect.com
info@a4architect.com
0721410684

Solution to Kenya’s Poverty.

The level of poverty in Kenya, just like in many other African countries, keep rising by the day.

This has thrown the social fabric into disarray resulting to issues such as the recent Domestic violence cases in Nyeri and rampant cases of alcohol abuse among jobless youth through out the republic.

The jobless Kenyan men have tried anything possible under the harsh tropical sun to eke out a living. Unfortunately, the harder they try the dryer their pockets become. This is because the political leadership has not been knowledgeable when signing contracts with International Finance institutions. This has resulted in Kenya, just like many other African countries, getting the shorter end of the stick in the bargain.

The contracts signed by Kenyan political leadership have resulted in endless debt and over consumption of unnecessary imported goods and services, hence very high inflation.

No matter how hard the Mkokoteni pusher works, no matter how many tones the woman who makes ballast out of rock using bare hands make, a large chunk of their money will go to servicing a foreign debt they have no idea how it came about.

Solution. No need to reinvent the wheel.

Over the years, research has been done as to why African countries remain poor no matter how hard their citizenry work.

The research points out to African leaders signing contracts that they don’t understand, resulting to International Finance Institutions giving large loans that take forever to be serviced, and contracts that restrict local consumption of goods and services. This creates inflation of which the benefactors are thee International Finance Institutions.

This book written by Graham Hancock, Lords of Poverty  has researched into this issue and should be a must read for any one aspiring into political leadership in Kenya.

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/book-review-lords-of-poverty-the-power-prestige-and-corruption-of-the-international-aid-business-by-graham-hancock/

 

Another book written by John Perkins in 2004, Confessions of a Political Hitman, explains in detail how Political leadership in African countries is tricked into ensuring their citizens will forever live in abject poverty no matter how hard they work.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit_Man

Wikipedia explains the book as below

====According to Perkins, he began writing Confessions of an Economic Hit Man in the 1980s, but “threats or bribes always convinced [him] to stop.”

According to his book, Perkins’ function was to convince the political and financial leadership of underdeveloped countries to accept enormous development loans from institutions like the World Bank and USAID. ====

Kenya situation.2012 elections.

Recently, a 2012 presidential aspirant asked Kenyans to give views on which issues they would want changed and improved once he gets into power. This is the very first step in liberalizing Kenyans and Africans in General. Research has shown that knowledge is crowd sourced as opposed to monopolized by a few. By acknowledging this fact, Kenyans will raise issues that are of priority to them as opposed to situations whereby the International Finance institutions mentioned in the John Perkins book Confessions of a Political Hitman, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit_Man   through the Kenyan political leadership, and guide into Kenyan citizenry priorities.

The Kenyan political leadership should go further and upload all international contracts between Kenya and these International Finance institutions so that Kenyan citizens can discuss and deliberate .The discussions should then guide the Parliamentary committees under whose jurisdiction the subject matter lies. This way, the collective intelligence of Kenyans will be tapped into assisting the political leadership make the best decisions for Kenya.

This essay written by Hayek, Friedrich A.(1899-1992) published in 1945, has stood the test of time to prove that the best way to get knowledge is through crowd sourcing.

http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw1.html

 

Conclusion.

Poverty in Kenya and other African countries contributes to tribal violence and social fabric disharmony and decay.

Poverty in Kenya and other African countries is caused by political leadership not being able to tap into crowd sourcing collective Kenyan intelligence while dealing with International Finance institutions contracts. This collective intelligence can now easily be tapped through using the internet and social media networks.

Already a leading presidential candidate has spearheaded this method to collect diverse views which will enable better Governance. Other political leaders in Kenya should learn from this and follow suit.

This crowd sourcing of Kenyan citizenry collective wisdom will enable the political leadership engage with International Finance Institutions from a point of knowledge, hence ending poverty in Kenya. Without poverty in Kenya, tribalism  and social decay will die a natural death.

 

Francis Gichuhi Kamau, Architect.

www.a4architect.com

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit_Man
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit_Man

J
This article is about the book. For the song by Anti-Flag, see For Blood and Empire.
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
Confessions of An Economic Hitman Cover.jpg
Author(s) John Perkins
Publisher Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Publication date 2004
Pages 250p
ISBN 0-452-28708-1
OCLC Number 55138900

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is a book written by John Perkins and published in 2004. It provides Perkins’ account of his career with consulting firm Chas. T. Main in Boston. Before employment with the firm, he interviewed for a job with the National Security Agency (NSA). Perkins claims that this interview effectively constituted an independent screening which led to his subsequent hiring by Einar Greve[1], a member of the firm (and alleged NSA liaison) to become a self-described “economic hit man”. The book was allegedly referred to in an audio tape released by Osama Bin Laden in September 2009.[2]
Contents
[hide]

1 Content
2 Controversy and criticism
3 In popular culture
4 See Also
5 References
6 Further reading
7 External links

[edit] Content

According to Perkins, he began writing Confessions of an Economic Hit Man in the 1980s, but “threats or bribes always convinced [him] to stop.”

According to his book, Perkins’ function was to convince the political and financial leadership of underdeveloped countries to accept enormous development loans from institutions like the World Bank and USAID. Saddled with debts they could not hope to pay, those countries were forced to acquiesce to political pressure from the United States on a variety of issues. Perkins argues in his book that developing nations were effectively neutralized politically, had their wealth gaps driven wider and economies crippled in the long run. In this capacity Perkins recounts his meetings with some prominent individuals, including Graham Greene and Omar Torrijos. Perkins describes the role of an EHM as follows:

Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly-paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign “aid” organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet’s natural resources. Their tools included fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization.

The epilogue to the 2006 edition provides a rebuttal to the current move by the G8 nations to forgive Third World debt. Perkins charges that the proposed conditions for this debt forgiveness require countries to privatise their health, education, electric, water and other public services. Those countries would also have to discontinue subsidies and trade restrictions that support local business, but accept the continued subsidization of certain G8 businesses by the US and other G8 countries, and the erection of trade barriers on imports that threaten G8 industries.

In the book, Perkins repeatedly denies the existence of a “conspiracy.” Instead, Perkins carefully discusses the role of corporatocracy.
“ “I was initially recruited while I was in business school back in the late sixties by the National Security Agency, the nation’s largest and least understood spy organization; but ultimately I worked for private corporations. The first real economic hit man was back in the early 1950s, Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., the grandson of Teddy, who overthrew the government of Iran, a democratically elected government, Mossadegh’s government who was Time‘s magazine person of the year; and he was so successful at doing this without any bloodshed—well, there was a little bloodshed, but no military intervention, just spending millions of dollars and replaced Mossadegh with the Shah of Iran. At that point, we understood that this idea of economic hit man was an extremely good one. We didn’t have to worry about the threat of war with Russia when we did it this way. The problem with that was that Roosevelt was a C.I.A. agent. He was a government employee. Had he been caught, we would have been in a lot of trouble. It would have been very embarrassing. So, at that point, the decision was made to use organizations like the C.I.A. and the N.S.A. to recruit potential economic hit men like me and then send us to work for private consulting companies, engineering firms, construction companies, so that if we were caught, there would be no connection with the government.[3] – November 4, 2004 interview ”

[edit] Controversy and criticism

Some of the book’s critics have questioned whether Perkins makes a significant contribution to the debate on global finance and the development of the Third World. For instance, columnist Mark Engler of In These Times, has written that “the actual content of Perkins’ admissions proves distressingly thin.”[4] According to the New York Times, “the book’s popularity seems driven more by the mix of cloak-and-dagger atmospherics and Mr. Perkins’s Damascene conversion” than by insight into “the larger issue of America’s role in emerging economies.”[5]

Columnist Sebastian Mallaby of the Washington Post reacted sharply to Perkins’ book[6]: “This man is a frothing conspiracy theorist, a vainglorious peddler of nonsense, and yet his book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, is a runaway bestseller.” Mallaby, who spent 13 years writing for the London Economist and wrote a critically well-received biography of World Bank chief James Wolfensohn,[7] holds that Perkins’ conception of international finance is “largely a dream” and that his “basic contentions are flat wrong.”[6] For instance he points out that Indonesia reduced its infant mortality and illiteracy rates by two-thirds after economists persuaded its leaders to borrow money in 1970. He also disputes Perkins’ claim that 51 of the top 100 world economies belong to companies. A value-added comparison done by the UN, he says, shows the number to be 29. (The 51 of 100 data comes from an Institute for Policy Studies Dec, 2000 Report on the Top 200 corporations; using 2010 data from the CIA’s World Factbook and Fortune Global 500[8][9] the current ratio is 114 corporations in the top 200 global economies.)

Other sources, including articles in the New York Times and Boston Magazine as well as a press release issued by the United States Department of State, have referred to a lack of documentary or testimonial evidence to corroborate the claim that the NSA was involved in his hiring to Chas T. Main. In addition, the author of the State Department release states that the NSA “is a cryptological (codemaking and codebreaking) organization, not an economic organization” and that its missions do not involve “anything remotely resembling placing economists at private companies in order to increase the debt of foreign countries.”[10] Economic historian Niall Ferguson writes in his book The Ascent of Money that Perkins’s contention that the leaders of Ecuador (President Jaime Roldós Aguilera) and Panama (General Omar Torrijos) were assassinated by US agents for opposing the interests of the owners of their countries’ foreign debt “seems a little odd” in light of the fact that in the 1970s the amount of money that the US had lent to Ecuador and Panama accounted for less than 0.4% of the total US grants and loans, while in 1990 the exports from the US to those countries accounted for approximately 0.4% of the total US exports (approximately $8 billion). According to Ferguson, those “do not seem like figures worth killing for.”[11]
[edit] In popular culture

In 2009, the documentary film Apologies of an Economic Hit Man featuring interviews with Perkins, was shown at film festivals around the U.S. The film is a Greek – U.S. co-production directed by Stelios Kouloglou, and was filmed in 2007 and 2008. Numerous interview-style statements by John Perkins also appear in the 2008 documentary film, Zeitgeist: Addendum.
The song “Confessions of an Economic Hitman” on Anti Flag’s album For Blood and Empire makes several references to the book.
In year 2010 the song “A Worldly Kinda Economic Hitman” by Ecuadorian band Los Batracios was written about John Perkins’ book.

[edit] See Also

Bamako_(film)
[edit] References

^ http://www.economichitman.com/pix/veracitymemo.pdf by Steven Piersanti, President and Publisher, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. March 7, 2005
^ Otterman, Sharon; Mackey, Robert (2009-09-14). “Bin Laden’s Reading List for Americans”. The New York Times. Retrieved 2010-04-30.
^ “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man: How the U.S. Uses Globalization to Cheat Poor Countries Out of Trillions”. Democracy Now: The war and peace report. 9 Nov 04. Retrieved 2009-01-09.
^ Engler, Mark, “Failures of a Hit Man,” In These Times, April 18, 2005.
^ Confessing to the Converted, by Thomas Jr., Landon, New York Times, Sec. 3, Col, 1, p. 1, 2006-02-19.
^ a b The Facts Behind the ‘Confessions’ by Sebastian Mallaby, Washington Post Op-Ed, 2006-02-26
^ The Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/opinion/columns/mallabysebastian/.
^ The CIA World Factbook
^ The Fortune 500 list
^ “Confessions – or Fantasies – of an Economic Hit Man?”. US Department of State. 2006-05-10. Retrieved October 21, 2010.
^ Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, Penguin Books, 2008. ISBN 978-0-14-311617-2

[edit] Further reading

New Confessions and Revelations from the World of Economic Hit Men, John Perkins, 2007-03-15.
Confessions of an Economic Hitman(Video interview of author, John Perkins [Kinetic Reaction])
John Perkins talks about his book with NOW’s David Brancaccio (video), 2005-03-04.
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man: How the U.S. Uses Globalization to Cheat Poor Countries Out of Trillions, Interview with Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!, 2004-11-09.
In hock to Uncle Sam, The Guardian, Nick Lezard, 2006-02-10.
Recipe for empire, New Statesman, March 6, 2006, Paul Kingsnorth
The sinister side of U.S. biz; Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins, The Capital Times (Madison, Wisconsin), July 29, 2005, By Judie Kleinmaier
Incapable catharsis, The Weekend Australian, February 18, 2006, Matthew Bright
Hit and Miss; There are good reasons “the mainstream media” has ignored John Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, East Bay Express (California), February 1, 2006.
Undermining poor nations in the name of profit, The Boston Globe, February 8, 2006, by Michael Langan
A miss not a hit, Sunday Times (London), March 5, 2006, David Charters
Conscience, confession from an agent of greed, The Seattle Times, January 22, 2006, Steve Weinberg
A hit man repents, The Guardian, 2006-01-28.

[edit] External links

Video of interview with John Perkins
Film Confessions of an Economic Hit Man at IMDB
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit_Man

KONZA CITY-HOW BEST TO KICKSTART THIS PROJECT.

 

The Kenya Ministry of Information through its ICT Board has done a commendable job in conceiving anew cityinKenya, Konza city.

The location is perfect-flat vast vacant grassland nearMombasaroad,JKIAAirportand Nairobi CBD.

The demand for another city is also perfect-Nairobi CBD land has become too expensive, between 200 to 400 million shillings per acre. The traffic jams are too much.

The Konza area needs very little to kick start a new city there. Assistance in terms of Government Policy e.g Town planning, Zoning regulations and laying of infrastructure such a internal roads, sewer and fibre optic cable to name just a few are what is needed to kick start a new city at konza.

Wordldbank/IF as Financial Advisors.

The Ministry of Information has appointed Worldbank/IFC as their Financial Advisors.

The City is being estimated to cost KES 800 Billion.

Its my hope that the Kenya Government through the Ministry of Information will not be pushed to accepting enormous development loans at the expense of Kenyan citizens to finance this.

For starters, the Konza city or Ministry of Information website can publicly avail the contracts so that all Kenyans can be informed on how the Ministry of Information is engaging with the WorldBank /IFC and any other stake holders in using tax payers money to realize theKonzaCityproject.

 

Other financing options friendlier to the tax payer’s pocket can be explored.

The Kenya Government approved the Ministry Of Information to spend KES 1 Billion towards the Konza city development.

Using the Financial advisory offered to the Ministry of Information by the Worldbank/IFC, the Ministry of Information found it wise to spend all of this money to acquire 5000 acres, hire London-based Architectural Master Planning firm Design Engineers and Pell Frischmann to come up with the planning and design of the city and pay for massive TV and Radio advertisement.

Other Land Acquisition Possibilities without using tax payers money.

East African Portland Cement factory, of which the Kenya Government has shares, has 14,000 acres of vacant land next to Konza city. The 99 year lease for this land expired and so it would have been an easy task for the Ministry of Lands to organize on how the Ministry of Information could acquire some land there to create the plannedKonzaCity. Out of the 14,000 acres, am sure a deal to utilize only 5,000 acres of this massive vacant land could easily have been achieved, saving the use of tax payers’ money to purchase land.

There are many other possibilities that the Financial Advisors,Worldbank/IFC could have looked into advising the Ministry of Information into acquiring land for development.

If these possibilities were exhausted, this could have saved Kenyans’ tax payers money from buying the 5000 acre land so that the same money can go into a more direct ICT use such as laying fibre optic cable.

Tatu city and any other private city developments inKenyahave utilized partnership deals with large land owners whereby one side injects cash to lay infrastructure while the other side offers land.  A similar partnership deal could have been utilized to reduce the risk on tax payers’ money into the development.

Slow Disrupted Internet currently in Kenya.

As we speak, the country is being faced with slow internet due to fibre optic cable breakage somewhere along the coast. This money that was used to purchase the land could have gone a long way in ensuring speedy repair and implementing other methods to ensure that such cable damage does not render a whole country’s internet so slow and unreliable.

 

Other Master planning possibilities and options that could save tax payers’ money.

 

As we speak, the Konza city project has been set back by another two months because the Ministry of Information Advisors- Worldbank/IFC and London-based  Design Engineers and Pell Frischmann- had not foreseen requirements spelt out in the Physical Planning act .

Any local architect or town planner inKenyaknows these regulations at the back of their hands.

The Ministry of Information advisors, Worldbank/IFC and London-based  Design Engineers and Pell Frischmann could not foresee the regulations for obvious reasons-they do not have a day-to-day grasp  of the Kenyan real estate legal requirements compared to a Kenyan consultancy firm.

This 2 month delay will have an effect on Kenyan tax payer money since this money has already been used in buying the land ,advertisements and consultancy to Worldbank/IFC and London-based  Design Engineers and Pell Frischmann.

The daily radio and TV adverts are costing the Kenyan tax payer millions of shillings every day to run. When the public consumes the adverts but can’t invest in the Konza city due to the Physical planning hurdle, this means that the adverts will not realize their goals so more money will have to be spent to attract investors.

Architectural Association of Kenya.

The Architectural Association of Kenya should also advice the Ministry of Information on how best to procure services of international Architects and Town Planners so that when they work inKenya, they can be properly advised onKenya’s planning laws to avoid unnecessary delays which translate to loss of tax payer money.

 

Public Procurement and Disposal Act.

Recently, the Kenyan AG also pointed out that the Ministry of Information should adhere to the Public Procurement and Disposal act when leasing land to potential investors. The Ministry of Information advisory from Worldbank/IFC and London-based  Design Engineers and Pell Frischmann is that the land bought with tax payers money should be selectively given to multinationals with potential to invest. The AG’s position is that the land is public property and thus these multinationals will have to compete with Kenyans in an open fair field where the highest bidder gets the land allocation.

 

Consultancy cost reduction through using Local Consultants.

The cost of hiring Kenyan Financial advisory and architectural master planning firms is definitely much lower than hiring these services from overseas as in the case of Konza city where Worldbank/IFC and London-based  Design Engineers and Pell Frischmann are offering these services.

This cost will eventually be borne by Kenyan tax payers. Money can be saved by hiring local consultants. The saved money can then be used to improve the Internet infrastructure within the proposed city.

Conclusion.

The Konza city is a noble idea and is achievable in the long-run if proper team work is achieved.

Partnership with a Government body which already has existing vacant land [14,000 acres] such as East African Portland cement could have gone a long way in freeing cash to be used to enhance internet infrastructure.

Using local consultants who are the major source of the tax payer money could have even gone further to save the Ministry of Information from high consultancy fees and delays due to not comprehending the Kenyan legal requirements in setting up new towns and urban areas.

 

The Worldbank has been mentioned in this book by John Perkins       ‘CONFESSIONS OF AN ECONOMIC HITMAN ‘

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit_Man

on how they arm-twist African countries heads of Ministries into signing contracts which ensure the African countries remain impoverished financially. You can google the book to read various reviews available online.

According to his book, Perkins’ function was to convince the political and financial leadership of underdeveloped countries to accept enormous development loans from institutions like the World Bank and USAID.

It’s my hope that all Kenyans who have been privileged to serve the Kenyan Public in high positions do their research well before signing the proverbial dotted line. Careful reading in between the line for all contracts in the Konza city project is paramount to the successful actualization of the new city.

Francis Gichuhi Kamau, Architect.

info@a4architect.com

+254721410684.

Lords of Poverty

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/book-review-lords-of-poverty-the-power-prestige-and-corruption-of-the-international-aid-business-by-graham-hancock/

I’ve just finished Graham Hancock‘s 1989 classic “Lords of Poverty” and recommend it to anybody interested in the working of the international aid bureaucracy. Hancock is scathing in his assessment of international aid agencies such as the United Nations, bilateral aid agencies (eg US AID), development banks (eg World Bank), and the IMF, and concludes that they haven’t just made a few unfortunate mistakes but they are irredeemably broken and need to be abandoned.

I found a few of his examples to be overly harsh, but found his thesis to be generally persuasive. Instead of trying to review his themes, I think it best to provide some extended quotes, and then encourage you to read the rest…

“This is how the game works: public money levied in taxes from the poor of the rich countries is transferred in the form of ‘foreign aid’ to the rich in the poor countries; the rich in the poor countries then hand it back for safe-keeping to the rich in the rich countries. The real trick, throughout this cycle of expropriation, is to maintain the pretence that it is the poor in poor countries who are being helped all along. The winner is the player who manages to keep a straight face while building up a billion-dollar bank account”

…..

“At $60 billion a year [in 1989]… aid is already quite large enough to do harm. Indeed, as this book has argued at some length, it is often profoundly dangerous to the poor and inimical to their interests: it has financed the creation of monstrous projects that, at vast expense, have devastated the environment and ruined lives; it has supported and legitimised brutal tyrannies; it has facilitated the emergence of fantastical and Byzantine bureaucracies staffed by legions of self-serving hypocrites; it has sapped the initiative, creativity and enterprise of ordinary people and substituted the superficial and irrelevant glitz of imported advice; it has sucked potential entrepreneurs and intellectuals in the developing countries into non-productive administrative activities; it has created a ‘moral tone’ in international affairs that denies the hard task of wealth creation and that substitutes easy handouts for the rigours of self-help; in addition, throughout the Third World, it has allowed the dead grip of imposed officialdom to suppress popular choice and individual freedom.

“Aid has its defenders, not least the highly paid public-relations men and women who spend millions of dollars a year justifying the continued existence of the agencies that employ them. Such professional communicators must reject out of hand the obvious conclusions of this book: that aid is a waste of time and money ,that its results are fundamentally bad, and that — far from being increased — it should be stopped forthwith before more damage is done.

“Whenever such suggestions are made the lobbyists throw up their hands in horror. Despite some regrettable failures, they protect, aid is justified by its successes; despite some glitches and problems, it is essentially something that works; most important of all — the emotional touch, the appeal to the heartstrings — they argue with passion that aid must not be stopped because the poor could not survive without it. The Brandt Commission provided a classic example of this line of thought: ‘For the poorest countries,’ it told us flatly in its final report, ‘aid is essential to survival.’

“Such statements, however, patronise and undervalue the people of the poor countries concerned. They are, in addition, logically indefensible when uttered by those who also want us to believe that ‘aid works’. Through history and pre-history all countries everywhere got by perfectly well without any aid at all. Furthermore, in the 1950s they got by with much less aid than they did, for example, in the 1970s — and were apparently none the worse for the experience. Now, suddenly, at the tail end of almost fifty years of development assistance, we are told that large numbers of these same countries have lost the ability to survive a moment longer unless they continue to receive ever-larger amounts of aid. If this is indeed the case — and if the only measurable impact of all these decades of development has been to turn tenacious survivors into helpless dependents — then it seems to me to be beyond dispute that aid does not work.

“On the other hand, if the statement that ‘aid works’ is true, then presumably the poor should be in a much better shape than they were before they first began to receive it half a century ago. If so, then aid’s job should by now be nearly over and it ought to be possible to begin a gradual withdrawal without hurting anyone.

“Of course, the ugly reality is that most poor people in most poor countries most of the time never receive or even make contact with aid in any tangible shape or form: whether is it present or absent, increased or decreased, are thus issues that are simply irrelevant to the ways in which they conduct their daily lives. After the multi-billion-dollar ‘financial flows’ involved have been shaken through the sieve of over-priced and irrelevant goods that must be bought in the donor countries, filtered again in the deep pockets of hundreds of thousands of foreign experts and aid agency staff, skimmed off by dishonest commission agents, and stolen by corrupt Ministers and Presidents, there is really very little left to go around. This little, furthermore, is then used thoughtlessly, or maliciously, or irresponsibly by those in power — who have no mandate from the poor, who do not consult with them and who are utterly indifferent to their fate. Small wonder, then, that the effects of aid are so often vicious and destructive for the most vulnerable members of human society.”

That ends the polite and optimistic part of the book. The rest is a disappointing story of repeated mismanagement, incompetence, bureaucracy, waste, and corruption. I fear that Hancock is right when he concludes that the problem is institutional. It is too easy for people to conclude that the system can work if only it is repeated enough times with “good people” instead of “bad people”, but the truth is that sometimes the institutional arrangement just doesn’t work.

I would argue that the key institutional problems relate to incentives and knowledge. There is nothing wrong with the concept of helping people, but before good intentions can become good outcomes you need to ensure that the institutions are such that people face the right incentives and knowledge can be effectively coordinated. Most of the sad stories in Hancock’s book are examples of people responding rationally to warped incentives, or people failing to effectively use available knowledge.

This is an echo of the same institutional debates that happened 100 years ago regarding business, where Hayek convincingly argued that a voluntary system will tend to provide better incentives and use of knowledge compared with a bureaucratic system. In hindsight it is clear that Hayek was right and that private business generally out-performs government business. A similar debate is now needed in the “social” sector, where we need to consider whether a voluntary civil society (including mutual societies, charities, extended families and social business) might provide a better institutional framework compared to the ever-growing (but seemingly ever-failing) welfare and aid bureaucracy.

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/book-review-lords-of-poverty-the-power-prestige-and-corruption-of-the-international-aid-business-by-graham-hancock/

David Osterfeld
Book Review: Lords Of Poverty: The Power, Prestige, And Corruption Of The International Aid Business by Graham Hancock
June 1991 • Volume: 41 • Issue: 6 • Print This Post • 10 comments

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/book-review-lords-of-poverty-the-power-prestige-and-corruption-of-the-international-aid-business-by-graham-hancock/

Atlantic Monthly Press, 19 Union Square West, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10003 • 1989 • 226 pages • $17.95 cloth

Foreign aid has reached immense proportions. If one excludes the billions spent yearly by private voluntary organizations such as the Hunger Project, Oxfam, and World Vision, and looks just at money raised by taxation and distributed by government agencies, the figure hovers around $60 billion a year. The budgets of most multinational corporations, including Standard Oil, IBM, Phillips, Nestlé, and Volkswagen, pale in comparison. And yet this figure, Graham Hancock, a former aid worker for the British Overseas Development Administration, points out, doesn’t even include the billions more in government-to-government loans, unless they are “soft” or concessional loans. The question Hancock asks, and answers, in this explosive book is just whom is this “aid” aiding.

The chief, if not the sole beneficiaries of foreign aid, Hancock shows, are the local elites in the recipient countries, special interest groups in the developed counties, and the aid bureaucracy itself. The chief losers? The First World taxpayers and the poverty-stricken in the Third World.

The aid “industry” is quite lucrative for those who administer its programs. Incomes for employees of international agencies are determined by the “Noblemaire Principle,” named after Georges Noblemaire, an employee of the League of Nations in the 1920s. According to this principle, salaries for employees of international organizations should be high enough “to attract as employees citizens of the country with the best-paid national civil service.” United Nations pay rates, Hancock notes, must therefore exceed “those of the federal civil service of the richest country on earth—the United States.”

As a result, not only does base pay for U.N. officials exceed that for U.S. civil servants by an average of 25 percent, but the fringe benefits are also far more lucrative. Promotion comes twice as fast for U.N. employees than for U.S. civil servants. It takes a U.S. civil servant 14 years to accumulate as much sick pay as a U.N. staffer is entitled to on his very first day. U.N. pensions exceed those of the U.S. civil servant by 43 percent. And this is only the beginning.

An increasingly large part of aid budgets is for travel (first class, of course). And most of the travel is not to poverty-stricken areas in the less-developed world, but to poverty seminars normally held at posh hotels in exotic and very attractive locations. In just one year, Hancock notes, the Executive Board of the Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization received $1,759,584 for travel and lodging. During the same time it spent $49,000 on education for handicapped children in Africa, and $1,000 to train teachers in Honduras.

Interestingly, despite the Noblemaire Principle which is supposed to attract experts, U.N. agencies increasingly rely on the expertise of “outside consultants.” The minimum salary for a consultant is $100,000. The average salary is probably closer to $150,000. Since the number of consultants exceeds 150,000, this puts the cost at more than $22 billion. When the salaries of the regular employees are combined with the costs of consultants, the amount is well over half of all that is spent by governments on aid each year. In fact, “personnel and associated costs,” Hancock notes, “today absorb a staggering 80percent of all U.N. expenditures.”

Groups with political clout in the First World are also major recipients. The purpose of food aid was and is to help dispose of farm surpluses in the First World. The tragedy of this is that struggling Third World farmers are often driven out of business by the influx of food aid. Similarly, the real rationale of other aid projects, as Hancock amply demonstrates, is not to help the poor in the Third World but the giant corporations in the First. Thus, between 80 percent and 99 percent of all aid money distributed to the Third World is actually spent in the First World in the form of purchase orders. “Western aid,” as Hancock puts it, is used “to create profits for Western companies.”

And finally, Hancock shows that it is no accident that some of the world’s richest people live in the world’s poorest nations. Aid has been regularly siphoned off by Third World leaders. Often this has been done, it should be noted, with the knowledge and thus implicit approval of the aid agencies themselves. The agency term for this larceny is “leakage.” The figures reach into the billions of dollars: an estimated $10 billion for the Marcoses in the Philippines and perhaps $4 billion for President Mobutu in Zaire, to name just two.

Who pays the cost? The taxpayers in the First World and, more important and tragic, the poor in the Third World. To cite just a single example, the Akosombo Dam on the Volta River in Ghana was built with World Bank and other agency money. Its purpose was to provide inexpensive power to the U.S.-owned VALCO aluminum plant and to the wealthy sections of Accra, Ghana. In the process thousands of villagers were displaced, without compensation, when the dam flooded their lands. And since the dam’s completion, well over 100,000 people living in the vicinity have been permanently incapacitated by river blindness. This is far from a unique case.

Aid programs in places such as Indonesia and Brazil have resulted in massive losses of life. Brazil has received $434.3 million to fund its huge resettlement program. The result was the needless destruction of millions of acres of tropical rain-forest (3.6 million acres a year) and the decimation of many of the indigenous Indian tribes. Of the 13,000 settlers arriving in the resettlement areas each month, Hancock writes, “Their prospects for supporting themselves are virtually zero and, in addition, more than 200,000 are estimated to have contracted a particularly virulent strain of malaria . . . to which they have no resistance.” Even the World Bank has acknowledged that the program has been “an ecological, human and economic disaster of tremendous dimensions.”

Very similar has been the Bank-funded resettlement program in Indonesia: the destruction of millions of acres of rain-forest, bloody and savage fighting between ethnic tribes, and the death of 150,000 indigenous Timorese who opposed having their land used as a resettlement area for Javanese.

Hancock’s conclusion is that the aid programs are so corrupt they are “utterly beyond reform” and should be abolished.

If there is any criticism of Lords of Poverty it is that, as John Hogan wrote in Commonweal (June 15, 1990), Hancock “offers no alternative.” And since the problems are so immense, critics contend, it would be inhumane to abolish all aid. The point is well taken. The reader is left with the feeling that if only the rascals could be thrown out (admittedly a big if) and replaced by good, public-spirited bureaucrats, foreign aid could achieve its noble purpose. What is needed in Lords of Poverty is an explanation why foreign aid, by its very nature—by politicizing society, by generating large bureaucracies, by encouraging or even requiring recipient governments to pursue highly interventionist policies that scare off private investors and generate inefficiency—retards economic development.

But perhaps one shouldn’t criticize an author for not doing what he never intended to do. As the book’s subtitle indicates, the Lords of Poverty focuses on the “power, prestige, and corruption of the international aid business.” Hancock does a remarkable job. His book deserves wide readership.

Professor Osterfeld teaches political science at Saint Joseph’s College in Rensselaer, Indiana.

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/book-review-lords-of-poverty-the-power-prestige-and-corruption-of-the-international-aid-business-by-graham-hancock/