Floods remind us of the failure of Kenya's political leadership

The floods are back, to remind Kenyans of the political economy trap they live in. The same drama unfolds every year, with almost ritualistic precision. The rains arrive and the country groans under their weight.  

Rivers burst their banks. Bridges collapse. Landslides swallow homes. Roads become muddy trenches. Lorries, buses, private cars, and even bikes are immobilised for days. Travellers are stranded in the wilderness, waiting for waters to go. Entire villages stare helplessly as homes are overflooded. 

Then the rains vanish. Within months, the headlines reverse themselves. The land cracks open under a merciless sun. Rivers shrink into dusty memories. Cattle die along dry riverbeds. Women walk for miles in search of water. Children sit in classrooms with parched lips and empty stomachs. Relief appeals echo across the land. 

This is the strange rhythm of our national life. And it has been so for 62 years of independence. Are we right in the head? You might imagine that Kenya would have mastered the art of managing water –  too much when it rains, too little when it does not. Yet we are perpetually surprised by both floods and droughts. Each flood season is an unforeseen catastrophe. Each drought is mourned like a rare natural anomaly. But neither is rare. Kenya lies within a climatic zone that always swings between intense rains and prolonged dry spells. These cycles are not new. What is persistently troubling – is our remarkable inability to prepare for them. The real disaster is not the rain. The disaster is the absence of planning. 

Across the country, rainwater flows unchecked through hills, valleys, and cities. It sweeps away topsoil, roads, and homes, emptying uselessly into the sea. Very little of it is captured, stored, or managed. In a land that routinely complains of water scarcity, billions of cubic metres of fresh water escape to waste annually. 

Roads collapse because drainage is an afterthought. Bridges fail because rivers are underestimated. Landslides occur because hillsides have been stripped of protective forest cover. Entire settlements are built on floodplains that any average planner would have marked as dangerous. 

When the drought eventually arrives, the catastrophic consequences are so predictable. Rivers have no reserves to sustain them. Dams are too few or poorly maintained. Pastoralists wander farther and farther, in search of pasture that should have been secured through better water management. In truth, does Kenya suffer less from climate misfortune than from institutional short-termism? Look, we are a nation that builds projects, but rarely builds systems. Roads appear without comprehensive drainage strategies. Funds are announced for infrastructure without coherent blueprints to link water, land, environment, and transport into a single long-term plan. Only this week, Parliament legislated a Sh5 trillion fund, without a blueprint! 

Politics, unfortunately, thrives on visibility and immediacy. A new road can be opened with speeches and ribbon-cutting. A drainage system, or a watershed protection programme, attracts little applause. And yet it is precisely these less glamorous investments that determine whether rain becomes a blessing or a calamity. Other countries have faced similar environmental challenges and chosen a different path. The Netherlands transformed centuries of flooding into one of the most sophisticated water-management systems on earth. Israel converted water scarcity into a technological and agricultural advantage. These societies did not eliminate nature’s extremes; they learned to live intelligently with them. Kenya, by contrast, continues to oscillate between public panic and official forgetfulness. 

When floods strike, committees are formed and promises made. When drought arrives, relief operations begin and emergency funds are announced. Once the crisis fades, so too does the urgency of reform. The cycle resets, waiting patiently for the next season to expose the same weaknesses. 

I have previously told the ancient Greek myth of Sisyphus. The tragedy of a man condemned by the gods to push a heavy boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back down each time he neared the summit. His punishment was an endless repetition of futile effort. Kenya often resembles that tragic figure. We push the rock of development uphill in moments of crisis, only to allow it to tumble back through neglect and short memory. 

Unlike Sisyphus, our predicament is not imposed by the gods. It is a product of human folly. Is it, therefore, capable of human correction? What Kenya requires is not a miracle or Kaunda Suit heroism. We require something far less dramatic, but far more powerful: long-term thinking. Water storage systems across the country. Proper drainage engineering for every major road. Protection of forests and river catchments.