Over the past few months, media has fed us with several images of desperate children, women and men dying of hunger due to famine which has been declared as the worst to have hit the Horne of Africa in 6 decades. Refugee camps are overstretched with people looking for relief. Kenyans have particularly come together to help their own under the umbrella initiative dubbed 'Kenyan4Kenyans' which raised a whooping over Sh 500 million in just less than 2 weeks after its launching to help the hunger stricken fellow Kenyans starving in Turkana
Hunger is not a new thing in Kenya and in Africa a s a whole, several projects have been proposed to curb a repeat on this but it appears that the government is either not so keen at implementing them or has other reasons up its sleeve. But all in all, these images have kept me wondering why the Kenyan government cannot feed its own, why Africa is always in a state of dependency- Why Africa is not as developed as it should be.
Several theories and books have been written explaining why Africa is not at par with the rest of the world in terms of development
- Economist Ntahan Nunn argues that slavery is the main culprit. "without the slave trades, 72% of Africa's income gap with the rest of the world would not exist today"
- Oxford University and ex-World bank Economist Paul Collier attributes it to environmental factors such as being landlocked, existence or lack thereof of coastline, being resourceful or resource scarce etc,
- Zambian economist and Ex-World bank consultant Dambisa Moyo in her book "Dead Aid" categorically blames it on foreign Aid
- There is of course the largely unspoken view that the problem with Africa is Africans- that culturally, mentally and physically Africans are innately different. that, somehow, deeply embedded in their psyche is an inability to embrace development and improve their own lot in life without foreign guidance and help
- We also have historical factors like colonialism, the continent's disparate tribal groupings and ethno-linguistic make up has also been blamed, other factors such as absence of strong, transparent and credible public institutions like civil service, police, judiciary etc have also been apportioned blame as part of the problem
What about unregulated population?
Though may not out rightly be the problem, I have a feeling that Africa's constant population increase could also be another contributing factor why we are still scrawling in this development sector.Take for instance, the Kenya's case where Kenyan population was reported as 38.6 million in 2009, compared to 28.7 million in 1999, 21.4 million in 1989 and 15.3 million in 1979, an increase by a factor of
2.5 Over 30 years, or an average growth of more than 3% per year.
Kenya is about 580,000km2 in terms of surface area compared to let's say Finland- the 8th largest country in Europe in terms of area at 337,030km2- though relatively small compared to Kenya- in 2000 its population was about 5.2 million, in 1990 the population size was about 5 million. Since the mid 1990s the annual growth has remained under 20,000 persons averaging at about 5.4 million now.
Though this might not be a perfect comparison, compare their growth rate to Kenya’s and you will notice a very big difference. Interestingly, regardless of the growth rate, the resources remain constant which means these additional number of people will have to survive on the already limited available resources, this in my view leads to high poverty levels and makes it even harder for the government to take care of its citizens.
As much as it is the responsibility of the government to take care of its citizens, people should also just give birth to the number of kids that they can comfortably take care of and by so doing developing themselves and the country as a whole
