The NYT Editorial Board chimed into the Kenyan water story that I wrote about here with a bit of weird but very upbeat article today. First off, the title is strange, “Where Water is Gold”. What exactly do they mean by that? That water is valuable? Isn’t it valuable everywhere? Is Kenya unique in any way, besides lacking adequate clean water resources?
For the record, I’m not sure Kenya actually lacks water resources. It certainly is not an arid climate like some of the other places I study. The lack of water in Kenya is because it lacks the infrastructure to store and then deliver the right quality and quantity of water to those who need it, not because adequate supplies don’t exist within its borders.
But the NYT article is strange for other reasons. The basic gist is to laud those parties - UNESCO, Kenya’s central Government, and Japanese donors – who participated in discovering the water and then caution them that the Kenyan government can’t really be trusted because the president in on trial with the ICC. Um, non-sequitor much? What does the human rights record of the president have anything to do with the distribution of new water resources?
As I wrote before, I too think that a cautionary stance is the appropriate one. But I am more concerned with the governance rules that are put in place in order to actually distribute the water – not usually the purview of a country’s President or his deputy. The devil is (potentially) in the details: what are the rules that are set up to determine pricing, ownership, extraction rates, etc? Those will be set by the ministry in charge and will likely have no input from the head of state.
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