Considering the potentialities we talked about in last articles, we can’t ignore those big obstacles slowing the country’s development down and the dangers lying just around the corner, which we can sum up in an old-fashioned political class – which is still anchored to ethnical fights for power – and demographic growth, which is difficult to manage.
The constant population growth, added to internal migrations, forces the country to keep on chasing something: there is no time to improve the services satisfying all inhabitants and the massive demographic growth. Needs overlap each other, roads stop, cities keep on being full, slums host more and more people, forced to live below poverty line. In few words, dangers increase.
In this way, Kenya could die from urban elephantiasis.
As we have seen, taxes are not enough to provide those services the country asks for. Money goes around but remains in the hands of few people.
The verb “grab” gives an idea of people’s situation in this country. In Kenya, people try to bring home the most they can, immediately, like there was no tomorrow.
At the beginning, it is difficult to notice it, but the more time you spend in Kenya – meeting people for work or for pleasure and developing projects together with local community’s leaders -, the more you understand this attitude, which can be linked to some factors, such as poverty and the fact of having been a colony. It seems like you were in front of a collective state of mind, the fear of missing an opportunity or a good which tomorrow won’t be there anymore.
This attitude is the demonstration of these people’s determination and ambition, their will to retrieve and redeem, their wish to make their own ways and to obtain an economic and social recognition.
If this power is channelled in a growth strategy, it can result in an incentive to improve and move the efforts from a mental dimension to a wider and national process towards wellness.
Otherwise, it risks being painful, counterproductive and becoming an excuse not to trust anything or anyone.
