The first major irrigation project in Africa was undertaken during the reign of King Menes of the First Dynasty in Egypt, 3,000 years before the era of Jesus Christ.

Since then many societies around the world have used irrigation to give cultivators an entry into growing cash crops they would otherwise not be able to grow.

The lack of water usually confines cultivators to producing only food crops for their own consumption.The sponsors of Galana-Kulalu tell us that their aim is to put one million acres under irrigation to provide more than “enough” food for Kenyans. Sounds like an excellent idea.

Until you consider that the Galana-Kulalu is a joint project, with the Kenya Government putting in an initial investment of $40 million and $125 coming from an Israeli partner.

The ownership of this project is therefore between the two. The individual cultivator is nowhere to be seen. Given the shareholding, the produce from this project is not for distribution as charity to the needy but is for sale.

Yet the question is; sale to whom when 50 per cent of Kenyans live below the poverty line?
However, it is understandable where such ideas come from. Ours is a society where up to 80 per cent of the population relies on the crops they grow on their pieces of land and/or the livestock they keep for livelihood and survival.

These are Kenyans, who much like the Biblical Adam, are condemned to eat only by the sweat of their brow. Their needs are usually given short shrift by the decision makers. And yet these are clearly people who can hardly afford to buy food even at the best of times and that is the reason they have to grow it.

The fiction of the government being the “representative of the people” has long evaporated when it comes to food security.

Since independence in 1963, what is euphemistically referred to as the “strategic food reserves” have proved to be little more than fertile grounds for elite graft.

Although there are several reasons why I think that Galana-Kulalu is not a good idea, this is the one that matters the most to me: It is loudly proclaiming that the people do not matter!

For how will it put food into the mouths of the odd 50 per cent of Kenyans who live below the poverty line? At the very best this project consigns them to the role of helpless spectators and at worst as supplicants to the vagaries of state and donor charity with regard to food: the most basic of human needs.

Experts tell us that within a typical irrigation system there are three levels of organisation. The first consists of individual or small-holder informal groups of individuals participating in the system at the field that is concerned with conveyance of water and its distribution.

The second level consists in farmers’ collectives that form in structures that may be as simple as informal organisations or as complex as irrigation districts.

In addition to operations and maintenance, such structures would assume responsibility for allocation and conflict resolution.

It is only at the third level that the state usually features prominently as the ultimate entity responsible for water distribution and its use at the project level. Thus, the Galana-Kulalu is basically a statement by Government that it does not have much use for the people.

They are involved incidentally only through the “thousands of jobs” that will be created.

So that even as it loudly proclaims that its aim is to feed the people, this project is really only aimed at impoverishing them further; it really is anti-people.The people are neither to be involved as cultivators nor as people who need to acquire knowledge and skills to provide for themselves.

And yet, Kenyans have learned over many cycles of famine and food scarcity that they always bear the brunt of food scarcity. Food aid usually comes only when people have died of starvation.

By leaving individual cultivators out of any meaningful participation in such a project, the elite is simply reiterating its contempt for the people. Kenya has never been a welfare state and it is unlikely that it is about to become one because of a one-million acre project.

King Menes of ancient Egypt, as deified as he may have been, saw the need to think of the small cultivator as a beneficiary in his irrigation project; he at least appreciated the fact that the hungry are not good subjects to man or god.

That the Kenya elite do not seem to grasp this in the year 2016 is indeed a harsh indictment not only of their leadership but of us Kenyans as a people.