We love a good PR stunt in this country. Every time there’s a drought, some suit launches a billion-shilling dam project with a shiny shovel and a lot of prayer. But Prof. Collins Miruka finally said the quiet part out loud: we aren’t thirsty because the sky is stingy; we’re thirsty because the people in charge are greedy. We have enough water to wash the entire Rift Valley, yet 40% of it just “disappears” before it hits your meter. That’s not a leak; that’s a business model for the well-connected.

Let’s talk about that 40% “non-revenue water.” In any normal country, that would be a national scandal. Here? It’s just Tuesday. While you’re rationing your shower like you’re in the middle of the Sahara, someone is siphoning that water to sell back to you in a dusty blue tanker at five times the price. It’s the ultimate Kenyan hustle - break the system, then charge the citizens for a private solution. It’s not a hydrological crisis; it’s a management heist.

The Prof thinks “professionalizing boards” will fix this. I hate to be the one to burst the bubble, but since when did we hire for expertise instead of tribal loyalty and political debt? These water utility boards are just retirement homes for failed politicians and campaign donors. You can’t expect a man who got his job as a “thank you” for mobilizing votes to care about the engineering specs of a treatment plant. They aren’t looking at flow rates; they’re looking at who gets the next procurement tender.

This isn’t just about your kitchen sink; it’s about the whole economy. We’re out here trying to attract investors while the basic infrastructure is a joke. Real estate, manufacturing, and even the “vibes” in hospitality depend on a predictable tap. But when the water governance is this shaky, capital gets expensive. It’s all part of the same cycle I talked about in The Empire of Debt where we borrow billions for infrastructure that never actually serves the taxpayer, leaving us to pay back loans for dry pipes.

Until we stop treating water as a political tool for winning elections and start treating it like the economic lifeblood it is, we are just “firefighting” the inevitable. No amount of new dams will fix a pipe that’s being intentionally tapped by cartels. We don’t need more concrete; we need someone to stop the rot in the boardroom. But then again, in Nairobi, expecting competence is the quickest way to get a headache. Stay thirsty, I guess.