Fishermen on the shores of Lake Turkana

Fishermen on the shores of Lake Turkana

Kenya is a country teeming with good intentions that came to grief. An indifferent government and rich foreigners coming to help poor people they hardly understand, let alone care about, are some of the reasons development projects collapsed, the most spectacular being the Kalokol Fish Factory in Turkana County.
The laughable thing is, here was a multimillion-dollar factory being erected among a pastoral community to minimise, among other things, the vagaries of famine with a high protein, low-cholesterol fish diet. But the Turkana, proud of their cattle heritage, survived on meat, milk and blood. They boasted zero fishing history and actually looked pitiably down at those who ate fish, which they gave away. In fact, fish is the last resort   when a Turkana’s death is imminent.
 But hey! Lake Turkana  brimmed with the best Tilapia all year round. They called it ka’alakol, meaning lake with lots of fish, with 17, 000 tons as annual catch at the time. So, why not teach the Turkana how to fish? That way, it would be easy to domesticate them. They would stop wandering in the punishing heat of the Northern Frontier District. Best of all, how did the Turkana expect the government to build roads, schools and clinics besides delivering services yet they were never taxed?
A fish factory would inject a taxable cash economy and eliminate the cattle rustling menace that had dogged the region. The most generous donor country in the world, Norway, came on board through its international development arm, Norad. Norway donates nearly two per cent of Gross National  Product to specific Third World poorest countries. Norway is also the most knowledgeable in commercial fishing.  With its benevolence and expertise, the Turkana were to cream from the largesse via the Kalokol Fish Factory whose construction began in the mid-1970s up to 1981.
Blaine Harden writes in his 1993 effort, Africa: Dispatches from a Fragile Continent that Norad jetted salaried experts and “20 fibre glass fishing boats, four motor boats and the Iji – a 36-foot research vessel, which was sailed from the North Sea and then trucked overland more than 700 miles to the lake.”

But a comedy of errors shortly ensued due to the “town people” mentality of overlooking local knowledge.  Or not doing thorough background research. If Norad had dug around  first, it would not have sunk $22 million (Sh1.8 billion at current exchange rates) into the Kalokol Fish Factory – which the Turkana later nicknamed “new mountain”. Lake Turkana dries every 30 years. Lodwar town has yellowing colonial data showing it had dried in 1924 and 1954. Nobody checked. The lake’s Fergusson’s Gulf, source of 80 per cent of the factory’s fish, dried when the 30-year cycle came calling in 1984! There were problems galore. Fillet,  the most viable way of exploiting Turkana fish, as Norad whizzes recommended,  required freezing from near 100 degrees heat to minus zero. Turkana lacked adequate clean water for the fillet freezers.
Kalokol Fish Factory used diesel-powered generators. And to transport the perishable fish to Nairobi, the Kalokol management soon realised there was no road!  Of Kalokol’s initial $2 million budget, a further $20 million was injected for road construction! The total expenses of running Kalokol Fish Factory were more than the fillet could swim in profits.
When the factory collapsed, the Turkana were left desolate. Harden termed the factory “Africa’s most handsome, most expensive dried fish warehouse”.