Siaya nuke power plant a big joke
By Clay Muganda, June 21, 2025Away from writing this column, I am a smallholder bee farmer in Siaya County, where, earlier this week, the Energy Cabinet Secretary made a shocking announcement that caused giggles nationwide.
Ideally, it should be called a revelation because it is not something Siaya people had imagined: He revealed that Kenya’s first nuclear power plant will be built in Siaya!
While some Kenyans were stifling their laughter, most of those who were taken aback by CS Opiyo Wandayi’s loaded statement are from Siaya, and they are smallholder farmers.
No, Siaya’s smallholder farmers are not worried that the nuclear power plant will affect their crops, and eventually their harvest.
Specifically, bee farmers (not beekeepers) are not even afraid that it will interfere with the bees’ forage, and subsequently affect the exquisite taste of Siaya honey. We are just concerned about the misplaced priorities.
He was speaking in Ugunja constituency, the area he represented in the National Assembly before his appointment as CS. Since a by-election has not been held, Ugunja has no representative, but no one is complaining, and that should tell you a lot about Wandayi’s track record.
Many Kenyans are wont to say that nuclear power plants are not safe or are costly to maintain, but there are several studies that can prove them wrong.
The safety of a nuclear power plant is the least of our worries, at least mine, since I am an advocate of clean energy that is climate- and environment-friendly. Additionally, my work involves combating misinformation about technology, especially agri-biotech.
We are just concerned that Siaya’s needs are much simpler, and the people would benefit more if these ground-level issues were addressed first, and fast, before we can build a nuclear power plant “that will create employment opportunities for the youth.”
While Kenya’s energy sector badly needs an upgrade, what with the unstable supply system and intermittent outages, Wandayi’s reason that a nuclear power plant will create employment opportunities for Siaya’s younger people is not just weak, but unconvincing.
It is a joke, actually – what kind of jobs will unskilled youth get in a nuclear power plant?
Most of the younger people Wandayi is planning to give jobs in a nuclear power plant are subsistence farmers without access to the most basic modern farming technologies.
They even lack the resources to access the government’s subsidised fertiliser, considering that there are fewer than four distribution points in Siaya’s 2,496 square kilometre land mass.
While the economic mainstay of Siaya is agriculture, the 2024 National Agriculture Production Report shows that between 2019 and 2023, the acreage under crops such as maize, beans, cowpeas, sorghum, and green grams has generally been dwindling.
Production has also been inconsistent, and in the years when the acreage increased, production decreased significantly or is disproportionate, yet 80 per cent of Siaya land is arable, with agriculture poised to create 61 per cent of employment opportunities, according to the County Integrated Development Plan.
The 2021 Kenya Continuous Household Survey by the National Bureau of Statistics notes that the agriculture sector is the highest employer in Siaya at 79.61 per cent, followed by services at 16.50 per cent, and factory jobs a distant third at 3.89 per cent.
In agriculture, fishing is listed as an important source of livelihood. Oddly, fishing has the least share of employment.
Of course, several factors are responsible for this gloomy state of affairs, but it can safely be said that the youth that Wandayi wants to create employment for in a nuclear plant need to learn better technologies that can improve their catch or enable them to run a fish processing plant, which is just one of the things Siaya badly needs since the raw material is readily available.
In its Policy Brief No 53 of 2023/2024 on Assessing Labour Productivity for Siaya, the Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis recommends enhancing agriculture productivity by improving integration to relevant value chains such as leather, dairy, poultry, and bee farming, increasing agro-processing, and promoting manufacturing.
On the ground, things are not looking up, literally, and that is where Wandayi and his masters and mistresses in Nairobi need to work on, if they genuinely want to create employment for Siaya’s youth, who, whichever way you look at it, desperately need help and not handouts or empty talk.
As for older folk who are bee farmers, we just need Wandayi and his lieutenants to let the world know the quality and taste of Siaya honey is unmatched – and the youth are welcome to the beekeeping community to learn new skills and join the cooperative society.
The writer is the Managing Editor of the Alliance for Science (AfS). These views are solely his and do not necessarily reflect the position of AfS or its partners.