Green Army: Popular Initiative or Popular Fraud?
As an intentional component of this blog we have invested in addressing aspects of interests around climate change, youth and community. This disclaimer is as important as anything else within today's conversation. Now let's dive into it!
The Green Army initiative was first floated as a national recruitment drive through the Kenya Forest Services for youth across the country to participate in nationwide tree growing programs. The first call for applications exactly a year or so down the line clearly stipulated that the recruited youth over 4000 of them would undertake activities with a recompense model of between 9000-18000 shillings every month for a period of one year. And these initiative would be managed by Kenya Forest Services and its regional officers.
In all honesty anyone looking at such a model would feel a strong level of pride and great enthusiasm. Finally, the government had decided to step up work and in so doing created opportunities through Climate Change mitigation programs. But loh and alas, that was never meant to come true for some of us.
First forward and hundreds of thousands of applications later someone somehow managed to miscue the process. By design selected green army members were a few individuals connected to political headliners. A clear process for selection was never provided and no responses were ever communicated to a majority of applicants. And right here we hit a pause.
Why are we interested in all this? As an initiative whose work aligned with the objectives of the Green Army program we mobilized over 20 applications from our team. Thankfully these applications are on record with all the necessary applications reference numbers. Out of the 20+ applications from our end, no applicant was contacted, interviewed or received a regret message or email or even a word of mouth from the Kenya Forest Service and its officers. This is worrying on multiple fronts. If we took the initiative out of good reasons and applied as had been required, didn't we deserve at least communication regarding the status of our applications?
Forezava as an initiative remains one of the most vibrant youth led climate change initiatives within Vihiga County. This reflects in what we do that is deeply entrenched in tree nursery establishment, management and other related tree growing activities. Having carried out cross cutting events over the past few years we hoped so much for sections of our membership to be integrated within the project. Be it as host nursery operators or even community mobilisers because let's face it no grass roots initiative will take root without local campaigning and mobilization.
But something from recent communication has sparked our interest in the project one more time. A recent post by one of the supposed beneficiaries from the Green Army indicating designed military type regalia that would be used in a proposed launch activity spooked us a bit. Of interest to us was the mantra in use. The designer of the aforementioned hoodie used a corrupted version of our rallying call.
Shrewdly printing out Local People, Local Projects, Local Solutions does not hide the true motivation of the mantra. Our lead has used this mantra on multiple occasions including this moment during a public Youth4Climate event in Rome, Italy. The popularity of this basic line cannot be ignored. And the fact that a similar line has been emphasized over and over again within our blogs is worth noting.
As a consequence we raise questions over the honest motivation behind the Green Army initiative. We raise questions over its longterm objectives. We raise questions over the chances of public resources having been misdirected or misused by clear and deliberate actions of public officers. We wonder loudly here, is the Green Army initiative just a popular initiative or a popular fraud?
About Author: Kevin Makova
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