Do you have to wait for a problem to manifest itself before solving an issue?

I was reading a Newsweek article about the problems currently being experienced at the new Heathrow Airport Terminal 5. The article compares Heathrow to other European airports and finds a major flaw in Heathrow's design: It has too few runways! Some stats to compare the major European airport and ours:

European Airports -
Heathrow 2 runways 99% operation capacity
Schiphol Amsterdam 5 runways 75% operation capacity,
Charles de Gaulle Paris 4 runways 75% operation capacity,
Frankfurt Germany 3 runways approval to build a fourth 75% operation capacity.

Kenya -
JKIA current operation capacity: 176% and growing, 1 runway utilisation: 75%
Expansion plans:
Passenger terminal to be increased 215% (that's 82% operation capacity using present levels)
Apron parking to be increased by 50%


Future projection - 9m passengers by 2024. This means that once the expansion programme is finished the Kenya Airport Authority will have to start work on a second 4m passenger terminal and a 2nd runway to accommodate the projected passengers in time. This will take into consideration how long it takes to push such a project through the government bureaucracy and construction period.

The maxing out of capacities is not limited to the airport but anything that needs future planning. Some things that come to mind right now:

• Electricity - 97% utilisation capacity
• CBD parking - 1000% and growing
• Nairobi - 214% utilisation capacity (planned to accommodate 1.4m inhabitants currently 3m)

I am sure all these figures can be used to describe all the services including water & sanitation.

Do we really have to wait till a problem manifests itself before we try to solve it, playing catch-up. We should have think tanks whose work it is just to sit down and project or play out all kind of scenarios and develop contingency plans of what to do in such cases. This is called planning!