Kenyan Agriculture

I love bloggers, Kenyan bloggers, and I don’t mean the paid, rumor-peddling, scandal-chasing, politically biased pen-trotters! Nop! I mean the faithful lot who consistently, consciously, and at time have to sacrifice sleep & valuable family time to write priceless nuggets of wisdom on paper on real issues like our economy, the decay of chivalry, political messes, social time bombs in our society, the unequal wealth margin in Kenya, the dependence on foreign agricultural produce to feed our populace and much much more.

It has long been established that speaking (writing) of Kenya is a painful, depressing endeavour, thanks to those who keep a high spirit and pick out the positives and major on them; Biko heey!

Never has an article strike so close to my pulsing heart as The Man who sold a country, and as if that wasn’t enough a sequel came along! A momentary sharing blast online and ‘Wauz’ here and there and the story died off! The issue though is so deeply entrenched in our new reality we face it as individuals on a regular, just that we are so self obsessed we fail to see the thorn in our brothers’ foot is similar to ours.

I promised myself to be objective in the infamous new year resolutions. So let’s branch into Agriculture, and if that is too impersonal, I mean the very food we eat from the great hotels such as Kempinski to the little ‘Vibandanskis’ in our ghetto corners. The food we eat is the very fuel that drives us, we the working and toiling nation, the bloodline of our nation, our nations most valuable resource, its People! The people who make this nation what it is, without whom nothing proceeds. Yet this necessary and seemingly important factor of our existence isn’t assured, secured and protected from external players.

My point exactly is that the food we eat in our streets isn’t Kenyan by origin, we import most of it from neighbouring nations and them at times are conduits from other nations. Fine example is our grains come from as far as Malawi and South Africa and still find their way into our markets and onto our plates as hot meals. We have completely relegated our food production processes to external forces in the form of neighboring nations. Slowly by slowly we have frustrated and pushed out-of-business our local farmers by the: blind regulations set by the government, high tariffs on agricultural inputs and a general disregard of the well being of the sector.

Anyone who walks to work and doesn’t plan, consider or even give thought to their source of food must be crazy! And that we must be. Farmers from the Rift Valley have been complaining of bad prices, high cost of inputs, and unfair farming loans and we all have turned this to a norm in our society. Farms in Central province, rumoured to be our bread basket, have gone unkempt for decades. Tea and coffee farms are now bushes in huge tracts of land, at least those that have survived the real estate encroachment into farmlands(Ruiru). The core of this is a simple economical fact; you can’t work on what isn’t profitable, as long as farming isn’t profitable what else would anyone expect?

It has been my long standing belief that we the Kenyans, call us voters, common ‘mwananchi’ or even ‘ploretariat’ have this unnerving faith that our leadership has the best interest at heart, that there exists a sort of round table to maul over the important sectors in our nation. Where pointers are brought on board and stern actions are deliberated upon and assigned. Where the raw interests of the nation and the people is expressed in tact and deed. Sadly no organ like this exist, I believe.

The CSs we have seat on their lavish seats to represent their communities’ and benefactors’ hold or share in the national cake(to be eaten of course) they act as the musclemen for business interests, powerful individuals and cartels seeking to make a quick buck off the public coffers. How else do you explain the importation of tonnes of maize grain to ‘meet local needs’ yet grains from farmers rot in silos across the country? Or how would we explain the same importation to meet a starving nation’s dietary needs all the way from Mexico just because the necessary signatures weren’t impressed on the right documents to release food from the government stores? We must either be very crafty or very stupid.

Our very own basic foods: onions, potatoes, maize are expensive when produced locally than when sneaked through our border. Scratch that not sneaked, because due to EAC trade treaty, goods from member states enjoy free entry to any nation so as to spur inter-country trade, but what happens when Malawi maize finds itself in Tanzania and then Kenya? Is the GoK unable to decipher this?
Funny that the only reason the traders/importers result to unconventional ways and routes to get their cargo through the borders is due to the slow pace the custom officials clear the goods. ‘Speed’ they say is crucial to ensure freshness in their products and long shelf life. As a result they create new routes along the long borderline and follows other unwanted, regulated imports! So we have created the perfect situation for killing our local agricultural industry and letting through unwanted, potentially lethal items through our borders.

So let’s all come back home to the reality of the GoK inflating the budget to incorporate the Big Four Agenda. An Agenda that will be Uhuru Kenyatta’s signature project. One of the four pillars being Agriculture, with no visible restructuring of the industry, players, levies and regulation or even the round table to discuss it, is synonymous to planting cactus and hoping for juicy grapes in the end. We may end up losing all that money allocated to corrupt forces inside the industry, all that wealth may consequently end up in a neighbouring country buying their goods to bring them into the country to make a quick coin. Probably even that same money will be used to corrupt local systems into not properly utilising local produce for the benefit of local farmers; a signature to release goods won’t be achieved, an approval to offer tax-breaks or incentives to farmers won’t be implemented.

Yet ‘We shall Grow’ will be our mantra for a little longer!