Just this weekend I drove to Nakuru, and
along the Nakuru Highway there were many people waving down motorists
with what looked like rolls of white paper. Some were vigorous in their
attempt to catch the eye of motorists.
At the Limuru
turnoff, I stopped to check what they were actually waving. They were
hawking rolls of toilet paper. The hawkers flocked around my car
thinking I was a customer.
Due to the persistence of
one particular hawker (who looked motherly and despairing), I decided to
buy one. “Made in China” screamed the writing on it.
From
Kangemi to Limuru, we’d been discussing how haphazardly we build in
Kenya. Houses too close to the highway. A culture of not using
architects and even when we use them, no aesthetic beauty in our housing
designs.
Lack of building standards and zoning. All
these make driving on our highways unpleasant and more like going
through a museum of misery, instead of savoring the tranquility of
forested highways and the beautiful environmental landscapes Kenya has
to offer. As we got back to the highway, our topic changed on to the
toilet paper.
“What has happened so that toilet paper
gets hawked on highways?” my friend Martin asks. Perhaps it is a market
entry strategy, possibly because there is no credit in such a
distribution system, I responded. We seemed to agree that there has to
be something driving these new initiatives and possibly toilet paper is
at last is becoming affordable.
Then we began to
reflect on toilet paper, when we saw it first, what we used before, the
purposes of toilet paper, its market penetration as a product and so on.
The history of toilet paper dates as far back as the 6th century, but mass production did not take place until the 14th
century in China. It is argued that the British registered the first
patent in 1590 but what is more important is that a solution had been
found to deal with this important aspect of hygiene.
It
is now seven centuries later yet toilet paper is still not widely
used. From the 2009 census in Kenya, the penetration rate of toilet
paper is still below 50 per cent. As many as 30 per cent of our people
still defecate in the open and use grass for you-know-what
.
.
SPONGES ON STICKS
It
is emerging that communication is much more important to most people
than matters of nature. Mobile innovation that came around in the 1990s
now enjoys 85 per cent penetration in Africa. Prior to the invention
of toilet paper, different people used different methods. Growing up as
children, we used grass, old newspapers and leaves, but even these
proved harmful especially if you were unfamiliar with the local flora.
Some
people could at some time admire a green leafy shrub for the purpose,
only to discover it was the stinging nettle. Of course what ensued was
drama and if there was no water nearby, you got to learn a valuable
lesson on vegetation.
Nobodys-perfect.com
says other people used “fur, mussel shells, and corncobs. The ancient
Greeks used stones and pieces of clay; ancient Romans used sponges on
the ends of sticks, kept in jugs filled with salty water. In the Middle
East, they commonly used the left hand, which is supposedly still
considered unclean in the Arabian region.
“Corncobs
and pages torn from newspapers and magazines were commonly used in the
early American West. The Sears catalogue was well-known in this context,
and even produced such humorous spinoffs as the ‘Rears and Sorebutt’
catalogue. The Farmer's Almanac had a hole in it so it could be hung on a
hook and the pages torn off easily.”
Affordability propelled mobile penetration to where it is today. So I called one member of the Kenya Manufacturers Association
to ask why we cannot manufacture cheaper toilet paper than the one from
China. He told me that our production costs are high. Energy and
taxes in Kenya are our biggest problem, he said. I sought to
investigate these allegations.
SIMPLY NOT COMPETITIVE
Indeed,
the cost of electricity in China at 7.5 US cents per Kwh is almost half
what Kenyans pay at 13.73 US cents per Kwh. On gasoline, it costs
Chinese people 111 US cents per litre while in Kenya we pay 133 US cents
per litre most of it going to taxes. The average wage per hour in
Nairobi at $1.5 is higher than that of China at $1.2. Outside of
Nairobi in many counties, our wage per hour is less than 50 per cent
that of China. We are simply not competitive.
With a little bit of adjustment, we can be more competitive than China and this is how:
We need to reform the energy sector and make it more responsive to industry as the Chinese did. In April 1996, an Electric Power Law
was passed in China marking the departure from the past inefficient way
of managing electricity. The law set out to promote the development of
the electric power industry, to protect legal rights of investors,
managers and consumers, and to regulate generation, distribution and
consumption. The installed capacity has moved from 315 GW in 2000 to
more than 1,200 GW in 2012. They discarded small generation plants in
favour of large and efficient plants.
Kenya’s
installed capacity stands at 1,700 MW, virtually all of it coming from
small generation plants with only 18 per cent connected. The latent
demand is enormous yet economists keep on using antiquated predictor
models to come up with answers like 'Kenya cannot absorb significant
amounts of energy production'.
We need to simply
liberalize the sector and strengthen regulation. Discard small and
inefficient plants and build large plants to leverage on economies of
scale and more importantly, get the Government out of the way in the
energy sector. We have done it in the telecommunication sector when we
swallowed the bitter pill of liberalization. Many thought it will be
the end of communications in Kenya. We forget that most of us grew up
knowing that telephony was something for the rich only. Tell that to a
mama mboga today.
FROM FURNITURE TO STEEL
The
Kenya Posts and Telecommunications (KPTC) due to its monopoly status
had become too arrogant and non-responsive to customer needs. At some
point there were 3,000 drivers when the company had only 1,000
vehicles. Without liberalization, such innovations as Mpesa would never
have happened.
With some bold decision, we can change
our country forever. Provide energy to all then you begin to see
innovations popping up from all over the place. From furniture making
to steel welding there will be jobs all over. Manufacturers will
effectively compete and give us locally manufactured toilet paper as
well as other goods where we are not competitive. The ripple effect
will be enormous when people begin to afford the commodity leading to
greater hygiene and fewer opportunistic diseases. This is how every
citizen will understand that we are making progress.
Use
of toilet paper? The volcanic soil of Nakuru had dirtied our dash
board and the toilet paper came in handy. At the restaurant, someone
had rolled out a piece of toilet paper to blow his nose. I say we use
it to create a genuine industrial revolution, but hey, let me leave it
to your imaginations as to what Kenyans can do with toilet paper.
As
former Nigerian President, Ibrahim Babangida said “We have established a
new basis in our country in which economic liberalization would
continue to flourish alongside democratic forces and deregulated power
structure.”
We need liberalization in our devolved systems.
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