Picking tea in Kenya. In Kazakhstan, tea is taken at breakfast, lunch, dinner.
The Kazakh people often remind me of Kenyans from the rural
areas. Coming from a nomadic pastoralist background, they are warm,
hospitable and have a deep relationship with tea, which they call “chai”
in Russian. Chai is served all the time, and as often as possible.
People drink it black with no sugar, black with sugar, or with lots of
milk.
I spent a few days back in Kazakhstan recently,
in more relaxed and informal settings than during my previous visit in
January — when temperatures were averaging -35 degrees Celsius in
Astana, the capital. This time — the end of summer — the weather was way
less hostile, but the winds in the evenings could chill the bones.
I
make a point of taking Kenyan gifts of coffee, tea and macadamia nuts
when I travel; hoping to do my small part promoting some of the great
things Kenya has to offer. During my January visit, I gave away gifts of
coffee, tea and macadamia nuts.
And I was really
thrilled to get e-mails asking for more from my friends and colleagues
in Kazakhstan when they heard I could be returning in the late summer.
And I must say that the Kericho Gold brand of tea was the pick of the
bunch. And no, I have no interests in, nor do I know who makes, Kericho
Gold Tea!
IDEAL MARKET
We
can do far better than the few packets that the rare Kenyan visitor to
Kazakhstan takes when they visit. A country with the sort of love affair
with tea that Kazakhstan has — tea for breakfast, during morning
breaks, after lunch and after dinner — should be a prime target for our
businesses.
And especially when it has a growing
economy and rising living standards, just on the verge of being a
developed country and with nouveau riche tastes.
And
it’s not just tea. Kazakhstan seems an ideal market for flowers,
horticulture and nuts. Its citizens travel often for holiday to Dubai,
Turkey and Europe and we could also tap into this culture of tourism.
For
really, few countries can match what we have to offer tourists, with
our wildlife, birds, nature, archaeological history, beaches and
culture.
But we seem to lack the global ambition to be
among the best, content to focus on East Africa as our baseline.
Kazakhstan got independence a mere 25 years ago following the collapse
of the Soviet Union.
SPECIAL BRANDS
For
the first five to seven years, life was tough and hard and rough, as it
tried to shift from being a supply region for the Soviet Union whose
indigenous people were treated as second class citizens by the Russians
who dominated every republic in the USSR.
Today,
Kazakhstan has the ambition to be one of the top 30 countries in the
world by 2050. There is significant corruption in Kazakhstan, but a
substantial portion of the oil wealth has been used in the country,
including building a spanking and gleaming new capital of Astana since
1997.
With the quality of our tea and coffee, it is
dismaying that we have not done much to brand and niche our products
better. If the world can talk about Swiss chocolate (even when they
don’t produce cocoa), French wine, Belgian beer, Italian leather and
Thai rice, why can’t we have Kenyan coffee and tea as special brands?
Heck, Ethiopia is already branding its coffee as unique, and we hear of
Turkish coffee when they have no coffee growing anywhere in Turkey!
Beyond
branding our raw materials, we should also focus on more value added
goods in the same way we talk about Japanese cars, Korean electronic
gadgets, American cellphones, German luxury cars, French fashion.
Perhaps
the Kenyatta regime could focus more on these sorts of economic deals,
looking at expanding our markets in regions we don’t often think about,
and moving us into more value added trade, rather than working on
sugar-for-dairy deals with Uganda that raise more questions than
answers.
mkiai2000@yahoo.com
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