Travelers upsurge at Machakos Country Bus in Nairobi. FILE PHOTO | NMG
Summary
- Although the Covid-19 pandemic is primarily a health crisis and human tragedy, it also has far reaching economic ramifications disrupting millions of people’s livelihoods, with disproportionate impact on poor households and small and informal businesses.
- In many ways the pandemic presents an opportunity for us to look at ourselves differently and the world to consider the African continent as a partner in finding solutions to complex problems such as Covid-19.
- We have seen factories being converted to manufacture face masks and hand sanitisers in Kenya while in Senegal a one-dollar rapid testing kit has been developed.
Since the travel restrictions in Nairobi, my friend Jimmy, the
Kenyatta Market music guru, has been living in his rural home in
Ndakaini, enjoying the crispy clean mountain air while tending his
smallholder tea plantation, cows, goats and domestic fowls. He tells me
that his health has improved greatly and he is savouring the stress-free
environment, eating fresh traditional food from his “shamba. “ His shop
is being looked after by his son who has taken up the passion of
collecting old music.
Narok town is the quintessential
metropolis with the majority of its residents being migrants from other
counties in Kenya. I am told by Willie Mbatia, a long-term resident,
that during this Covid-19 period, many of the small-scale traders have
gone back to their rural homes in Kisii, Machakos, Kiambu, Nyanza and
Kakamega where they are eking out a livelihood.
During
the early part of March this year, I took a ride on my motorcycle around
the Aberdares. I could not help noticing the abandoned warehouses,
collection centres and railway sidings at Ol Kalou, Nyahururu, Kiganjo
and Sagana. These are areas where large scale farming had been
entrenched during the colonial era with branch railway lines from Gilgil
to Nyahururu and Thika to Nanyuki.
The problem of
rural-urban migration in Kenya has a long history going back to the
early 20th century when Africans sought refuge in urban settlements to
earn a wage employment and to escape punitive hut and head taxes levied
on them in the rural areas. Since Africans were forbidden to grow cash
crops, it did not make economic sense to farm subsistence crops on ever
dwindling land in the native reserves.
Unfortunately,
this perception was not addressed adequately after independence and to
add further misery to the situation the large- scale farming operations
and attendant infrastructure were looted and dismantled in the 1980s and
90s by a kleptocratic regime.
Although the Covid-19 pandemic is primarily a health crisis and
human tragedy, it also has far reaching economic ramifications
disrupting millions of people’s livelihoods, with disproportionate
impact on poor households and small and informal businesses.
In
many ways the pandemic presents an opportunity for us to look at
ourselves differently and the world to consider the African continent as
a partner in finding solutions to complex problems such as Covid-19.
We
have seen factories being converted to manufacture face masks and hand
sanitisers in Kenya while in Senegal a one-dollar rapid testing kit has
been developed.
Africans are seeing themselves
differently and already challenging the tired old tropes amid the
pandemic but the rhetoric needs to be converted into action.
The
question of food security has been brought to the fore by the crisis
because it has disrupted the flow of imports forcing us to look to our
internal stocks and production. Our stocks are woefully short and
farmers are disheartened due to low returns and delayed payments.
We
have enough arable land, great weather and a lot of idle or
under-utilised infrastructure. The problem is structural and is caused
by cartels on the demand side denying farmers direct access to the
markets and on the supply side, inflating the cost of inputs to the
smallholder farmer.
In March this year, the
Agricultural Sector Network (ASNET) was launched under the auspices of
the Kenya Private Sector Alliance (KEPSA) with a 10-point agenda to
transform the agricultural sector in the next 10 years. While it is true
that numerous conferences and position papers have previously
identified similar bottlenecks in the past, it is gratifying to note the
recent action of Agriculture Cabinet Secretary, Peter Munya, taking
bold and wide-ranging measures to restore the value chain in the tea
sector.
Farmers need to be incentivised in order to
restore their faith in the agricultural sector. All structural obstacles
in the marketing of produce including middlemen, brokers and agents
must be removed to give farmers direct access to markets so that they
can negotiate pricing thereby receiving full value for their produce.
The same applies to the sourcing of inputs and farmers must enjoy the
full benefits of any discount given by the principal supplier.
Farmers
must also have access to tailor-made financing for inputs, machinery
and technical assistance. The government needs to invest in research
facilities to develop modern farming and data collection techniques
which will assist in predicting variables such as the weather.
The
aim should be for the country to be self-sufficient in food production,
supported by an efficient distribution system and to optimize our
exports by moving up the value addition chain. A revamped agricultural
sector would lead to a substantial job creation opportunity making
agriculture an attractive proposition and moving many marginal job
holders from urban areas back to the rural areas where they would enjoy a
better quality of life. The national government should put the policies
in place in partnership with the county governments as the implementing
agencies.
We are living a historical moment which
should engender a sense of reawakening and self-actualisation that could
guide us through the difficult journey our ancestors started in the
20th century. Re-engineering our agricultural sector is but one of the
possibilities.
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