Two harvests later, the economy is getting even harsher for the majority. The promise that the cost of living would fall with improved harvests was a hot air balloon that has since deflated.
Do we wait for a third harvest — now that subsidised fertilisers are being cited as key to a reduction in the cost of living?
Farmers, and everyone else in the middle, understand the cost of living is not merely about the price of unga. People do not rely on ugali alone. Food security — or better nutrition — is more complex than the price of unga in the neighbourhood shop.
It’s all too easy to promise, but the reality incriminates: the cost of living soars, as the value of the Kenya Shilling falls against most hard currencies, including Tanzania’s.
Disenchantment could get infectious if the trend continues. A lot more is wrong. Challenges are arriving in this land of plenty in droves. It’s no longer sensible to sugarcoat the reality.
It’s no longer the darkest hour of the night before the beauty of a sunny morning. A groomed pig is still a pig.
A social media influencer, Kipkalya Kones, captures the cocktail of our national sorrows: “The Kenya Shilling is falling. Prices of essential goods are rising. Cost of living is high. Investor confidence has gone. Industries are fleeing to Tanzania.
“There is no tweet, arithmetic, expertise or lie that can change these facts. And these facts represent the simple truth that this regime is worse than the four previous ones and is too incompetent to manage a country. If saying that makes you angry, then we invite you to choke on your ignorance.”
There seems to be no end to the mounting challenges. Kenya is in a hole, but the digging continues with wolffish rage. This terrain is uncharted.
The ‘kadogo economy’ that was once the survival kit in the informal urban settlements, has sped past the reach of the masses. This, at a time the chosen few are broadcasting their conspicuous consumption.
Ever heard of Tomahawk steak? The few enjoy Tomahawk steak, selling at Sh10,000 per kilogramme. The price of a roll of mitura — poor people’s sausage — has risen from Sh40 to Sh100.
There was a time ‘Buy Kenya, Build Kenya’ was the mantra of the patriotic. Not any more. An ascendant class of the excitable accelerates the consumerist logic, 60 years after Independence.
This consumer country is burying its pride by importing anything, from vomit of bees from Israel, to toothpicks from China; seedless oranges from Egypt and apples from South Africa.
Two excitable legislators — a senator from a struggling pastoral county and an MP from Nairobi — represent the new race for conspicuous consumption. Their exhibitionist lifestyle makes them forget the dominant face of Kenya.
The video showing the acquired tastes of some of these politicians is an affront to poor voters. The gullible masses elected this power elite to help build Kenya. But the elected ones are wrecking the economy to whet their acquired appetites for imports.
They import honey — Balgess honey — custom-made from Dubai, Yemen and Wales. Dubai and Yemen are dominantly deserts that don’t have as many varieties of nectar-rich flowers as Kenya to feed bees.
The conspicuous consumers also flaunt honey imported from a ‘Lord-owned’ organic farm in Wales, in the United Kingdom. They display chilled imported wine and bread with a six-month expiry date from Italy. Local bread is too hard for their delicate taste buds.
During the era of founding President Jomo Kenyatta, through to the Daniel arap Moi error, there were bubble billionaire politicians who used to import water from Israel — a desert country.
Imports aid the rise of hard currencies, especially the US dollar, against the Kenya Shilling. Kenya is a consumer economy that imports more than it exports. But even the few exports — horticultural products and other raw materials — have no value added to warrant better pricing.
More dollars are exported than imported. If the weakening of a local currency was the standard measure of the health of an economy, then this one is indisposed.
The Shilling is collapsing on the basis of declining exports, ballooning imports, poor trade deal structures (like government-to-government oil deal backlash), experimental fiscal policies, runaway debt and unstable money markets.
About two years into the cesspit of decline, the government should seek alternative, independent, economic advisers to check further slide into the abyss to save the masses.
