One of the things the average woman from the Coast is proud of is her ability to cook. The culinary skill is taught by mothers or aunties to young girls as an essential part of future family life. Central to all meals, is the ability to make fish dishes, each according to their specific species and occasion.
These would include rabbit fish [tafi] seasoned and fried crisp, a delicacy for breakfast or lunch, scavenger [changu] grilled in coconut sauce as a sumptuous main menu item and mackerel [una] stewed with the right condiments for a satisfactory meal.
With fish therefore being a central ingredient in local meals, I was shocked to learn from a close friend in high school who happened to be Samburu, that fish is considered to be too much like a snake and thus abominable as food and was of no dietary value to the typical person from her community.
The question however arises, despite its popularity, why is fish not affordable to the average lower middle- and low-income household in Mombasa despite the proximity to the ocean? Why are there no new entrants into the supply chain willing to make profits by adopting a business model of large sales volumes as opposed to price markups?
Marine fishing at the coast has remained in two broad categories, the local artisanal fishers and foreign commercial fishers harvesting with or without a local licence. The typical local artisanal fisher, may own a boat with an outboard engine or lease one, and often gets fuel and provisions for the time at sea on credit. The boat may be made of wood or fibreglass but rarely has a capacity of more than 500kg of fish cargo and a crew of two or three.
A successful catch averages 100kg for a two-day excursion at sea, with no shelter from the elements – sun, rain and waves – and equipped with fishing lines and nets only.
The lucrative fishing season along the coast spans approximately five months only. To add salt to injury, the landed price of the fish is estimated as 20 per cent of the retail price. Therefore, to determine the actual take-home of the fishers, the costs have to be deducted resulting in the figure going as low as 10 per cent of the retail price of the fish.
This leads to a situation in which the monthly income of a full-time fisher is embarrassingly low. So low that when you attempt to find out how much they earn, they become evasive and say things like, “As you can see, we are poor people who do not make much money.”
Kenya produces 830,000 tonnes of fish annually, of which 93 per cent is from Lake Victoria, whose size within Kenya is 4,100sqkm. Ironically the area of the Indian Ocean in Kenya territory is 54 times larger at 221,800sqm, yet it contributes to only three per cent of the total fish volume produced in Kenya.
Ghana produces 539,000 tonnes of fish annually. However the inland Lake Volta, which is twice the size of the part of Lake Victoria within Kenya, only accounts for 25 per cent of the total annual fish production, while the Exclusive Economic zone, which is similar to Kenya’s, produces the remaining 75 per cent.
These statistics show that Ghana’s marine produce is 18 times more than Kenya's. Why is this?
Salim Mvurya, the Cabinet Secretary for Mining and Blue Economy, accurately attributed the lack of realisation of the wealth in fisheries to lack of equipment and adequate training.
One of the solutions he advocated is a paradigm shift, requesting each riparian county governor to move from individually owned vessels that cannot reap the cost-effectiveness required for commercial fishing to larger vessels with state-of-the-art fish finders and harvesting techniques.
The fact that the ministerial docket fell upon one of the coastal counties' sons was not a coincidence but a deliberate action of the President with the objective of wealth creation by the local inhabitants.
The coastal youth on their part are ready to pick up the challenge, with several youthful community groups already formed and in the process of scaling up their activities.