NAIROBI: Had elections been called the morning after Air Force One lifted into the Kenyan sky, Uhuru Kenyatta would have beaten the Opposition hands down.

I am not sure it is the same case today. He came, he saw and scattered them. That could aptly sum up what became of the usually clumsy and disjointed Opposition after US President Barack Obama let the cat out of the bag in his recent visit.

After Mr Obama revealed that some Opposition leader (name withheld, though we could guess who) requested him to be tough on Government and to turn the heat on them, there was no doubt where the Opposition stood.

Mr Obama had deprived the Opposition of the claim to the moral high ground that they thrive on. What else could they tell us?

All that was left for President Kenyatta was to stew the Opposition in its own soup. With so much damage done to the Opposition, Mr Kenyatta and his message handlers ought to have looked for any opportunity to rub it in that the Opposition never stood for anything and that all they cared about was that it was rather they and not the Jubilee Coalition in power. Remember the awkward Press briefing the day Mr Obama left where the Opposition mumbled a few excuses about the encounter with the world’s most powerful man?

But as they say, a day is a long time in politics. Indeed, it is. In three weeks, the Government has unwittingly thrust Cord coalition into the headlines again. Mr Kenyatta must rue his recent visit to Uganda where the alleged signing of sugar importation deal with Uganda was done.

I am not sure who to believe since leading Government officials have denied the existence of such deals. Personally, I see nothing wrong with importing sugar from Uganda if our inefficient sugar industry has collapsed due to corruption and ineptitude. Like in many other sectors of the economy, corruption and cronyism have left the people poorer.

What is disappointing though is the mismanaged message from State House: the President’s strategic communication unit is mute; ministers are talking at cross purposes and Jubilee politicians are out of depth in the art of sleek PR, unlike Cord.

But then what are the issues in the Kenya’s latest political drama? In a free market and especially with the agreement within East African Community to make the area an integrated free trade area, I would expect the Opposition to know better. Figures don’t lie and the trade deficit is in favour of Kenya many times over.

At 10.5 per cent, Kenya exports more goods to Uganda than to any other country in the world. The war cries from the Opposition are akin to burning the haystack to look for the needle. I haven’t picked any other nuances from Government briefings, but the need to secure the North where contraband sugar finds its way into Kenyan teacups might not be far-fetched.

I choose to digress. In my tour of Australia last week, one of the areas we visited was the Mackay Sugar Factory in Queensland. Ironically, about the same time, the politics of sugar was heating up in Kenya. The Mackay Sugar Mills processes six million metric tonnes of crystallised sugar per year and generate 23 megawatts of electricity for the Australian grid. The process of production and packing is not any different from our Mumias Sugar mills but the level of management and maximisation of profit from the mills is, without doubt, much higher.

Back to Kenya, the sugar politics as it currently stands has shifted its focus not on how to increase and maximise our potential for sugar production and on the value addition, but on consolidation of the political votes for 2017. Having made inroads into Cord’s political stronghold in western Kenya, the Jubilee Government has now been drawn into discussions on the motive behind the alleged sugar deals. Some are interpreting it to mean the President does not care about the sugar-cane farmers of western Kenya. This sentiments have political implications.

Whether we import sugar from Uganda, or any other country for that matter, it is clear that our sugar-cane farmers would benefit more from increasing efficiency in our production techniques. The business is a big business around the world. If Australia, which is more arid than Kenya, can produce such a huge quantity of sugar with a population less than half of ours, we surely can do better.

My concern if I were the leader of the Opposition would not be the Sugar deals.

I would be more concerned by the sliding Kenya shilling, which has lost more than 10 per cent of its value since the beginning of this year.

Despite a visit by President Obama and the expected gains from the American support through aid, and despite the fall of oil prices in the last one year, the shilling has continued to depreciate and the inflationary trend has been generally upwards. The report by the Auditor General recently raised many red flags as regards fiscal discipline and management of public finances. The Opposition has better agenda to be concerned with rather than talking about sugar, which we do not have enough of and must import anyway.

The politics of sugar is not really an urgent matter, the issue of governance and accountability is what needs urgent attention.