In a land overflowing with milk and bread, let workers eat cake!

Workers at an affordable housing construction site in Mukuru, Nairobi. [File, Standard]

Presidential advisor David Ndii is a brilliant mind with brilliant ideas, one of his most penetrating theories being about milk shortages that have ravaged the country over the last few months. 

Ndii, whose name means “the one who eats,” says workers on government-run Affordable Housing—the project has been christened Avoidable Housing in some quarters—have been drinking all the milk.

Well, that’s an exaggeration. They are probably using milk to “escort” bread, as we say where I come from. Incidentally, no bread shortages have been reported, perhaps because bakers received the vital intel and responded accordingly.

I have no reason to doubt Ndii; like his boss, Prezzo Bill Ruto, he’s a PhD, which is to say he has “eaten” many books, perhaps with a bit of bread, to qualify as an economist.

But since the Kenya Kwanza folks have taught us to question everything—they even stole the rains—it’d be remiss of us not to fact-check this milky claim. Official data from the Kenya Dairy Board shows supply peaked at 90 million litres of milk in April. The numbers shrank to about 75 million litres in August.

This dip of 15 million litres, according to Ndii, has nothing to do with rhythms of nature, but the hunger pangs of construction workers. And since this volume of milk did not make its way to the processors, one can only assume that the workers received it raw, drinking directly from bovines’ udders.

Things get a little murky here, as we’d need to work out the average yield from every bovine. Assuming a healthy dose of five litres per head, and we’re thinking of high-maintenance, zero-grazed grade cows, we’d be talking about some 3 million heads of cattle.

But a single construction worker, no matter how ravenous, cannot clear a whole five litres of milk in a single sitting. In any case, given the complicated logistics of accessing raw milk from the udder, unless the workers spent a good chunk of work hours commuting to and from milking and drinking, the most logical option would be to deploy cows to every construction site.

This, too, is a complicated manoeuvre since, as the former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin Dada was wont to say, a cow needs feeding, lest one risk milking it to death. That’s to say, every cow deployed to a construction site would require care.

The next logical inquiry, perhaps, is to work out the number of construction workers deployed to the government housing project. Given the opaque nature of government procurement, one would have to work backwards and confirm how many units are under various stages of construction.

Official government records state some 10,000 units have been completed. Yes, that’s correct. Only 10k, which is why a good chunk of our taxes are being invested in T-Bills to earn interest from the same government that received our taxes in the first place! Yaani, the sort of theft being orchestrated here is out of this world.

Interestingly, even with all our money in its vaults, some housing projects have ground to a halt. Even workers took to the streets to protest unpaid wages, which means they couldn’t afford to buy bread, let alone the milk to go with the bread.

Official government records suggest some 600k jobs have been created in what the government calls the construction “value chain.” This category comprises loaders, timber merchants, car-wash folks, even the askaris who keep guard at night. Using this inflated figure to imagine a workforce of 600k would mean that each of them has had 25 litres of milk at their disposal. This is enough not just to feed themselves and their entire clans; they could even wash in it!

Kenyans are fond of a particular quip: unajifanya ng’ombe ukamuliwe na nani? I can’t use such base language on presidential advisors like Ndii. Instead, I’ll suggest that next time he asks construction workers to consider taking cake for a change. Cake won’t require a milk escort, so no shortage will be reported, and it’s even tastier!