Temper mindless consumption with production in the counties

After many months of hearing the word ‘deadline’ ringing in my ears, I took time off the cut-throat newsroom processes to cool off. Now, I like quiet life. If I could – once in a while – tiptoe away to a place of lush green thickets, the chirping of crickets, the melodious whistling of the mid-afternoon wind in the boughs and not a single human shout in the air, I may yet live a bit longer. But you would be fooling yourself if you think the poetic serenity of my craving can be found in the village. Not anymore. Kenyan villages - trust me, I have been up and about - are no longer the havens of verdant green tranquility. Chalk up to many years of importing second-hand Japanese cars, and the expanding middle class, the city bedlam is catching up with what were dusty one-street shopping centres just ten years ago.

Folks, there is nowhere to run. In places where you could have fallen asleep for five hours in the middle of the road and woken up before the next car passed, today you sit on a balcony of a village bar and witness rush-hour traffic snarl-ups reminiscent of the city’s gridlock. And we are not just talking about rickety pick-ups that send black smoke billowing endlessly to the skies. No, the county chiefs roll in style; in humongous gasoline-guzzling showroom machines. They live obscenely large, arrogantly oblivious of rumours swirling around about the sources of their newfound wealth. And you’ve got to like the way MCAs display Toyota car keys on the bar table. And oh, they call each ‘other’ mheshimiwa, even when flattering a colleague into buying another frothy round.

Vehicular madness aside, the reality that assaults one at every village outpost, from Machakos to Maua and back to Mwatate at the Coast, is that we are already moving into towns and already madly in love with the finer things in life. I am the only one who carries around a basic cell-phone. No one even wears nondescript attire. We are into designer stuff. The tragedy, as I see it, is that more than 90 per cent of our flashy clothes, phones, cars, motorbikes, utensils, crockery and even toothpick, are not made here. You no longer send a child to buy Eveready batteries, because there are tens of Chinese options whose names you cannot master in a hundred years. The boutique and cosmetic shops sell everything from face cream to shirts from Turkey or, again, China.

This prompted me to check the figures. Just last year, China exported goods worth well over Sh295 billion to Kenya. Compare that to our Sh5 billion to the Chinese market and you get what that Philosophy guru, Prof Kahiga, would call ‘unfair comparison’.

And the Chinese are not to blame. Every nation has a right to market its products. Besides, these Chinese products have created many jobs. And that includes the Deejay outside a Chinese cell-phone shop in Embu whose work is to scream himself hoarse in a bid to tease passers-by into walking in and having a look-around. Again, China has even lowered tariffs for Kenyan exports substantially. The Kenyan government should therefore give incentives to boost production and value addition for export. You see, you can’t preach to people on how to invest their money. You can only make it more lucrative to set up a shoe factory than it is to import.

I’m sure some people are paid to rack their brains on how to promote exports. Are there natural resources on our soil that can be sold as raw materials for the Chinese manufacturing market? Or who knew Singapore could flummox the world with their semiconductors, which gave us the electronic transistor and paved the way for the logic gates of a computer? We just need to find out what we can sell each of the one billion people in China and we will be on the next bus to prosperity. As one miraa trader asked me in Meru: How about one big campaign – a la Eurobond’s – to get the Chinese to try chewing miraa, or Mukhombero?