A dangerous ideology has taken hold of Kenyans, and threatens to get out of control. It’s being fanned by a clutch of power-hungry opposition bigwigs and irresponsible media types, and is in danger of becoming an all-consuming national passion. Just when, one has to ask, did eating ugali become a human right? Which international or national Bill of Rights codifies this new-fangled right that Kenyans are so obsessed with, and which entitles them to access maize flour as and when they want, whether at market or subsidised prices?
When former President Moi wanted to illustrate the futility of one or other political folly, he’d ask the protagonists just how many sufurias of ugali their political treachery would add to their respective tables. The old man was right – how many sufurias of ugali will the current ugali-obsession add to Kenyans’ tables?
It gets even worse when wananchi and their opposition masters proceed to blame the government for the absence of unga on supermarket shelves – since when did serikali morph into a food aid organisation?
The business of government is to govern, it’s not to scour ragged little farms looking for maize to grind into flour for your kitchen.
Did Jubilee’s 2013 manifesto have anything in it about guaranteeing maize supplies? No! Did it contain any pledges to ensure maize flour was always available? Nada.
It therefore beggars belief that an entire political movement has sprung up around the availability – or non-availability – of unga wa mahindi.
Perhaps what’s even more incredible is the fact that maize is a relatively new crop to Kenya. It was introduced just the other day, a mere 500 years ago, by itinerant Portuguese sailors intent on finding spices and women to marry. That a crop introduced under such suspicious circumstances should hold entire countries hostage to its seasonal whims is both unbelievable and unacceptable.
And it’s not even like Africans in general – and Kenyans in particular – do not have alternative sources of starch. What’s wrong with millet, which is so tough that it sneers at droughts and can grow on a rock, needing neither soil nor water to unleash its bounty of starch after a few months?
What’s the problem with sorghum, which is so laden with carbohydrates and sugar that beer brewers prefer it to almost anything else as the base of their delightful concoctions? Isn’t Kenya experiencing a rice glut, too? It’s incredible that a bunch of Kenyan shoppers will drop-kick other in a melee to grab scarce ugali flour packets from some lucky supermarket while completely ignoring the stacks of rice packets beside the mahindi flour.
If that’s not witchcraft, then there’s no witchcraft on earth. Failing rice, what’s the story with wheat, then? Kenya grows and sells wheat. Wheat can be eaten as the seed itself, ground to flour and made into all sorts of cuisine – from bread to chapatti to cereals and so on – it is so versatile that serious countries in the West, places where systems actually work and humans have working brains, have abandoned maize to animals.
Yes, the Americans – who put men on the moon and therefore clearly are a people who know what they are doing, unlike Kenyans who can’t even get a bridge right – the Americans suck the sugar out of maize and then give the rest to their horses and cows. They save a little maize and use it as foreign aid for food-ravaged places like Kenya, places with food options staring at them but with people and politicians who stubbornly insist on ugali even when it’s clear that ugali causes bad governance, encourages corruption – remember the maize scandals in every government we’ve had since independence? Ever heard of a millet scandal or a wheat swindle? – and depletes soil resources.
The solution to this maize drama is therefore quite simple: government needs to ban maize and its associated ugali – which is so nasty, it gives you diabetes. Wananchi should be told in no uncertain terms that from now they are expected to eat rice and chapatti and bread and cake. Maize stories hatutaki – anyone that pines after maize is free to move to America. Or Mexico. Meanwhile, the opposition must be stopped from turning unga into a campaign issue.