Rampant petty theft and alcoholism rooted in our failed agriculture sector

By Edward Indakwa

Occasionally, you read in the newspapers that 80 per cent of Kenya’s population is employed in the agriculture sector. Employed, really?

If that statistic were correct, my village would be covered in greenery – fat cows chewing the cud, high yielding crop varieties thriving on farms abuzz with irrigation and cutting edge farming technology, the markets filled with fresh farm produce and farmers lining up to deposit money in their bank accounts. But the reality is far from that.

Many of the small shambas that I have seen back home are poorly kept, the soils worn out, the animals undersized and poorly fed, the crops sickly and the farmers stone broke.

To call these people farmers would be to stretch it too far. They are basically a bunch of ‘hustlers’ struggling – unsuccessfully - to eke out a living from the land. They can’t vouch for the quality of seeds they plant, they use contraband fertilizer sold on the black market, fertilizer that could be sawdust mixed with ash for all you know, and half of the little they produce is wolfed down by pests because of poor storage facilities.

At my rural market, even milk hawkers can’t break the law because they have no milk to sell illegally. Vegetables and maize are imported from counties far afield because what we produce is grossly inadequate for own consumption, leave alone for sale. And such is the dearth of cash that m-pesa outlets can’t pay out a miserly Sh500 to a customer. One can actually walk along the whole street without getting change for a Sh1,000 note.

The village is broke. Gown men – husbands in their prime - have been reduced to beggars and thieves to raise a shilling to fuel runway alcoholism and bhang addiction. Prostitution is so rampant that small market centres have red light districts and the level of decadence is so widespread that HIV infection, school dropouts, teen pregnancy, marital strife and divorce are as normal as the rising of the sun.

Mumias Sugar Company, once touted as the region’s largest sugar produce, is not just a giant in decline, but an empire deep in the throes of death.

The agricultural extension workers left with the white man, the agronomists no longer test farmers’ soils and the farm management programme is so haphazard that seed cane can be supplied when the farm hasn’t been plowed. Amusingly, if you listen to the drunkard leaning on a shop pillar, every manager is cutting the hand that feeds him, conning farmers and  stealing  from, and canibalising his employer before the company collapses, as it must, to death.

Policy and management lapses aside, this decline in agriculture is equally rooted in social and educational issues  too. To begin with, we stopped hiring agricultural extension officers many years ago, leaving the farmer to his own devises and ignorance. In schools, we have since time immemorial used farm work as a form of punishment for errant pupils, in that manner brainwashing them that farming is some dirty job that only failures and criminals perform.

Our agricultural training institutions, once respected across Africa, are now a pale shadow of what they once were; underfunded, their core mandate compromised as they fight for a piece of the parallel degree programme pie, training lawyers, medics, MBAs and whatnot.

Not surprisingly, not a single KCPE high achiever wants to be a farmer, or an agriculture engineer or an agronomist. They all want to be pilots, lawyers and brain surgeons, but not Lord Delamere, whose agricultural empire, though equally in decline, probably makes more dough than a hot-shot lawyer ever will. 

As a result, the average age of a Kenyan farmer is 50. Most of our farmers are in their 70s and 80s, tired old men recycling farming methods that are best rudimentary and subsistent at worst extinct. Their bent backs still farm because  their young children want nothing to do with the soil or cultural tenets bar sub-division of land to children while the old man is alive. Mostly, however, the old men cannot parcel out his land to his young sons and daughters because that would compromise their only source of income. Not that land sub-division is any good for agriculture anyway.

The consequence of this is that we have thousands of young people roaming villages with nothing to do, and whose frustrations at losing out on blue collar jobs has driven them to alcohol, drug abuse, prostitution and pornography. Men who should be working the farm congregate around market centres playing ajua, drinking busaa, sunning themselves lazily like lizards, watching European football, stealing chicken  and touting at the bus stop.

Such people cannot be said to be ‘employed’ in the agriculture sector. In fact, time has come when statistics should reflect that 80 per cent of Kenyans have been rendered unemployed by the agriculture sector.