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Ear to The Ground
By Charles Onyango-Obbo |
Baker of Teso meets Mumias cane farmer
Jan 21, 2004
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This is a story about two friends, a bakery, sugar farming peasants, and political food. A good friend has a thing about bread. When he used to visit his old folks in Kumi district, he found that the “fresh” bread being sold at the nearest trading centre was about two days old. Like an educated man should do, he asked why. He found, to his consternation, that some of the bread being eaten in Kumi came from as far away as Kampala and Kenya! Further exploration revealed that there was no decent bakery between Mbale and Lira. And he was waiting for his scouts to report on whether there was a bakery worth the name between Lira and the Uganda-Sudan border. In fact outside Kampala and Jinja, there is no bakery to write home about. My friend has been linked to an effort that has now opened a small bakery in Kumi. While he doesn’t make a big deal of it, my sources tell me that when the first loaves rolled out of the oven recently, some wananchi received the event with the emotion that the American space officials recently awaited the first signals that the Mars lander had touched down on the red planet. So to my second friend. There is a connection between the record setting status of the small bakery in Kumi, and a much bigger establishment further away in Kakamega, western Kenya. No, when you think of it, Kakamega isn’t that far away from Kumi. Mumias has an annual turn-over in excess of UShs 250bn. And there are very few managers and directors who have to walk on such treacherous political ground like those at Mumias. The members of the local co-operative of cane outgrowers are among the shareholders in Mumias. It’s one of the biggest agricultural – and certainly among the most militant – co-operatives in Africa. Though through buy-outs their numbers have reduced to about 50,000 now, not too long ago they were about 70,000. And these cane out-growers had a reputation for something else – they took the annual general meetings seriously. Today, about 40,000 of them will turn out for an AGM. Ominously, they are won’t to turn up carrying their rungus (clubs) and machetes. These are peasants, several thousand of them barefoot, who come to hear how much (not if) they will get as dividend. It doesn’t require a lot of imagination to figure what 40,000 farmers with pangas and clubs can do if they hear that the KShs 10,000 dividend they were banking on won’t be paid. The result is that many of these meetings tend to be massive military operations, with hundreds of heavily armed paramilitary and police officers. The new chief executive officer of Mumias is a friend, Evans Kidero. On the face of it, you could never imagine someone who comes from a very opposite background than the outgrowers of Mumias. Golf-crazy Evans was, among other things, the MD of the giant multinational SmithKlineBeecham in Kenya, then Nigeria. He then became MD of Nation Media Group’s Newspaper Division, and moved to Mumias at the end of last year. There is a golf course at Mumias, so that is one problem solved. I haven’t spoken to Evans in recent days, so I don’t know how his optimism levels stand. However, he will need all the luck he can get, because Kenya sugar has a bigger problem that can’t be solved by Mumias alone. The cost structure of the industry makes it very expensive, and it’s even being beaten on price by imports from other countries in the COMESA area like Malawi. Malawi has been able to mechanise sugar production. But Kenya can’t quickly take the road that Malawi has set out on, and Mauritius took years ago partly because there are 50,000 panga-wielding peasants and possibly millions of their dependants who would go to bed on half-empty stomachs because of the reforms – and vote against the Members of Parliament and the government that backs any modernisation. And here is where the paths of the bakery in Kumi and the sugar plantations of Mumias cross paths. In a world where, in some countries, large families have domestic bakeries in their backyards, the lack of a bakery in the north-eastern, northern, and possibly West Nile region is a vivid index of a low standard of life. To change the situation will require a radical shift in government policy; a revolution in how it allocates the country’s resources; and a very enlightened leadership to make it happen. In Uganda today - and in the past - the only time leaders have had the sufficient emotion and commitment to do something of that magnitude for an area is when either it’s their village, district, or region. The result is most Ugandans (unfortunately) believe that the surest way you can have a bakery in your little town and develop and afford the habit to eat it, is when one of your children is in State House. To them the road to quick and serious bread is politics. So is it for the Mumias sugar farmers – except by opposite example. The managers and directors at Mumias probably have write-ups of best practice in the global sugar industry on their desks. However, until the politicians are willing to risk a fall-out from an outgrowers’ revolt and push through a shake-up of the sugar industry that will bring in efficient methods of production, Kenya’s sugar will remain too expensive, and the farmers who grow it will continue coming to the AGMs barefoot. At the end of the day, then, the problem that countries like Uganda have is not that they lack leaders “with vision”. There are so many of those about. What is in short supply are leaders who have wisdom, courage, and honesty, and who don’t claim to be patriots by day, while they are actually tribal chiefs by night. |
© 2004 The Monitor Publications
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