{UAH} Pojim/WBK: Don't blame tribalism for failed cash crops | The Star
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Don't blame tribalism for failed cash crops
Much has been said about the astonishing lack of courtesy showed by the crowd of mourners to 'non-Cord eulogists' at the funeral of Fidel Odinga.
And it has even been announced by some that what was said by various Cord speakers might have amounted to hate speech, since we all know very well who they were referring to when they spoke of 'them' as the source of all Kenya's trouble.
Now there is little mystery about this kind of speech. It has been the stock in trade for Kenyan politicians for many years now.
It is always very easy – and politically very profitable – to stigmatise the serving President's tribe as a cruelly rapacious bunch ('they') who are taking all national benefits for themselves, even as they frustrate the legitimate aspirations of 'the others'.
For, as the 15th century theologian, Richard Hooker noted (and I have quoted him more than once in this column): "He that goeth about to persuade a multitude that they are not so well governed as they ought to be shall never want attentive and favourable hearers."
And that was basically what was happening at that funeral service. In typical Kenyan fashion, the veteran public speakers from Cord, when called to address the crowd, found it advantageous to suggest that their political rivals, the Jubilee coalition, is driving the country into a downward spiral unto disaster.
What I think is of greater interest is that the crowd seemed to really lap this stuff up. This was not a crowd being 'incited' by the speakers. It was a crowd that was hearing very much what they already believe.
More disturbing still is that from what I have heard, any speech that harps on these themes of deliberate marginalisation, or outright oppression by the Jubilee government – whether at a funeral ceremony or a political rally – receives immediate applause from the crowd in much of western Kenya (ie, the former Western and Nyanza provinces).
So the question is: Why is it so easy to turn the people of this region against successive governments led by Central presidents?
The answer, no doubt, is very complex and layered, having both historical and anthropological dimensions. But in my view, the key dimension is economic, and can be explained in just two words: cash crops. Or to be more precise, the failure of the local cash crop economy.
To illustrate my point, let me outline an argument I had as far back as the late 1980s with a friend from Central, whose view was that 'Moi is out to impoverish Kikuyus by ruining the coffee sector'. He had as evidence the fact that many small-scale coffee farmers, who had been prosperous before President Moi succeeded our founding President Jomo Kenyatta, were by that time mostly destitute.
While I was willing to acknowledge the political marginalisation of the Kikuyu by the Moi government, I did not really buy into the 'economic sabotage' argument. But no amount of explanation about the global collapse of coffee prices due to an oversupply across the world could appease him. As far as he was concerned, 'they' (in this case the Kalenjins) had set out to ruin the Kikuyu by sabotaging the massive profits to which coffee growers were entitled.
What about tea? I asked him. Many small-scale farmers in Central grew tea. And they were thriving. And that was because there was still a huge global demand for tea.
But he disagreed even with this. 'They', he told me, did not dare sabotage the tea sector because 'they' also grew tea in Kericho.
Well, something of that kind applies today.
Western relies on just two cash crops for the small-scale farm income: maize and sugarcane.
Talk to any sugarcane or maize grower and they will tell you that what they receive for their crop at harvest-time barely covers what they invest in growing it. Given that such poverty exists despite backbreaking hard work, nothing is easier than to get the local people to believe that their destitution is part of a deliberate scheme by powerful people (from 'a certain tribe') to keep them poor.
And this is not a phenomenon that will end anytime soon. As long as Kenya remains, in its fundamental demographics, a nation of poor small-scale farmers, it will always be easy (and politically advantageous) to stigmatise the President's tribe, by explaining that the desperate agrarian poverty so evident all around is because 'they' have, very unfairly, 'eaten everything'.
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