Ranging from foodstuffs, toiletries, confectioners, vegetables, fruits, petroleum, name them, commodity prices in Kenya are not favoring the common man.
The fluctuating market prices, for basic commodities, is really worrying. Jane, not her real name, does her shopping at a famous supermarket, downtown Nairobi.
When the exponential price rush began, two weeks ago, she was buying milk at Sh 43. The following week the same half liter milk packet traded at 50, a whooping Sh 7 increase. Today, the same milk brand trades at Sh. 63, making great the total rise to be Sh 20, in just two weeks.
The trend is the same in other goods, like unga, cooking oil/fat, sugar, meat, fish, pork, chicken, match boxes, soap, and detergents. Such a scenario is occasioned by low supply versus high demand, or simply inflation, due to poor credit control, at the central bank.
Natural disasters, leading to low or constrained output, or simply poor mechanisms appertaining price regulation and price control, or simply sabotage.By certain monopolistic production parties, colluding with the state, to make a dime, in the transitional period.
Current high commodity prices not good for a struggling economy
By Mwalimu Miruka Ongoro
| May. 2, 2017