The way to a nation’s heart, I think, is through its stomach. It therefore follows that the way to Kenyans’ hearts, is through maize, the country’s staple food that knows no tribe.
The evidence is all there. During campaigns, politicians slaughter bulls and brew copious amounts of liquor, and their sins are forgiven. Our functions - weddings, funerals and all - are judged by whether there was enough to go round. Even graft, our unofficial national sport, uses terms reserved for food - chicken, eating, chai and the like.
Such is the power of unga that, if you are eyeing the MCA’s job and the attendant benchmarking trips abroad, just open a posho mill in your village. It is a matter of fact that the most well-known business people in rural Kenya are posho mill owners. For such is the power of unga that a man needs to be welcomed to a meal of ugali to wax lyrical about your generosity at every opportunity. An internet joke has it that if a man finds there is no unga at the local shop, he might ask for two loaves of bread and four packets of milk to enable him “sleep hungry”.
Now, besides providing a livelihood to millions, maize is the barometer of the Kenyan economy. We simply can eat ugali, a derivative of maize, 365 days a year and not complain. If you are still in doubt, tell me what else could have brought Opposition leader Raila Odinga to the same table with someone like Moses Kuria. Before this begins to sound like an ode to unga, let me bring you up to speed. In the last few days, there has been a lot of confusion on the state of unga in the country.
It started when the main maize millers warned they would raise the price of the national delicacy over lack of maize. It turned out that on June 15, the National Cereals and Produce Board (NCPB) had released 600,000 bags to millers, which could reportedly only last 12 days. Then NCPB came out to trash the millers’ claims, insisting that there were 2.7 million bags in its silos.
Nonsense, the millers retorted, arguing that NCPB’s stocks were unfit for human consumption. The unga saga got thicker when, on Tuesday, NCPB’s managing director admitted to the Parliamentary Investment Committee that over 400,000 bags in their stores were actually unfit for consumption.
The tower of babel led to suspicion that someone may be plotting to flood the country with cheap imported maize. The Central Organisation of Trade Unions (Cotu) blazed the trail with this theory. Farmers in the North Rift are already crying foul over influx of cheap maize from a neighbouring country.
Someone needs to get to the bottom of the matter. If NCPB has had enough maize stocks for years, as it claims, why did we have intermittent shortages in the past few years?
Two, between NCPB and the millers, someone is lying. We need to know whether, as Cotu alleges, the talk of bad maize has a business and political angle to it. Or whether indeed there is bad maize that needs to be discarded under heavy vigilance lest some unscrupulous guys bring it to our dinner tables.
Thirdly, and most importantly, we need to ask hard questions about the ability of the cereals agency to control levels of stock in the country. NCPB’s mandate is basically to ensure there are enough stocks by buying in times of bumper harvest and selling in times of shortage.
I could be wrong, you know even the most agile monkey sometimes misses the branch. It gets cash from the exchequer to cushion farmers from losses and to subsidise inputs. So why do we still have so much uncertainty in the unga sector?
We cannot afford to play alarmist politics with unga, whether for polls-time profit or to protect someone’s image and job. It is a red line we must not cross, lest we face the wrath of a hungry - and angry - wananchi.