Hand To Mouth

Philip Ochieng comments on the famine that grips Kenya--this year.

What can the President mean when he declares anything a "national disaster"? Why did he need to announce that a famine was swallowing Kenyans? With all the headline news, who did not already know? How do you rescue a nation from the jaws of death merely by giving that tragedy an official recognition? Did we elect you – and are paying you through the nose – simply to make sanctimonious statements about "generosity"? [SNIP]

Can a nation survive on the "charitability" of the "private sector" and the "donor community"? Why have we allowed this embarrassing beggarliness to become an annual ritual?

For there is no such thing as a naturally occurring "vagary" that we cannot tackle effectively with the fund of techniques to which all societies and all generations have contributed.

There is only the flaming greed which drives the very same "donor community" to destroy humanity's natural and mental habitat so completely that certain societies cannot think and work sustainably for themselves – and must beg.

Two posts ago the abundance which is available to all Americans—and to those not American, but who live in this country—was demonstrated. Contrasting that to what is going on in the country of my father’s birth, I didn’t feel so much guilty as blessed by the “accident” of birthplace and citizenship. I could very well have been raised—if not born—in Kenya.

But whose problem is the Kenyan famine and can it be solved? Philip Ochieng rails against the ‘donor community’ as an entity which ‘destroy[s] humanity's natural and mental habitat:’ an international interference in African countries which destroys incentive to do for self.

We are always being forced to do things – whether "democracy" or "development" – in accordance with a set of Western corporate self-interests marketed as "international standards" or "paradigms".

‘Forced to do things?’ Since Kenya's independence, how true is that? Or has the living by-product of dead colonialism produced a mindset within many Africans; an idea that the Europeans (and the Americans) owe Africans there lives so completely, that the former must shoulder every burden that the Africans bear, including putting food in their mouths? Did colonialism co-opt ingenuity?

Often I find my father’s tirades against the West confusing. He’s an ardent socialist who sees free market economies as detrimental; however, he occasionally will implicitly acknowledge that it is those very type of economies that will successfully feed and water (cleanly) the peoples of his continent.

Back on track, he continues to slam the lack of foresight of the Kenyan government, which has had only three presidents since its independence:

[E]very year, our people perish as much from lack of water as from an oversupply of it.

Drought is followed in April by veritable Noachian floods in which scores perish, especially in Kano, Budalang'i and Yatta. Our only choice is whether to die by drowning or from a parched throat.

Yet, year after year, after this fatalism is crowned with an impassioned appeal for "international" alms, the earth is allowed to continue with its usual "diurnal course" around the seething sun.

No thought at all is ever given to finding a perennial solution. Nobody seems interested in destroying, once and for all, the vicious circle in which this "vagary" of international fraud entraps us.

Yet the answer is as glaring. We must urgently invest in technologies with which to tame the April waters so that they do not touch human life and livelihood and to channel them into reservoirs with which to take care of future droughts.

And then my father asks the question which had formed in my mind upon reading the first paragraph.

Why won't we channel Kano waters to North-Eastern – as modern Israel has done for its wildernesses – and turn that semi-arid region into lush agricultural land?

Why not, indeed. Could it be because the Israelis well know the detriment of being dependent upon another people?

Young Kenyans—such as Akinyi June Arunga, who sometimes blogs at Martin Kimani’s fantastic African Bullets & Honey—ask themselves and their elders the same types of questions.

I watched my younger siblings being moved from one school to another as their former school got too expensive, we quit eating breakfast as bread, butter and milk became too expensive and we quit doing monthly household shopping since we could not afford it anymore.

My friends and I theorized about the creation of wealth and the formula behind it… if there was any. I wondered (often aloud to my mother) if the creation of wealth was by chance, both for countries and for individuals since I also watched many of my well educated relatives move to wealthier countries to work unskilled jobs for better pay and higher standards of living. I watched my younger siblings being moved from one school to another as their former school got too expensive, we quit eating breakfast as bread, butter and milk became too expensive and we quit doing monthly household shopping since we could not afford it anymore. [SNIP]

All I heard from the “grown ups” was that the government needed to step up and do something about one or another of the different social and economic ills that affected our lives. And the truth is that I really felt sorry for whoever’s task it was to plan everything for 30million people, and alleviate all these problems. I wondered if I would be able to do handle it if it were up to me.

I marveled at the wisdom of the people who had to run all the different government ministries and marketing boards, planning everything and even determining prices of goods and services for the whole economy. It always baffled me why all surplus grain had to be collected and put in the huge silos I saw growing up in the agricultural town on Nakuru.

Wouldn’t it be faster to let the farmers get the food to the market themselves? But on enquiry I was told that some people would not get the food if the government did not procure and redistribute it at affordable prices, and yet in the North of the country, there was always famine. [SNIP]

I was introduced formally to freedom and free market by reading books on freedom. The insights it offered were crystal clear. Presenting to me questions I had never contemplated before, such as what the proper role of government is, and the idea that protection of life, liberty and property were the only functions that could be justified in the existence of governments.

I felt relieved and elated. Relieved because I expected creation of wealth to be very complex, and now I realized that in comparison to the task of central planning, deregulation and liberalization are simple. [SNIP]

It is hard to sit back passively with the knowledge that tried and proven solutions exist for the questions and fears that many of my peers still have in Kenya -- to sit back knowing that it is within each individual’s reach if only he was “deregulated”.

It is harder to watch the law break the people, demoralize and impoverish them when one clearly understands what it would take to improve their lot.

Back when I didn't understand much about free markets and I didn't know that my father was a socialist, I asked him why the poorest of people in his country had no access to even the most rudimentary plumbing as poor people do here in the US. Tellingly, he didn't answer. I suspect that he considered my question stupid; and, after reading this latest commentary, I suspect that he had no answer which would have made sense to my very American mind.

Will young Kenyans like June stay the course? More importantly, will Africans--Kenyan and otherwise--get tired of allowing the same useless "leaders" to guide their fate? I hope--and fear--that many a revolution may have to take place in relatively open countries like Kenya in order for real republican democracy--with respect for the individual citizen, private property and free markets--to take any real hold; in order for Africa to continuously and sustainably feed itself.

Here's hoping that those revolutions are mostly peaceful.

(Thanks to Pajamas Media; Ms. Arunga’s documentary, The Devil’s Footpath, was screened at the American Renaissance Film Festival this past weekend.)

Comments

[inmypajamas]

This is why I love the blogosphere - fascinating information not available anywhere else. Thanks for this article.

[Tully]

Central "planning" combined with endemic corruption--the story of post-colonial Africa.

The world community failure is in handing aid money over to corrupt governments, pretty much guaranteeing that it'll be stolen and/or wasted and end up doing little or no good. Even worse, it enables and sustains the corruption.

[Peter]

I wish I had some optomism about Africa. There is no reason for Kenya's famines. When the Brits ran the show, Kenya exported food, along with minerals. Kenya's wildlife brought in still more dollars while those same hunters donated much of their meat to the tribal villages.
I don't understand it at all. It would be one thing if Africans had tried socialism for a few years after independence and moved to free markets when they got hungry but Kenya has been indepedent for two generations. And each year it gets worse. Sigh.

[Steve]

You've posted a couple of articles about Kenya since I've been checking in. It is something I know little about but I always like to learn more. How is the situation there concerning Mosques? Like Saudi funded Wahabism Mosques or the Iranian funded Shia sects. In other words terror recruitment and donations to terror. It seems a little blunt to put it that way but it maybe should be said. I've heard that along the East coast of Africa is where the Wahabist Mosques and Madrassas have been springing up.

As for Socialism vs. Capatalism I cannot comment too much. Each country has got its individual circumstances. There was a time that open trade meant Western influence but now it could mean Iran, Saudi Arabia, or China. But as for providing the best to the most, capatilism seems to be the most efficient. But, I don't really know, maybe someone could think of somehting else on a smaller scale country like Kenya.

I really do not know that much about how countries really work when it comes to the words "socialism" and "capitalism". Its always a little of this and a little of that.

[StinKerr]

This piece strikes me as an indictment of socialism. I find it ironic that it comes from a bright and erudite "ardent socialist". Does he read his stuff after he has written it?

[bigger]

I did archeology in Kenya with my undergraduate professor in 1981. While we were there he mentioned how, back in the early seventies, he had plotted a method to make himself, the farmers of the Lake Naivasha area, and Kenyan National RR a Lot of Money. He did all the math and it would have worked out. The Gulf States and Saudi Arabia are horse happy and _fly_ in hay from Europe for their horses. He would ship an American hay baler out from the US to Kenya and up into the highlands where it would harvest vast ammounts of lushly growing grass that just grew, bale it, and ship it down to Mombassa by RR and on to the Gulf to earn petrodollars. He would have made money. Everyone would have made money. The Kenyan government would have made money from the taxes.

The farmers, both white and black, reacted at his idea with undisguised horror. If their farms made money, the politicians would seize the farms for themselves.
They could only keep thier land, and the people who depended on them safe, by operating as close to a loss as possible. Improvement s were out. Investment was insanity. The Kleptocrats were in charge. Now, this was back when Jomo Kenyatta was still in charge. It go worse under Daniel Arap Moi. Bear in mind that it was lost on no one that the old King Street had become Jomo Kenyatta street and Queen Street was renamed for Mama Ngina (Kenyatta's wife, who also owned the largest chain of supermarkets in the country when I was there.)

Bear in mind that Kenya was one of the _success stories_ of post-colonial Africa. Tanzania was far, far worse off. You could bribe Tanzanian government officials with toilet paper (literally!) Kenyan government officials demanded hard currency (they had rather strict currency controls, in part because the shilling was worthless, so locals would make arrangements to get money out of the country by paying the bills of academics in shillingis and the hard currency would be banked in the US, Europe, or South Africa. South Africans wanting to emigrate often would try to do the same thing)

One thing in noticed about Kenya, however, was there was far less resentment against whites than, say, by black students at my university in the US (which had two 2! black separatist groups, Umani and Ujima)and was more segregated than any work situation that I have ever been in before or since. Kenyans assumed all whites (wazungus) were rich and the fashion set tourists who filled the game parks certainly were. The local politicians were constantly playing the tribal card -- you buy a lot of land, subdivide it into tiny plots that cannot support anyone, and move people of your ethnic group in to vote for you. Most of the foreign academics were predicting a major ecological disaster in a generation since most women were having four or more kids. Far too much of the country is semi-desert or desert with no way to get water, but before they begin grand projects simple maintainence might help in the short term. In 1981 one of the major RR lines was out of action because a train had derailed and was still on the tracks when we drove by it on a cross country (off road) trip.

The intellectual elite were socialist. Lots of them were educated in Russia (it was a given that a Kenyan man who went to college in Russia came back with a Russian -- or Czech -- wife), only a few of whom became doctrinaire Marxists. Most of _those_ were educated in Britain. It can justly be said that the post-colonial impoverishment of Africa was planned in detail at the London School of Economics.

As the South African exiles who thronged Nairobi at the time would say whistfully about their homeland, "it's a beautiful country."

[baldilocks]

bigger: Thank you *very much* for your insight.