Our loudest national argument right now is about arithmetic. ‘One term or two term’. Enjoy it while it lasts, because that arithmetic has a habit of changing its address, and those shouting loudest for one term tend to discover, once they are inside, that two is perfectly reasonable. Notice too that the man they want held to one term is, by plain counting, asking for one more. So, the whole country is quarreling over a single term that both sides want!
Now to the harder thought. Suppose a president arrived tomorrow from another planet, honest, brilliant, and uninterested in stealing. Within two years, that visitor would be shouting at the same walls, because our difficulty has never been the runner. The real issue is that we are a country of magnificent runners who have never learned to pass the baton. As any athletics coach will tell you, relays are not lost by slow legs but in the exchange zone.
Nowhere is this illustration more vivid than in Agriculture. Take the example of a simple crop like the avocado. The extension officer who advises the farmer works for the governor because agriculture is the first devolved function. The export license comes from a national authority, the plant health certificate from a different national agency, and the quality standard from a bureau in another ministry altogether. The consignment joins a queue of roughly 26 state bodies at the port. Every desk alongthat route is doing its job, yet none of them owns the fruit.
When that fruit is rejected in Rotterdam, for instance, every office can prove it was not at fault. The Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis (KIPPRA) estimates that our failures in plant health and food safety cost about fifty billion shillings in lost exports each year. Nobody can be arrested for that because it is not theft. It is a gap, and gaps never appear in anyone’s performance contract.
Tea tells the same story on a larger stage. In July, Kenya’s Trade Cabinet Secretary noted that 97 percent of our tea leaves the country in bulk, unblended and unbranded. He was right, though he stood in the ‘wrong’ ministry, because the seedling, the factory, and the farmer all answer to Agriculture, not to trade and industrialization. Interestingly, Germany, which owns no coffee bush, sold about six billion euros’ worth of coffee to the world in 2024.
Here is what should keep us awake. Last year, the Netherlands exported agricultural produce worth 137 billion euros from a territory about a fourteenth the size of Kenya, on soil they drained from the sea. In such instances, we cannot claim we were cheated out of land, rainfall, or sunshine. What we are routinely cheated out of are handovers. This means the one inheritance no competitor can copy leaves here raw and returns as somebody else’s brand.
That is also why our taxman can hardly hit his target. Nearly nine in ten jobs created last year were informal, in an economy where value is extracted and shipped before it can employ anyone. That is truly shameful!
The remedy is unglamorous, but it must be pursued urgently. We should simply pick a few crops and get the various agencies, county government, and relevant ministries to sign on the same page, so that an office is praised for what it hands over rather than for what it holds.
Every government we have had, including those we could not stand, built something worth keeping and broke something worth mourning. So, as we approach the next ballot, before we argue about terms, we must ask a basic question: which crop will you carry from seed to shelf, and with whom will you share the credit?
In the end, whether ‘one-term’ or ‘two-term’, someone still has to pass the baton.
Think Green, Act Green.
