If you suffer even a tangential connection with farming in Kenya, you must be deeply attuned to the endless grief of that sainted community. Throughout Kenya, farmers bristle with angst over the torment of punitive government regulation and taxation on one hand, and vicious exploitation under monopolistic market structures on the other.
Market efficiency is a foreign word in Kenyan agriculture. Farmers are virtual slaves.
Under these conditions, feeding the nation, creating employment and reducing poverty through agriculture is a desperately wishful gamble that invariably ends in tears.
You will, therefore, sympathise with all those optimistic souls who, at one time or another, have resolved to plunge headlong into earthly ministrations. They have, so to speak, “made a heap of all their winnings, and risked it all in one turn of pitch and,” more often than not, “lost everything”.
You will also share the indignation of those outraged and terminally exasperated by pervasive corruption, zealously vowing to scatter thieving middlemen just as the man of sorrows did the traders at the temple.
Once upon a time, a friend put some impressive acreage under tomatoes. As the beautiful crop approached its harvest, sundry intermediaries materialised with miserly propositions which, naturally, my offended friend disdained.
Vicious bloodsuckers
Determined to defeat them, he hired a truck, filled it with ripening tomatoes and drove straight into the produce market. We were all certain that he had finally retired an entire cartel of vicious bloodsuckers.
After paying to enter the market, he found himself negotiating with innumerable menacing and obstinate characters for obscure services and other arbitrary impositions. He also discovered that his truck was as far away as possible from the point where buyers were scrambling to unload fruits and vegetables.
Granted, tomatoes were in hot demand, but no one even gave him a glance. After a few hours of observing the dizzying bustle of the place, he approached a group of women who informed him that they were obliged to congregate at only one point and take their stock from approved suppliers.
This precious approval was only available to trucks entering the market under the name of “registered members”. Guess who the registered members were?
Suffice it to say that by 11am, my friend’s truck was beginning to run with the syrup of rapidly ripening tomatoes, squashed under their own weight at the bottom, and exploding in the heat of the sun at the top. What a mess!
New cycle of levies
By afternoon, word in the square was unanimous that his lot was entirely ruined, and by early evening, the stench of ferment and decay began to ooze from his truck. Naturally, the driver was getting impatient and the brusque market wardens had commenced a new cycle of levies, both official and illicit. Another one had lost his shirt.
My friend’s shamba is now a little thicket where raiders of the chicken coop peacefully breed. His attitude towards farming is fairly unsettling, and his view of cartels is outright bloodthirsty.
But what is the difference between the farmer and the voter?
The explanation for the testiness in our political domain lately is simple. The 2010 Constitution ejected the middleman from our politics, making us a democracy in word and deed.
It is clear that they did not take this gracefully at all, and all so-called reform endeavours since 2010 have in effect been schemes to restore the lavish privileges of political middlemen, and to confine the voter to the polling station.
We are caught up in a cataclysmic tension between the supremacy of the people and the repression of political cartels.
The political cartels’ aversion to the principles of the sovereignty of the people and public participation is of a piece to the produce market operatives’ disdain for the unmediated farmer’s cargo in the market.
In both cases, dire threats of direct ruin accompany attempts to prise away all value and power from the citizen.
Just as agricultural produce brokers pretend to be making the farmer’s life easier by assuming the burden of marketing, political middlemen purport to relieve voters of the “burden of choice”, whatever that is.
Intolerable monopolies
The struggle against cartels of predatory intermediaries is a perpetual enterprise in Kenya.
Paternalism always disguises greed and tyranny as selflessness.
Consociational pacts, just like middlemen’s guilds, are pretentious cartels aimed at choking politics and stifling business with intolerable monopolies.
As we contemplate these analogous threats gnawing at the foundations of our political economy, remember Adam Smith’s warning: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
In a free market, as in a republic, the citizens freely and joyfully embrace the “burden of choice”, for better and for worse.
The people are sovereign and cartels are their mortal enemies. We must fight to the utmost to remain that way. BY DAILY NATION