We should reverse rural-urban migration post Covid-19 crisis

Since the travel restrictions in Nairobi, my friend Jimmy, the Kenyatta Market music guru, has been living in his rural home in Ndakaini, enjoying the crispy clean mountain air while tending his smallholder tea plantation, cows, goats and domestic fowls. He tells me that his health has improved greatly and he is savouring the stress-free environment, eating fresh traditional food from his “shamba. “ His shop is being looked after by his son who has taken up the passion of collecting old music.

Narok town is the quintessential metropolis with the majority of its residents being migrants from other counties in Kenya. I am told by Willie Mbatia, a long-term resident, that during this Covid-19 period, many of the small-scale traders have gone back to their rural homes in Kisii, Machakos, Kiambu, Nyanza and Kakamega where they are eking out a livelihood.

During the early part of March this year, I took a ride on my motorcycle around the Aberdares. I could not help noticing the abandoned warehouses, collection centres and railway sidings at Ol Kalou, Nyahururu, Kiganjo and Sagana. These are areas where large scale farming had been entrenched during the colonial era with branch railway lines from Gilgil to Nyahururu and Thika to Nanyuki.

The problem of rural-urban migration in Kenya has a long history going back to the early 20th century when Africans sought refuge in urban settlements to earn a wage employment and to escape punitive hut and head taxes levied on them in the rural areas. Since Africans were forbidden to grow cash crops, it did not make economic sense to farm subsistence crops on ever dwindling land in the native reserves.

Unfortunately, this perception was not addressed adequately after independence and to add further misery to the situation the large- scale farming operations and attendant infrastructure were looted and dismantled in the 1980s and 90s by a kleptocratic regime.

Although the Covid-19 pandemic is primarily a health crisis and human tragedy, it also has far reaching economic ramifications disrupting millions of people’s livelihoods, with disproportionate impact on poor households and small and informal businesses.

In many ways the pandemic presents an opportunity for us to look at ourselves differently and the world to consider the African continent as a partner in finding solutions to complex problems such as Covid-19.

We have seen factories being converted to manufacture face masks and hand sanitisers in Kenya while in Senegal a one-dollar rapid testing kit has been developed.

Africans are seeing themselves differently and already challenging the tired old tropes amid the pandemic but the rhetoric needs to be converted into action.

The question of food security has been brought to the fore by the crisis because it has disrupted the flow of imports forcing us to look to our internal stocks and production. Our stocks are woefully short and farmers are disheartened due to low returns and delayed payments.

We have enough arable land, great weather and a lot of idle or under-utilised infrastructure. The problem is structural and is caused by cartels on the demand side denying farmers direct access to the markets and on the supply side, inflating the cost of inputs to the smallholder farmer.

In March this year, the Agricultural Sector Network (ASNET) was launched under the auspices of the Kenya Private Sector Alliance (KEPSA) with a 10-point agenda to transform the agricultural sector in the next 10 years. While it is true that numerous conferences and position papers have previously identified similar bottlenecks in the past, it is gratifying to note the recent action of Agriculture Cabinet Secretary, Peter Munya, taking bold and wide-ranging measures to restore the value chain in the tea sector.

Farmers need to be incentivised in order to restore their faith in the agricultural sector. All structural obstacles in the marketing of produce including middlemen, brokers and agents must be removed to give farmers direct access to markets so that they can negotiate pricing thereby receiving full value for their produce. The same applies to the sourcing of inputs and farmers must enjoy the full benefits of any discount given by the principal supplier.

Farmers must also have access to tailor-made financing for inputs, machinery and technical assistance. The government needs to invest in research facilities to develop modern farming and data collection techniques which will assist in predicting variables such as the weather.

The aim should be for the country to be self-sufficient in food production, supported by an efficient distribution system and to optimize our exports by moving up the value addition chain. A revamped agricultural sector would lead to a substantial job creation opportunity making agriculture an attractive proposition and moving many marginal job holders from urban areas back to the rural areas where they would enjoy a better quality of life. The national government should put the policies in place in partnership with the county governments as the implementing agencies.

We are living a historical moment which should engender a sense of reawakening and self-actualisation that could guide us through the difficult journey our ancestors started in the 20th century. Re-engineering our agricultural sector is but one of the possibilities.