Farmers Need Productivity
Farmers Need Productivity Not Occupation
She is called Salome. She has walked on Mbagathi way; across Mombasa road to enterprise road for the last 30 years to work at a food packaging plant in industrial area. Her status has remained just that; one of the hundreds of thousands of Nairobians who stream out of Kibera slums as early as 4.00am to work for utmost $2 a day. Close to 200 kilometers from Nairobi is a market town Il Bissil; Ole Senteu’s cattle have faced the wrath of drought and he is now disposing of them at $10 each, down from $200. Near the Ugandan border, is Namukhula – a mother of seven; she wakes up at cockcrow to weed her maize crop that yields not more than 180 kilograms of maize per year.
My drive to Il Bissil last week forced me to reflect on efficacy of the development system a poor country adopts for her people. Early in the morning it will be thousands of workers (labour) walking to industrial area in the cities for a pay package that simply keeps them alive to walk the next day. In rural farms, it will be thousands of farmers, hoe in hand headed to the fields. Late in the morning there will be hundreds of automobiles of all sheds queuing in early morning city traffic as workers head to their offices to receive pay packages that sustain markets that do not liberate their countries from over-dependence on wealthy economies.
Ole Senteu is trapped in a situation where he has to sell one cow in order to raise money to provide water and grass for the remaining herd. Salome is trapped in working at the industrial area to pay her rent and feed herself. Namukhula, has to keep scratching the soil to feed her immediate family of seven. The middle class have to keep driving to work to pay their mortgages. Focus on productivity is the only way out of remaining in mere occupations…!
James Shikwati
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