Want to know Kenya? Just follow its tractors, cars and mosquitoes
Last week, I was chatting with a Kenyan who has a very alternative way of looking at the country, what pains it, and what makes it happy. Inevitably, we got talking about the big issues the next President will have to deal with in March.
He surprised me with how he summed up the challenge: “The problem with Kenya”, he said, “is that today we import only 10 per cent of the number of tractors we were doing in the 1970s”.
He paused, and added dramatically; “However, we import more than 40 times the number of vehicles we used to bring in during the same 1970s”.
Of course, some of those vehicles are trucks for transporting produce, and buses and mini-vans for carrying the working masses. But his point was well made; that Kenya does less of the serious productive things like importing tractors for farm use, and is becoming a consuming nation.
I tried to cross-check those figures on the Internet, but I could not find any meaningful data on Kenya’s tractor imports. However, there is a lot of stuff on how much beer Kenyans drink, cellphones sold and subscribers.
We, however, managed to compile some information, based on 2007 when there was the most complete data, on the number of tractors per 100 square kilometres of arable land in Africa.
Surprise, surprise! The island of Seychelles came top, with 400 tractors for every 100sq km of arable land. Second was Egypt with 339, Libya third with 227. Tunisia was fourth with 143.8, Algeria fifth with 140.4.
Among the top 10, the surprise was Mswati’s kingdom of Swaziland. It was ninth, with 87, better than South Africa that was 14th with 43.5.
Kenya was 19th with 26.9. The other surprise is that in the East and Horn of Africa (or Greater Horn of East Africa, GHEA, as it is sometimes called), Djibouti was the best, at 13th with 46.2!
Tanzania was 22nd with 23.9, and then it was downhill for the region from there. Uganda was 32nd with 8.6, Burundi 43rd with 1.7, and Rwanda 48th with 0.4. In fairness to Burundi and Rwanda, they are so hilly, they have probably little use for tractors there.
We then looked at some data (2008) for motor vehicle ownership per 1,000 to see if the figures could show changed priorities, and reveal to us the economic ways of a country. Libya was top with 290.8, followed by the Seychelles with 173.2.
South Africa, which was 14th in the tractor league, is third in car ownership per 1,000. This, perhaps, explains why the recent national census found that there were more music deejays in South Africa than accountants. Maybe SA is actually in trouble.
Also, Nigeria, the only country for which it was impossible to find data on tractors, pops up at 15 in car ownership — 33 for every 1,000 people. Kenya is not much changed, it is at 18th with 21.1.
In another revelation, Djibouti, which had the most tractors in the GHEA, doesn’t even show up in the top 30 in car ownership. Maybe it is camel country, but that is a very good sign about the country. It cares more about growing food than driving fancy cars.
The same can be said of Sao Tome and Principe Islands. It was 6th in the tractor league with 138.9, but 36th in the car table with 2.2.
Still, this is half the story, so we decided to look up some other data that we thought measures better how much governments really care about the plight of the ordinary people. This was the provision of mosquito nets.
As of 2007-2008, Rwanda topped Africa in the percentage of children under five sleeping under insecticide-treated mosquito nets, with 56 per cent. (Rwanda is close to eliminating malaria). Sao Tome and Principe was third, at 24 per cent.
Ethiopia was sixth at 33 per cent; Tanzania 12th with 26 per cent, Uganda 22nd with 10 per cent. Kenya was 28th, with only 5 per cent, although it was being measured on much older data than the rest. Data from the 2007-2008 shows that number up to 7 per cent.
I can only conclude from this that, like many other African countries, Kenya’s heart is not in the same place as its head.
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