Kenyans are starving and all we hear are conflicting state reports

In the course of this week, two things struck my mind, making me wonder where we are going as a country.

The first was the apparent discordance between the utterances of two Cabinet Secretaries on one of the most sensitive issues in any country — looming starvation.

The second was the extremely discomfiting report that at least 83 per cent, or more than 38 million Kenyans, are living below the poverty line, which means that only two million earn enough to lead a decent life.

These two are, of course, related, but the first one first. On Tuesday, Devolution Cabinet Secretary Anne Waiguru revealed that 1.5 million Kenyans in 23 counties were at risk of starvation due to prolonged drought.

She, of course, volunteered the usual palliatives when food security as a policy has failed — money and food relief to cure an endemic problem that successive governments have only half-heartedly tried to grapple with.

The following day, Agriculture Cabinet Secretary Felix Koskei had a different take on the matter, insisting there was enough food in the counties, but the affected people were too poor to buy it. Which, essentially, means the two ministers were not necessarily speaking at cross-purposes, only they were looking at the issue from different angles.

But the question is: of what earthly use is food if the hungry cannot access it because they are too poor to afford it? If one Cabinet secretary says a huge number of people are in acute distress, it would be only reasonable for the second to seek to know how this situation could be remedied through more efficient distribution.

KOSKEI SPOT ON

Mr Koskei’s admission about poverty being a major cause of hunger is spot on, so it is not surprising when the Standard Bank came up with statistics indicating the majority of Kenyans are living on less than Sh100 a day.

Now, writing about absolute poverty and hunger is hardly a sexy undertaking. Most of us reading this column do not really know what the two mean, for we have never starved, although we could have been victims of the absolute poverty syndrome early in life.

What I do not understand, if this study by the Standard Bank is credible, is why we have in the past few years been assured by economists, the World Bank, and even government leaders that the number of Kenyans living below the poverty line had fallen below 50 per cent?

By this, they obviously meant that at least 20 million of us have, in the words of the singer, Jaguar, “crossed the border”. Why have they been painting a rosy picture about our levels of destitution?

Spare a thought for the family whose head has no idea where the next meal is coming from. He wakes up in the morning from, say, the Kibera slum, treks to the Industrial Area hoping to get a casual job, fails to get one and treks back to his hovel only to be met by the baleful eyes of his toddler who is too hungry to cry, and the accusing eyes of the mother who believes her man is a loser.

This is what living below the poverty line means. And don’t even suggest that such people should go back to rural areas, because there, poverty is even more entrenched. Is it any wonder there is so much restlessness among so many Kenyans?

Even if the Standard Bank’s statistics appear to be a little too contrived — I mean, it beggars belief that Kenya’s huge middle class could have been sliding below the poverty line en masse — it still would help for us to ask where we went wrong. For we must have taken a wrong turn somewhere, otherwise why are so many people dirt poor while a tiny minority keeps talking of millions of shillings as though that is so much loose change?

Now, don’t mistake me; I am no leveller. In fact, I am a capitalist at heart. But such disparities of income are not only obscene, they are extremely dangerous, and one day, there is bound to be a bloody reckoning. That is, unless, we as a country, go back to the drawing board and seek ways to close the poverty gap.

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