WAMUGUNDA: Get priorities right to boost food security

The other day I was invited by some friends to a friendly meal during which they wanted to share with me an idea they had.

It was all about how society can place the farmer at the centre of planning for economic growth.

Did I not hear that food security is one of the key items on the agenda that our President is pursuing? And who produces the food?

Anyhow, after they had made me understand what they had in mind, we all went into the usual Kenyan mood of complaining and pointing out the things that are not going right.

Most of our discussion centred around the question of deaths — even though they had been denied — caused by hunger.

All the five of us wondered how Kenyans could be dying of hunger in one part of the country while food was going to waste in some other parts of the country.

Could it be because most Kenyans only eat certain types of food and cannot think of anything else?

Or could it be as a result of lack of creativity on the part of the leaders we have. When hunger resulting in deaths was first reported, the immediate reaction of some of those leaders was to deny that such deaths had occurred.

I would have imagined that a creative governor with a problem like that would right away have called upon his counterpart from an area that has excess food on offer.

I am sure that many people, if properly informed, would have been more than willing to offer foodstuff even without going into issues of selling or buying.

Such arrangements and others would certainly have saved lives. As we explored this issue, we came to some conclusions. One, we all agreed that the major underlying disconnect is the matter of governance.

If people are dying, and from what we have been told, billions of money is being paid out to build dams and no work is done, then we have to question the integrity of our governance structures.

As such we agreed that the question of governance must be checked. We also agreed that our priorities are all wrong.

If human beings are dying and instead of doing what must be done we are busy denying the empirically provable facts, then we have it all wrongly worked out.

What became of the value of human life? Incidentally, what happened with that Israeli-supported Galana maize project, which as I understood it was supposed to provide maize in such a way that the cost of unga would come down for Kenyans?

Could all these things be related to the issues of Kenyan farmers’ maize that cannot get into government stores because maize traders have an upper hand?

Fr Wamugunda is the dean of students and sociology lecturer at the University of Nairobi. [email protected]