While the people starved, the politicians went on a shameless maize looting spree

Last year, Kenya experienced the worst food crisis in its history, with starvation threatening the lives of more than 10 million people.

In a letter to the IMF in May 2009, Finance Minister Uhuru Kenyatta and Central Bank Governor Njuguna Ndungu blamed it all on three “shocks”: the post-election violence in early 2008 which impacted negatively on key sectors of the economy such as tourism, manufacturing, transport and agriculture, resulting in a year-on-year decline in real GDP of 1 per cent in the first quarter of 2008; record high fuel and fertilizer prices; and the failure of the short rains in October-November 2008, resulting in a sharp decline in domestic food supplies, particularly, maize.

They of course left out the one factor which is perhaps the most significant of all.

For while it is true that Kenya is prone to drought, it is equally true that famines are rarely caused by a deficit of rain.

In Beyond the Miracle of the Market: The Political Economy of Agrarian Development in Kenya, Robert Bates shows that Kenya suffered 16 major droughts between 1889 and 1984 which averages out at one every 6 years. He also notes that relatively few of these resulted in famine.

According to Mr Bates, of all the factors that turn a drought into a famine, only one is under human control: Public policy and political institutions.

Nobel-prize winning economist Amartya Sen put it more bluntly in his book Development as Freedom: “…no famine has taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy — be it economically rich (as in Western Europe or North America) or relatively poor (as in post independence India, or Botswana or Zimbabwe.”

And, after the events of 2008, Kenya was hardly a paragon of democracy.

The writing was on the wall as early as 2007 when the short rains failed.

By February 2008, the country only had a stock of about 20 million bags of maize, enough to last till September, seven months later.

It was clear to government technocrats that maize needed to be imported by August to bridge the shortfall till the critical North Rift crop was harvested in late 2008.

So they recommended to the political leadership the same solution that had been successfully implemented in 2004 when the country faced a similar crisis: A duty waiver to allow the private sector to import the needed grain.

However, for reasons that would perhaps become clear in the light of ensuing events, the politicians, at the very first meeting of the Grand Coalition Cabinet, opted for a novel and utterly untested approach.

Subsidised maize scheme

Under the Subsidised Maize Scheme, they would have the National Cereals and Produce Board, a parastatal, import the maize and sell it at subsidised cost to millers who would then pass the savings on to the consuming public.