Food crisis: A symptom of failing democracy in Africa

Abstract
This paper argues that the leadership failures of many African regimes accounts for a significant increase in the prevailing food crisis in these countries. The fact that most African communities still rely on Agriculture as a sustainable way of livelihood has been taken for granted and failed to be recognised by political regimes in Africa. While little has been done to invest in agriculture, political rivalry and a struggle for a nations limited resources has cultivated a tribal monster in the public sphere. Consequently, survival depends on loyalty to particular individuals, often members of an elite tribe in powerful political position, controlling state resources and governing the country. There are cases whereby this rivalry has caused a natural decline to some cash crops that play a crucial role in sustaining the economy and feeding the nation. African governments have failed to come up with proper legislations/policies on land reforms for posterity. The colonial individual land tenure system, which ought to have been addressed by now, has benefited some communities  at the expense of others. This has cultivated ethnic rivalry that culminated into violence in the December 2007 general elections. With the current global food crisis enhancing the problem in developing countries, it is difficult to establish whether or not ‘democratic regimes’ in Africa are ignorant of their failures. Arguably, they could be using food crisis as a powerful political weapon in achieving their interests to maintain the status quo. This paper draws from the case of Kenya to show how African ‘democratic regimes’ and their western counterparts have contributed to the problem of food crisis. It recognises the challenges existing in implementing national food policies in Kenya and suggests how they can be reconstituted for sustainability in food production under the development model of Comparative Advantage in the process of democratisation in this global era.


Key words: Democracy, democratic regimes, food crisis, poverty, politics, corruption, policies, tribal-politics, Land legislation, Land grabbing, ethnic violence, comparative advantage, Luo, Kikuyu.

Introduction

This paper argues that the democratic/leadership failures of many African regimes accounts for a significant increase in  food crisis in the continent. This is due to the fact that most African communities still rely on agriculture as a sustainable way of livelihood. The importance of agriculture has been taken for granted by political regimes in Africa. Almost all the 42 tribes in Kenya, for instance, rely on agriculture which is the backbone of the economy. Neighbouring countries like Somali, Ethiopia and Sudan (the horn of Africa) are characterised by seasonal droughts and famine and they mostly rely on livestock for their survival. In Southern Africa, countries like Zimbabwe, Zambia, Lesotho and even Botswana and South Africa, despite being rich in minerals, still value and depend on agriculture. While little has been done to invest in the latter, political rivalry and a struggle for a nations limited resources has cultivated a tribal monster in the public sphere. Consequently, survival depends on loyalty to particular individuals, often members of an elite tribe in powerful political position, controlling state resources and governing the country.

There are cases whereby this rivalry has caused a natural decline to some cash crops that play a crucial role in sustaining the economy and feeding the nation. This is due to governments’ failure to come up with proper legislations on land reforms for posterity. These patterns were visible in Kenya during the leadership of President Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel Arap Moi that failed to address the land question for the benefit of all ethnic communities after the departure of colonial leadership leading to ethnic rivalry. With the current global food crisis enhancing the problem in developing countries, it is difficult to establish whether or not ‘democratic regimes’ in Africa are ignorant of their failures. Arguably, they could be using food crisis as a powerful political weapon for achieving their interests of maintaining the status quo. This paper draws from the case of Kenya using the development model of comparative advantage to show how African ‘democratic regimes’ and their western counterparts have contributed to the problem of food crisis and suggests options that can lead to food production sustainability.

The paper begins by giving a historical overview of land and land policies in Kenya. The paper then discusses the political relationship between land and elections and how this relates to severe food shortages in Kenya. By so doing, this paper argues that the food crisis is as a result of lack of political will by African leaders to come up with cultural sensitive policies on land and agriculture to protect small scale and other famers for sustainable food production on one hand and failure of western countries to acknowledge their role in ensuring they support African countries in developing sophisticated agricultural techniques. The West having benefited from colonial and post-colonial land ownership in Africa . It is at this point that the points out how African leaders have failed to implement the western concept of democracy by simply borrowing western values without properly integrating them with the African ones to form hybrid values that suit the local content.

The paper draws from various works done on development and democracy in its approach by suggesting possible measures that can lead to sustainable food production in the quest for democratic advancement. Conclusively, the paper calls for a change in attitude among African leaders with the hope that they will embrace a culture of accountability and political willingness regarding the ammendment of the time worn colonially inherited policies through the constitutions. The implimentation of the latter can strenghten institutions that protect and respect democracy by ensuring those in power accountable for their actions. This is not negotiable  if Africa is to realize her millennium development goals - ending poverty and hunger..

The Kenyan case - land question

The colonial legacy of partitioning created abstract boundaries that assisted in the running and administration of colonial states and can therefore not be assumed in the current situation. In Kenya, colonial settlers partitioned the most fertile regions of the countries, commonly referred to as highlands and utilised native labour for the mass production of cash crops such as coffee, tea, pyrethrum, maize, beans, and millet. Subsequently, and after independence, some of these farmlands were inherited by the black political elite. This is still the reality in Kenya to date and demonstrates a large degree of inequality when it comes to land redistribution considering that many white settlers opted to go back to England, with a few exceptions like Lord Delamare, leaving the land for the new black political elite.

The acquisition of land in Kenya has always been politicised with those in the government often demarcating large portions of land for themselves and their kinsmen through land grabbing - a term that I will refer to a number of times in this paper. In Kenya, there are certain areas in Nairobi (the capital city) that were earmarked for the construction of infrastructures such as roads, as the city of Nairobi expanded into a metropolitan, that were grabbed by "private developers". How the latter came to own such lands remains a mystery. In fact, this was a bone of contention after the defeat of the then president Daniel Arap Moi (One of Africa’s strongmen) with a coalition of parties (rainbow coalition) that led to the formation of National Rainbow Coalition (NARC) government. Raila Odinga, a coalition member whose party was considered the strongest partner in the alliance, was appointed the minister for roads and public works. Odinga began his duty by bulldozing all houses that were constructed on road reserves (grabbed Land) for the construction of bypasses in the city. Of course, he was sacked from office. This indicates the level at which land questions are still sensitive in Kenya. So what has the Kenyan government done to solve the land problem since independence in 1963? Well, as we shall see, not much.

Kenya is a case where land issues have been  critical components of the post-colonial development process. Research done on land policy in Kenya indicates a particular colonial categorisation of land for production from the most to the least productive land with agricultural activities suitable for those areas (Fox & Rowntree 2002). Land was classified into seven categories according to how it can be utilised as listed below:

• Highland and Middle cultivation
• Transitional and marginal cultivation
• Upland livestock
• Lowland livestock and millet
• Lowland ranching
• Nomadic pastrolism
• Tropical alpine and mountain

This was according to Rountrees’ 1991 study which examined the agro-distribution of land nationally based on major racial and tenurial sub-divisions at the end of the colonial period (1963). According to this study, most Kenyan land was held by British crown 58.4%. The British queen was accordingly the jural community and she held the land in trust for the nomadic pastoralist inhabitants of these areas such as the Maasai and Samburu. In post-colonial period, this land became state land. The African land was the next largest group with 22% of the country’s land area. The vast majority of these was held under communal land tenure system although this was gradually changing in the mid 1950’s onwards as the Swynnerton Plan’s goals of registering land under freehold tenure was implemented. Just over 50 % of the African land lay in the three most productive agricultural zones, around 20% was highland and midland, a further 25 % was transitional and marginal for cultivation and there was a small amount of land in the upland livestock zone. National parks were the third largest categories with 11.1% of the countries’ surface area. Most of the park lay in the lowland ranching and Nomadic pastoral regions of the country. The alienated European lands colloquially known as the ‘white highlands’ were very small in terms of their land area, only 6.2 percent but they contained significant portions of land in the fertile highland and midland cultivation (20%) and upland livestock (20%) zones. Lastly, there were forest reserves which were very small and consisted of the country’s most fertile land in the highlands and midland cultivation category.

Fox and Rowntree unravel the interesting relationship between environmental characteristics and how they can be compared for a deeper debate on how long term development process in former colonies can be achieved. Acemoglu et al (2000) and Easterly and Levine (2002) have reopened the debate concerning the importance of geographical/environmental endowment in the development process. Their two papers have tested the relative importance of geographic variations in phenomena such as tropic allocation or cash crop potential against the significance of colonial institutions such as legal system underpinning land ownership, or the role which policies have played in the post-colonial period. What they have not addressed is the political will and leadership needed to address the colonial imbalances when it comes to the three issues (geographic endowment, colonial institutions/ post-colonial institutions and policy) that they focus on and the possibilities of addressing such imbalances given that Kenya still relies on a colonial constitution which largely favoured the colonial masters.

It is such arrangements that should be questioned and therefore, I see it as an increasing failure among the democratic regimes in developing countries to genuinely address these land questions that are symptoms of colonial legacy that largely account for the current food crisis in Africa. This can be well done through changing the constitution to represent modern realities by acknowledging the changes in the current geographical patterns especially climatic changes and demographics. Extreme droughts for instance, are experienced in areas that were previously demarcated as highlands and Middle cultivation due to the changing weather patterns as a result of global warming . Increasing population figures have ensured scarcity of arable land in many parts of Africa, previously scarcely populated. Therefore, current policies should be ones that address these kinds of problems shaping land utilisation for development.

Politics of land in Kenya

The land question in Kenya was visible during the post-election violence indicating that it is a deep rooted problem in that country. According to the Humanitarian Policy Group brief 31 April 2008 titled "crisis in Kenya: Land, displacement and a search for durable solutions," internal displacement is a recurrent theme and it is often characterised by pre-election tensions. As we have arguede, during the colonial period, British Land policy favoured (white) settler agriculture, entailing the dispossession of many indigenous communities’ land (mainly Kalenjin, Maasai and Kikuyu) across the Rift Valley and Nyanza, Western and Central provinces – the so called white highlands. This process was legalised with the implementation of an individual freehold title registration system at the expense of customary mechanisms of land tenure . The land grievances colonial dispossession were aggravated by Jomo Kenyatta newly formed government. Kenyatta maintained the system of freehold land titles that did not question how land was acquired. To compensate the displaced, the government begun a series of resettlement which was biased towards those with financial means to acquire the land . Meanwhile, corruption and ethnic politics supported patronage networks and favoured certain communities, particularly the Kikuyu who settled in the fertile areas of the Rift Valley, at the expense of others such as the Maasai and the Kalenjin.

This land tensions were further exacerbated by Kenyatta’s successor as president, Daniel Arap Moi. In response to the political threat posed by the advent of multiparty politics in the early 1990’s, Moi (a Kalenjin) sought to portray the oppositions as Kikuyu led, and multiparty politics as an exclusionary ethnic project to control land . This entailed evoking Majimboism, a type of federalism that promotes provincial autonomy based on ethnicity. To recover ‘stolen’ land, Kikuyus were evicted from the areas they had settled in the Rift Valley and Western Kenya . Associated clashes towards the 1990s left thousand dead and over 350, 000 displaced allowing Moi to win elections in 1992 and 1997.

Under Moi’s regime in the 1990s , the executive branch continued to wield considerable control over the judicial and legislative branches through patronage and threats. Individuals were rewarded with government posts, land and other resources, thus paralysing the economy by inhibiting any private initiative and undermining the rule of law. Patronage has been bestowed most lavishly on members of Moi's Kalenjin tribe at the expense of Kenya's some forty other tribes. This contributed to ethnic polarization. Further, corruption sustained a culture where injustice has been tolerated and violations of human rights have seldom been punished. After two decades of sham Kenyan elections, the 1992 election were the first time that opposition parties were allowed. The largest opposition party, the Forum for the Restoration of Democracy, (FORD) was split into three after failing to agree on a single presidential candidate, and Moi won easily against a divided opposition and widespread ethnic violence that was largely politically motivated and instigated by powerful individuals who took advantage of a long history of land disputes in the region to stoke tribal hostilities.

Despite the violence, many civil society groups emerged in the 1990s and organized mass demonstrations to force the government to implement important reforms, most notably greater political freedom. Nevertheless, Moi won easily also in the second multiparty elections of 1997, against a fragmented opposition and political manipulation of ethnic tensions that included organized "cleansing" before the election to evict Kikuyu and Luo migrants and was carried out by armed gangs that killed hundreds of people. During the past twenty-four years under Daniel Arap Moi, Kenya had a system of governance based on highly centralized and personalized executive power. Officials appointed by the president and accountable only to him gave his ruling circle enormous control over the police, judiciary, legislature, and local administration. The unabated corruption and the plunder of public resources deterred foreign investors and plunged Kenya into a vicious cycle of patronage, corruption, and deepening poverty. Kenya's economic growth rate fell to less than 2 percent last year -- the lowest in the region, the average Kenyan was poorer in 2002 than in 1978 when Moi assumed power, and more than half the population lived in chronic poverty.

In the late 1990s however, the Kenyan parliament reached compromise on a reform plan that created an Electoral Commission which included opposition representation and registration of political parties that had been denied in the past. The 2002 election differed in many respects from the previous two elections, primarily because there has been far less violence and internal displacement . One reason for the relative calm was the selection of Uhuru Kenyatta, the son of former President Jomo Kenyatta, who belonged to the Kikuyu tribe (the largest in Kenya), as the main candidate whom Moi has supported. Inevitably, Moi's choice of Uhuru Kenyatta angered some KANU ministers, who had hoped that the new candidate would be chosen at the party's nominating convention in Kasarani and, in protest they formed a breakaway faction known as the Rainbow Coalition that was led by Raila Odinga, former head of the largely Luo National Development Party (NDP). In October 2002, the Rainbow Coalition abandoned KANU and joined an opposition political party known as the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) that later united with the National Alliance Party of Kenya (NAK) that represented many different geographical regions and all of Kenya's major tribes, and formed the main opposition alliance known as the National Rainbow Coalition (NARC), with Odinga as candidate for prime minister.

Corruption has actually increased after the introduction of multiparty elections and other political reforms, in part because international and domestic pressures for reform made it more difficult for Kenya's leaders to consolidate power through ‘conventional’ repression and induced them to turn to bribery, patronage, and theft of public funds with even greater zeal than before. This actions have costed the Kenyan people, most of whom are hungry and lack adequate shelter, health care, and clean water, billions of dollars. The most widespread form of corruption has been the illegal appropriation of public land by government ministers, and senior civil servants that left thousands of people displaced. This high-level corruption stalled all financial support from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and donor countries.

The biggest obstacle to governance was the concentration of power in the hands of the executive. The president was the head of the government, the state, and the ruling party and later also the head of Parliament. A long series of laws passed since independence increased the president's administrative power, particularly his control of provincial administration, and the authority to appoint all administrative officials down to the level of village chief. Constitutional amendments to restrict the president to two five-year terms in office, the legalization of political parties, and the repeal of the amendment permitting the president to fire judges were instituted during the 1990s, but the president still had only limited restrictions on his power to manipulate justice.


According to a recent parliamentary report on corruption, bribery occurs in virtually every sector of society, from government ministers, the judiciary, the police, health services, and local and provincial authorities. It is ironic that levels of corruption may well have increased since the introduction of multiparty elections and other political reforms in the past decade. International and domestic pressure for reform has made it more difficult for Kenya's leaders to consolidate power through conventional repression. As a result, they may be turning to bribery, patronage, and theft of public funds. The recent election of 2007 was seen as much more than just choosing the next leader, but an opportunity to set new standards for democracy in Kenya and the continent. This election that confronted two equally strong leaders, the incumbent President Mwai Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga, was a rarity in Africa where one-party states are the norm. Kenyans saw this as a test of multiparty democracy, but the battle was still along tribal lines in which the main selection criterion was the leader who will best serve the interests of the voters’ ethnic communities rather than about issues and policies.

According to Aidan Hartley writing for the NYT in his article titled “Democracy by other means” in January 11 2008 from Laikipia, Kenya's democracy has failed because ordinary people were encouraged to believe that the process in and of itself could bring change. So leaders-and often international observers-interpret democracy simply in terms of ceremony of multiparty elections. Polls bestow legitimacy for politicians to pillage for five years until the next depressing cycle begins. In the campaign rallies, there are no debates about policies despite the country’s immense health, education, crime and poverty problems. In their campaigns, “when they spoke English for the Western news media benefit, they talked of human rights and democracy. But when they switched to local languages, it was pure venom and ethnic chauvinism”. Raila and Kibaki, the two presidential candidates, belong to ethnic communities that have long been rivals. Kibaki is an ethnic Kikuyu from Central Province, and represented Kenya's business and landowning class. Odinga is a Luo from Nyanza province, and his appeal to the other 40-some ethnic groups.

According to Jeffery Gettleman writing for the Herald Tribune in Nakuru in his article titled “As fighting rages, Kikuyus flee the lands of rival Kenyan tribes” in January 7, 2008, ethnic conflict is threatening the decades of stability that has set Kenya apart from so many of its neighbors, like Congo, Rwanda, Somalia and Sudan. But Kenya has struggled with ethnic violence before. Its rare bursts usually come around election time. Maina Kiai, chairman of the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights, was quoted arguing that land issues "are political."

Gettleman indicates that the last time the Rift-Valley was this violent was in 1992, another election year in Kenya and a time of turbulent transition between dictatorship and democracy. Kalenjin militias, stirred up by politicians who told them that the valley was Kalenjin ancestral land, massacred hundreds of Kikuyus in a bid to steal their farms. Since then "Emotions have been festering, resentments have been building and we seat around pretending ethnicity didn't exist."
In the Rift Valley, the anti-Kikuyu grudge goes back to independence, when the British government bought out Britons who owned huge, picturesque farms. But instead of redistributing that land to the impoverished people who had lived here for centuries, like the Kalenjin and Masai, the newly formed Kenyan government, led by Jomo Kenyatta gave much of it to Kikuyus from other areas.

In many cases the Kikuyus own kiosks or small patches of land or they are related to someone who does, and this makes them a little better off by local standards.  Anthony Kirunga, a Kikuyu, who sells spare car parts in Nakuru was quoted arguing that "land is very important to us...It's not our fault that other people are jealous." That years election stirred up anti-Kikuyu jealousies like never before. Raila Odinga, the top opposition candidate and a member of the Luo tribe, built his campaign on a promise to end Kikuyu favoritism and share the fruits of a growing economy with all tribes.

The displacement crisis following the 2007 general elections is thus not anomaly; rather it is part of a sequence of recurrent displacement stemming from unresolved and politically aggravated land differences, in a context of population growth, poor governance and socio-economic insecurity. This situation further led to food shortages as many small scale famers were displaced from their fertile land. According to Greg Mills writing in Nairobi for the Herald Tribune in his article titled “defusing the ethnic time bomb” February 12 2008, land distribution and reforms have been shaped by ethnicity resulting, for example, in large numbers of Kikuyu settling in historically Kalenjin territory

It seems as if violence over land had become a culture defining the direction in which electoral campaigns took in Kenya. Therefore, the struggle for power to control the allocation of land and to secure jobs for a certain ethnic community were the breeding grounds for the post-election violence. The Waki commission concedes that  the post-election violence can be traced to injustices committed to Kenyans since the 1960s in a publication published by the Daily Nation 16 Oct 2008.The Waki Report says violence was part and parcel of the colonial regime and that after independence, President Kenyatta used it to maintain power. “Opposition parties were subjected to political harassment and individuals who refused to support the status quo experienced various types of repression and even detention without trial."

The Government was also linked to the killing of politicians such as Pio Gama Pinto, Tom Mboya and J.M. Kariuki, who were viewed as threats to the regime then. Opposition members were further weaned back to the fold through appointments to government, land allocations and other perks. Under President Moi, the repression became more draconian, with violence, detentions without trial and torture of real dissenters being the order of the day. There was also discrimination in appointment to political offices and jobs to public service and military. The Waki team argues that violence was institutionalised in 1990s during presidential and parliamentary elections and that tribal fights and political culture that used and tolerated extra violence gave birth to groups like Mungiki, Taliban, Chinkororo, Kamjeshi and Baghdad Boys. This pattern continued after President Kibaki took power in 2002.

The report warns that personalisation of presidential power, deliberate weakening of public institutions and corruption were responsible for the poor living conditions of Kenyans. Corruption in Kenya has been so rampant such that even after the election of President Kibaki, rules were ignored within ministries resulting in Anglo Leasing and other scandals, underscoring once again the fact that the personal power of the President and his close associates trumped the law. Some Kenyans felt government institutions, including the Judiciary were not independent of presidency, were not impartial and lacked integrity. Hence, "they were perceived as not able to conduct the election fairly.”

A belief by public that a person from their ethnic community must be in power, both to secure for them benefits and as a defensive strategy to keep other ethnic groups from taking jobs, land and entitlements also fuelled the violence. President Kibaki was further blamed for reneging on a memorandum of understanding in 2002 to create the post of Prime Minister to help trim presidential powers. The Kibaki administration was also accused of watering down provisions of the Bomas Draft.“The post-election violence therefore is, in part, a consequence of the failure of President Kibaki and his first Government to exert political control over the country or to maintain sufficient legitimacy as would have allowed a civilised contest with him at the polls to be possible.”

Peter Kimani Wrting in the commentisfree.guardian.co.uk in an article titled “Share land, not power” indicates how land has been a big question in Kenyan history and traces the colonial links to the land problem in Kenya. He says that “Land is what Me Katilili wa Meza and the Giriama people at the Kenyan coast, Waiyaki wa Hinga and the Gikuyu people in central Kenya, and the Nandi's Koitalel arap Samoei in Kenya's Rift Valley invoked over 100 years ago in their resistance against the British because land was the very basis of the people's social existence. According to Kimani, at the height of the British rule in Kenya, less than 1,000 white farmers held more than eight million acres of the nation's best land - virtually all the available arable land - acquired through brute force or shrewd conning.
The Maasai, for instance, who were the original inhabitants of the Rift-Valley, lost their land through dubious "treaties" that allowed their forcible removal from their homelands to pave way for white settlers. The land in question covers the vast Laikipia plateau stretching across two million acres of mountain, savannah and forest, from Mount Kenya in the east to the Rift valley in the west. The uprooting of the Kikuyu from their farmlands in Central Kenya triggered the Mau Mau armed insurgency that lasted one decade, one of the bloodiest periods in Kenya's history.

Kimani adds that Kenya's founding president Jomo Kenyatta, mistakenly jailed as the leader of Mau Mau, emerged from incarceration preaching "suffering without bitterness," specifically urging the white settlers to "stay on and farm the land". And stay on and farm they did - but for the 780 white settlers who sold their land under the Settlement Transfer Fund Scheme. Under this project, the British and West German governments and the World Bank contributed £20m towards land buy-out for redistribution. Only 1.2 million acres of the eight million acres held by settlers had been distributed by the end of 1971 when the scheme was wound up. To date, up to six million acres of land is estimated to be in settler hands, as happened 60 years ago. Other lords of poverty include Kenya's political elite. According to the Kenya Land Alliance, a consortium of local NGOs pushing for social and land reform, more than a half of the arable land in Kenya is in the hands of just 20% of the 33 million Kenyans. Sixty-seven per cent of the population is squashed in less than an acre per person. A whopping 13% of the population is landless.

There are historical parallels between what's happening now and then. After the Mau Mau armed resistance, a political settlement was sought through the Lancaster House Conferences between 1960, 1962 and 1963 that among others, upheld the sanctity of the title deed, thereby legitimising the theft of the people's land. The settlers who took the people's land before independence still hold it. They use the fertile red volcanic soils to grow tea, coffee and horticulture while the expansive savannahs have been converted into eco-tourism sites where they draw the rich tourists.

In 2004, for instance, the combined earnings from tea, coffee, tourism and horticulture grossed about £1 billion, nearly half of Kenya's annual national budget. Yet only 31% ended up in national coffers as tax and real earnings to Kenyans. The rest went to largely British individuals and multinationals.
Under the theory of comparative advantage , a country should be able to maximise production in a sector where they have a relative advantage to their trading partners, in the case of Kenya then this would be surplus production in Agricultural products since Kenya is an agricultural economy.

Given the above discussion, on one hand, it is true that the most productive land in Kenya is still under foreign ownership, it is easy to see how ordinary Kenyans do not benefit from the sales of tea, coffee, tobacco and horticulture, basically because they are exported and the returns are withheld abroad. On the other hand the remaining percentage of land not under settler ownership was unfairly distributed based on ethnicity. In international trade, the principle of comparative advantage refers to the fact that although one country may have an absolute disadvantage with another, value can be created for both countries by allocating resources to the most competitive area of the disadvantaged country.

European countries have a technological advantage and less opportunity cost when it come to agricultural production. They have managed to increase the competitiveness in terms of the production of coffee, tea and horticulture in Kenya. However, this amounts to exploitation due to the fact that Kenya does not benefit out of such trading arrangements. When ordinary famers want to buy machinery and chemical fertilizers to improve food production, they pay through their nose due to the high costs of imports; this is despite government subsidies such as zero tax on agricultural products. This is not only true for chemical fertilizers, but also organic. The former have side effects, including heavy costs -- globally, the cost of fertilizer is increasing. Using fertilizer must be accompanied by knowledge of soil and fertilizer management. Sadly, this is not the case. Elimination of tax on chemicals has not been effected in Africa, despite the AU resolution. There has been a bit of that in Kenya, but this was due to post-election violence because many farmers' properties were destroyed and (they) couldn't afford the fertilizer . On the other hand, European countries benefit from cheap land and labor to obtain raw material for the manufacture of finished products such as tobacco, coffee and tea which they in turn resell at very high costs.

The government should strive to protect domestic farmers from overseas imports that might threaten agricultural production and review land allocation and redistribution policies to benefit all ethnic communities in Kenya for sustainable food production. The belly politics through corruption during President Kenyatta and Moi’s error in Kenya affected some vital sectors of production such as coffee, sugarcane, and maize due to cheap imports that saturated the market and killed local production making these products scarce and relatively expensive.

The central causal factor to the food crisis in Kenya and other parts of Africa is therefore not essentially ‘drought as a natural disaster’ but poor land policies and the inability of the Kenyan government to question “corny” land acquisitions by European settlers and the Kenyan black elites that ensure they still hold the titles to large chunks of Kenya’s fertile land, where they do commercial farming, and the lack of support from overseas agricultural investors to transfer their technical skills to ordinary famers as well as support local food production. The crisis also includes deterioration of agricultural institutions, failure to implement policies that are set to ensure food security-which are directly linked to leadership failures and the inability of African countries to integrate successful indigenous agricultural techniques from one region of the continent to another because of lack of proper scientific language for such techniques.

Furthermore, if you talk of sophisticated scientific methods of ensuring food security, Sub-Saharan African countries, for instance, are at different stages of implementing the use of GMOs (genetically-modified organisms) to improve agricultural production. The tissue culture aspect is popular among some farmers. Although there is a lot of potential for use of GMOs, it is still constrained by different approaches and policies which are at different levels in the sub-continent. Some aspects of GMOs have also not been clarified, especially the health-related aspect; (for GMOs) to be adopted, it must be made clear there are no critical environmental problems. Many people in Africa fear the use of GMOs simply because issues surrounding them haven't been clarified. Scientists too have not agreed on how GMOs can contribute to food security. GMOs must be harmonised in regard to policy and assessment of their effects on the environment and human health. The standards must also be acceptable to neighbours, because of cross-border trade and globalization.

According to an Interview done by Interpress service with Washington Ochola, one of the authors of the sub-Saharan review, and also a senior lecturer in sustainable agriculture and rural development at Egerton University in Kenya, Egypt is a good example of where local level knowledge has been used for intensive agricultural production. Despite its harsh climatic conditions, the country has been able to harness and successfully use the Nile basin for agriculture. In Botswana, communities along a river delta have come up with local management strategies which encourage intensive production and at the same time protect the environment. There are other success stories in Congo and Uganda where agricultural knowledge and technology are helping farmers to beat the effects of desertification, crop failure and HIV/AIDS.

However, beurocracy and corruption among government officials ensure various policy issues are not implemented, typical among ‘African democracies’, defeats such initiatives in a country like Kenya. The Moi regime, for example saw the collapse of major farming institution such as the Kenya Meat Commission (KMT) and Kenya Co-operative Creameries (KCC) which acted as support and marketing mechanisms for Kenyan meat and dairy farmers. President Kibaki has since revived them by investing in meat processing plants. So one would question the current food policy in Kenya. What has Kenya been doing about food security? Arising from the shortages of essential staple food grains in 1980, in June 1981 Kenya launched a sessional paper No. 4 of 1981 on National Food Policy. The overall objects of the policy were three fold:
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• Achieve a calculated degree of food supply for each area of the country.
• Maintain a position of broad self-sufficiency in the main food stuffs in order to enable the nation to be fed without using scarce foreign exchange on food imports.
• Ensure that these food stuffs are distributed in such a manner that every member of the population has a nutritionally adequate diet. The National Food Policy addresses specific issues of price policy, agricultural trade policy, agricultural inputs policy, research and extension policy' food security policy, processing and marketing policy' nutrition policy, resource development policy and, employment policy.

Many countries throughout the world were originally spurred to build national food and nutrition policies because of a call-to-action at the 1992 World Food Summit in Rome. Although Kenya had a National Food Policy by 1980, it still experienced difficulty in implementing it to date. A team from the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University is providing technical assistance to the East and Southern Africa Regional Office of the United Nations Children’s Fund (EASRO UNICEF), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and the government of Kenya to build strategies for implementing Kenya’s National Food and Nutrition Policy. The Friedman team is assisting the Kenyan government with translating the policy document into a strategic, actionable plan. The scope of the plan ranges from agricultural production, strategic grain reserves, and post-harvest protection, to nutritional interventions for high-risk groups, and the interrelationship of nutrition and diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS (Gallager, 2007) .

The challenge is implementation of this policy. Taking them from paper to approved policy, and from policy to funding and effective programs is a complex, multi-faceted process, requiring involvement from many government groups that sometimes see themselves as unrelated. The Friedman’s team facilitated two meetings in Nairobi on March 26 and March 27-29, 2007. The purpose of the first meeting, attended by senior policy makers, including ministers and regional and country level United Nations agency heads was to introduce the national policy and generate commitment to the development of a comprehensive, workable strategy. The second meeting was a working meeting, with participants from several government ministries, consultants from FAO and UNICEF, and specialists from various international non-governmental organizations and national groups who collaborated to define strategy for moving the policy forward. Some of the key areas of the strategies addressed at the meeting were as follows:

• Forming a consensus on agricultural production and food trade issues
• Establishing a life-cycle approach to organize nutritional interventions, including a cross-generational approach for maternal-child nutrition issues
• Ensuring the new nutrition strategies are phased in three-to-five year periods so that goals are attainable and there is an operational research phase to build on
• Organizing a dynamic framework for the national food and nutrition policy with ongoing review and adjustment
• Promoting intersectional collaboration for nutrition and agricultural interventions
• Creating acceptance among food and nutrition ministries of the private sector as an ally
• Building capacity of various ministries to ensure sustainability of the policy

This policy, spelt out in the 2002-2008 National Development Plan was expected to prepare Kenya to tackle the challenge of food shortage. However, the famine situation in Kenya has severely cast doubts on the country's national food policy, which seeks to ensure adequate supply nation-wide and at all times. The food crisis, as a result, is a culmination of drought and a lack of a clear cut programme to protect local famers and lack of sufficient storage facilities and technology and, most importantly, lack of political will. Policy experts, however, fault government's agriculture policy, which they say does not protect the interests of small-scale farmers especialy considering the famines that hit the country regularly. The current famine is the worst to hit Kenya in recent times. President Mwai Kibaki termed it a "national disaster" in July and appealed to the international community for food aid.

Ironically, the famine situation was worsened by an alleged sale of strategic maize reserves by the National Cereals and Produce Board (NCPB) to Southern African countries in a transaction approved by the administration of the then President Daniel Arap Moi. But much of the food disaster has to do with government policy. The 2002-2008 National Development Plan notes among the main factors affecting food security in Kenya, emphasis on quantity at the expense of quality, lack of an early warning system, inadequate strategic reserves, inadequate research, weak farmer institutions, insecurity in pastoral areas and lack of effective control of crop and livestock diseases . This are among the challenges Western agricultural investors can help Kenya tackle.

Food crisis as a symptom of failing democracy

Considering that proper policy measures need to be implemented for greater production of food, then it is clear that the food crisis is consequence of leadership failure by African government to invest in agriculture, like in many other key areas of development. Fisher (2001) argues that even though Authorities agree the recent movement toward greater democratic freedoms has been impressive more still need to be done Widner in Fisher (2001) observes that “Between 1989 and 1992, roughly half the countries of sub-Saharan Africa either installed multiparty governments or embarked on a move toward multiparty governments or embarked on a move toward multiparty rule”.

Wiseman in Fisher (2001) points out that, whereas in 1989 only five states in the region could seriously claim to be governed by even relatively minimal definitions of democracy, by 1995 the situation had remarkably changed in the direction of more liberal government in which people had greater freedom to participate. However, even those nations demonstrating the best progress still have a long way to go to achieve true representative democracy. Some that have taken steps forward now find themselves slipping backward like the case discussed in this paper (Kenya). Others are actually regressing. A few have yet to opt for more democratic rule.

The food crisis is one, among a list of the many indicators of the failures of African governments to implementing the Western concept of democracy. Food crisis also indicates failure among the African governments to come up with policies that will protect local production from unfair exploitation from abroad in the name of cheap imports. Most importantly, it is also a result of the unwillingness of the Western countries to, genuinely, trade fairly with Africa and to surrender back the most important factor of production (land) as the basic unit of livelihood to Africans even if it means keeping whatever profits they have made since colonial rule to date. It also demonstrates the symbiotic relations that Africa leaders (elites) forged and have since shared with their Western counterparts at the expense of ordinary Kenyans.

But what is really wrong with democracy in Africa? Part of the answer to this question is African leaders. According to an article on the economist print edition on the April 3rd 2008 titled “A very African coup- “Kenya’s president steal elections, showing utter contempt for democracy and his people” the mayhem that killed hundreds of people following Kenya's election on December 27th completes a depressing cycle of democratic abuses in Africa's biggest countries. Nigeria held its own mockery of an election last April. Scores were killed and observers pronounced it the most fraudulent poll they had ever witnessed. Congo held a more or less peaceful election in October 2006, since then the main opposition leader has been hounded into exile. And the year before that, flawed elections in Ethiopia resulted in the deaths of 199 protesters. Needless to say, the incumbents all won.

So,  it is easy to be angry, as well as gloomy, about African leaders' continual betrayal of the democratic values they say they hold so dear? And all the more so in the case of Kenya, which has a strong tradition of holding elections, a vibrant political culture, a relatively free press and a sophisticated economy? Given all these advantages, Kenya had an opportunity to “set an example” to Africa and hold free and fair elections. But the country blew it. Like in Nigeria, Kenyans queued quietly to exercise their right to vote, reflecting the enormous appetite for democracy that exists on a continent that was until recently dominated by dictators and “big men”. But for democracy to survive, it is not enough to hold elections. Politicians must accept that they may have to give up office, and thus all the opportunities for self-enrichment that come their way.

It is no coincidence that the most corrupt politicians are also those who cling most desperately to power—as in Kenya and Nigeria. African politicians have increasingly failed the electorate who are always keen to participate during elections and advance democracy in Africa. All too often African politics is played as a zero sum game . The state is often seen as a cash cow to be captured and retained at all costs. Power-grabs particularly by particular ethnic groups are nothing new. But when combined with institutional graft and cronyism, it can be explosive

In analyzing the prospects of democracy in Africa it may be necessary to distinguish between ultimate goals and necessary instruments for achieving them . It would make sense for Africa to distinguish between fundamental rights and instrumental rights. The right to vote, for example, is an instrumental right designed to help us achieve the fundamental right of government by consent. The right to a free press is an instrumental right designed to help us achieve the open society and freedom of information.

Democracy as a means should be distinguished from democracy as a goal. The most fundamental of the goals of democracy according to the Western concept can be identified as four. Firstly, to make the rulers accountable and answerable for their actions and policies. Secondly, to make the citizens effective participants in choosing those rulers and in regulating their actions. Thirdly, to make the society as open and the economy as transparent as possible; and fourthly, to make the social order fundamentally just and equitable to the greatest number possible. Accountable rulers, actively participating citizens, open society and social justice -all of which have been a fiasco in Kenya like in many African countries

Having said this, the first challenge is therefore how to achieve these goals, a reality that has elicited different means. If the goals of democracy are the same while the means for achieving them differ, are there African means of achieving those same four goals of accountability of rulers, participation of the citizens, openness of the society and greater social justice? That is the challenge facing constitution makers in Africa – how to keep the democratic goals constant while looking for democratic means more appropriate to Africa (See also Obioma, 2001). The second challenge about democracy in Africa concerns its relationship to development. On this relationship between democracy and development in Africa, one crucial question has persisted. Is Africa underdeveloped because it is primarily undemocratic? Or is Africa undemocratic because it is primarily underdeveloped? Which is cause and which is effect?

There is a third dimension which is often treated either as part of the package of development or as part of the package of democracy, when in fact it should be treated as a kind of independent variable. The third dimension is stability – a social-political precondition for both sustainable development and durable democracy. Africa’s three greatest needs are development, democracy and stability – but not necessarily in that order. Alleviation of poverty is one of the fruits of democratized development. Alleviation of poverty is one of the gains when democracy and development are jointly stabilized and truly humanized . Stability also means the creation of an enabling environment to produce wealth –in cases of African economies that rely on food production, then the ability to produce food surpluses to sustain the economy

Professor Ali Mazrui in his 2002 paper titled "who killed democracy in Africa? Clues of the past, concerns of the future" questions the manner in which Africa has been faring in these areas of development, democratization, stabilization and the fruit of alleviation of poverty? First he explores what these words mean. In the term development, for example he argues that economists naturally focus on issues like resource flows, levels of economic diversification, domestic mobilization of savings and investment, national productivity and per capita income. And yet high levels of performance in those areas are achieved only after other measurements of development have already taken place. The most crucial may be partly cultural rather than purely economic.

Development in promoting performance and mobilization of domestic savings and investment capital may need to be preceded by development in areas such as the enhancement of managerial skills, transformation of Gender-Relations between men and women as producers, redefinition of the work-ethic as a discipline of the education system, redefinition of the laws and rules about corruption to make them more culturally viable and reforms of Africa’s schools and universities to make them more skill-relevant and more culturally-relevant.

Mazrui further argues that the primary economic problem in Africa has never been structural adjustment. The problem has always been how to carry out cultural re-adjustment. The re-adjustment would not be a demotion of African culture. The re-adjustment which is needed in culture is a better balance between the continuities of African culture and Africa’s borrowing from Western culture. Until now African has borrowed Western tastes without Western skills, Western consumption patterns without Western production techniques, urbanization without industrialization, secularization (erosion of religion) without scientification. Would Africa have been better off if it had retained its own tastes while borrowing Western skills – instead of absorbing Western tastes and retaining its own lower levels of skills? Would Africa have been better off with African consumption patterns and Western production techniques instead of the other way round? If African governments are willing to invest in these issues of reconstitution (Kalu, 2001) then, surely, food is not an issue. African countries have fallen short of integrating the successes of other regions in the continent when it come to indigenous knowledge on agricultural production.

Agriculture production, for example, in some indigenous areas in Africa is really good. There have been political instability and wars in the Central African region for instance but rarely do we hear of famine in those countries. Why? The traditional agricultural technologies they use are rich, but because of language and our lack of responsiveness other regions in Africa are unable to harness this local technology. Science has failed to capture this knowledge in appropriate language, package and disseminate it to farmers.

As far as land and ethnic tension is concerned, India discovered in the 1950’s and Nigeria realized in the 1980s, the most promising mechanism for defusing linguistic and ethnic strife is to restructure the basic ground rules of the political game . Given the prominence of ethnicity in African politics, democratization across the continent will require more than expanding the political and economic rights of individuals. In Kenya -- and elsewhere on the continent -- accommodation of group rights must be part of the equation and this includes the right to own land.

Conclusion

The Kenyan case highlights the links between politics and agricultural policies on Land that could be indeed the root causes of the food crisis in many African countries. There should be a willingness among leaders both in Africa and in the West to genuinely address the injustices that emanate from colonial land policies by acknowledging the need for land and other agricultural reforms that will reflect the general needs of ordinary farmers/citizens.

This should be policies that guarantee property rights and freedom to utilise land for food production as well as a guaranteed support from the government and other institutions in terms of the technological and other requirements and some degree of incentives to encourage food production, particularly, the production of staple food like maize, beans and vegetables by local farmers and fair trade among different countries especially, between African countries and the West.

The general infrastructure should also be upgraded, institutional quality improved and a general investment in technology. General government inefficiency, red tape and corruption in countries such as Kenya and Nigeria, should be eradicated and a general improvement on work ethics in the country’s institutions. The government departments which manage the various aspects of agriculture do so in isolation of each other therefore, there is a disconnect between implementation and planning. As much as this is a policy issue and policies take long to change and effect, African government should attempt to integrate this.

Above all there is a dire need to protect institutions of democracy and their independence in order to put rogue democracies to task and to protect the rights of citizens which include the right to life, apparently, which cannot be guaranteed in a situation where there is no food. African governments must carry out cultural re-adjustment which creates a better balance between the continuities of African culture and Africa’s borrowing from Western culture.

This paper concludes that the food shortages in Africa can be said to be a consequence of failed ‘democratic regimes’ that have failed to implement western concepts of democracy due to cultural and other challenges given the African context on one hand and failure of Western states to acknowledged their role in the exploitation of Africa through corny land acquisitions and unfair trade that created symptoms that have given rise to ethnic chauvinism and violence.

Furthermore, Western countries are often aware of the fact that some parts of Africa are marginalised and food production is not viable due to erratic weather patterns and do nothing to assist to save the situation. This they can do through funding educational initiatives into better agricultural techniques such as irrigation. However, they are quick to send food aid to starving communities in Africa as a show of ‘good gesture’ which is a short lived solution. African regimes, in addition, thoroughly understand the fact that food shortages, due to poor land allocation and redistribution policies, are among their many failures and therefore utilise food as political tool for political survival.

It appears as if political leaders in Africa understand the relationship between land and food production given the African context and use the land card to their advantage. If the food crisis is not addressed through measures presented in this paper, then African politicians will continue using food to manipulate the electorate to ensure they ascend to leadership by pledging food donations to starving communities to get their votes in campaigns. They will also continue to play this ‘land card’ to pursue their own selfish political interest leading to ethnic violence and anarchy. This means that the same land that is meant to benefit those resettled will fail to do so simply because land in itself is meaningless unless put into productive use. African leaders should be made accountable through the rule of law (constitution) to guarantee all the rights that are surrendered to them by citizens when elected in the so called ideal democracy.

 
Writers Profile: Fredrick Ogenga has a bachelors and a masters degree in Media & Journalism studies. He is an independent media consultant & analyst, a freelance writer, reporter for africanews.com, lecturer in Media & journalism and the founding director of Tazama media consultants closed corporate company. He is also pursuing a PHD in media studies at the University of Witwatersrand. Ogenga has published widely in the field of gender, HIV/AIDS, health and other socio-political issues and is listed in the UNAIDS database of consultants. His latest contribution on gender and HIV/AIDS can be found in the fourth issue of the 2008 media diversity journal at www.genderlinks.org.za. He also runs his own blog www.tazamamediaconsultants.blogspot.com


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