Jacob Owiti | NATION Now that Christmas is upon us, it is worth saying that our men turned to chang’aa, and hyper-alcoholic crude gin mixed with battery water, spirit, sulphuric acid, topped off with jet fuel, when they lost the ability to buy their wives and children Christmas presents.
By Charles Onyango-Obbo cobbo@ke.nationmedia.com
Posted Friday, December 23 2011 at 22:00
Posted Friday, December 23 2011 at 22:00
IN SUMMARY
- In the good old days, when men saved money and showered their families with Christmas presents, the money was not all theirs
One morning I was driving to work when a radio presenter cracked me up by embellishing a story in the papers that morning about the “disappearing children” of Murang’a.
The story had said that because the men of Murang’a are drinking too much, they had become “useless” and were no longer able to father babies. This is a big problem in central Kenya, if the politicians are to be believed.
The central Kenya politicians daily rail against alcohol abuse, and some have held rallies to campaign for the region to produce more children, otherwise there will be fewer voters in the future and the area’s bargaining power at the national cake-diving table will diminish.
Some MPs have even offered central Kenya women “baby” bribes and bonuses, so they can churn out more little ones.
So the good presenter said, rather dramatically, that “those children you see running around with their shorts torn at the back and dusty buttocks peeping through, are a rare sight in Murang’a”.
Baby-producing bribes
Whether central Kenya actually has a real baby deficit, we shall soon know. I am also not sure that having African men wasting away in the villages and being made impotent by lethal illicit brew is necessarily a bad thing.
One result of “male wastage” has been that something politics and law had failed to do for decades has happened — power is slowly being shifted to the hands of women in the countryside.
This is not a Kenyan problem. It is as big a problem in Uganda, Tanzania, and many countries in West Africa. It is only the largely Muslim countries in Africa that have escaped this problem — just like they were less ravaged by Aids — because the family structures in Islamic traditions tend to be different.
So, whether baby-producing-bribes will make a difference, depends on how we understand the source of the problem.
Now that Christmas is upon us, it is worth saying that our men turned to chang’aa, and hyper-alcoholic crude gin mixed with battery water, spirit, sulphuric acid, topped off with jet fuel, when they lost the ability to buy their wives and children Christmas presents.
Yes, Christmas is to blame.
How did this happen? First, in the good old days, when men saved money and showered their families with Christmas presents, the money was not all theirs. The women did the labour that produced the goods the men sold. The men had the money because they were the family cashiers.
And they became cashiers because before the mid-1980s and the advent of economic liberalisation, the State and semi-State institutions had a monopoly on selling all national produce. There was nowhere else to turn to.
If you grew cotton, you sold it through your local co-operative, which then sent it on to the National Cotton Board, which sold it to the world market, and gave you 10 per cent of the market price.
If you grew coffee, you sold it to the coffee co-operative, which sent it on the National Coffee Corporation, which sold it on the world market and sometimes didn’t pay you for five years. The same was true of maize, beans, simsim, name it.
Women could not be members of co-operatives because, in some cases, the law forbade it. That was a man’s thing.
So, however much women produced, they could not directly sell the produce to the society. So their husbands became middlemen. They sold the produce to the society, and kept the money.
In the late 1970s, the global commodity market for coffee, cotton, sisal, pyrethrum, and all those traditional “cash” crops collapsed. In many areas, people cut down their cotton, and even coffee, trees.
In Uganda, in fact the co-operatives were simply scrapped because they were exploitative after President Yoweri Museveni took power in 1986.
Even in Kenya, where they were not abolished, things like Kenya Cooperative Creameries and Meat Commission were, well, simply eaten to the ground in a corruption frenzy.
Married new wives
A big change has now occurred. With growing populations and towns and cities, and declining food production in most of Africa, there was a boom in the market for beans, groundnuts, millet, tomatoes, onions, and bananas.
And with the free market, now anyone could buy and sell. There is a weekly market near my village in eastern Uganda, and on the days it is held, there are up to six Kenyan lorries buying food, chicken, cattle, maize, groundnuts, and so on.As it happened, the marketing of these products was not through the cooperatives. There were even no formal markets for them. That is why all over Africa, roadside markets sprang up everywhere.
My aunt, who needed seven intermediaries —her husband, the village level coop, sub-county, county, district, regional office, and national corporation— to get her product to a consumer in Nairobi years ago, now sells to a Kenyan businessman directly.
The first thing that happened as more and more women sold the produce directly, they hid the money in their bras and waist belts. To get it, the men had to beg — or beat them — for it.
Not only had the men lost the job of middlemen, they lost the job of family cashier. And with that, quite a bit of the power they had, which came from controlling the distribution channels, slipped out of their hands.
Because men in the rural areas don’t cook, wash, or even look after the children, if they are idle, they are properly idle. The most they can do is sit around scratching themselves and trying to assert their power by being bullies and generally obnoxious around the home.
There has been research that showed that many women solved this problem as most men would do — with money. They gave their men money to go and drink with the boys, just so they are not around to disrupt the chain of enterprise and production at home.
Many of the men didn’t come back home. They married new wives called booze.
What was particularly hard for them was that the new lucrative food crops, because they were sold at ad hoc roadside markets, meant there was no proper seating. The owner of the beans put them in a basket, and sat on a mat or dust beside the goods and sold them.
Now, these “lost” men in the city might sit on the ground and sell something. But few serious and self-respecting men in the village will be caught dead sitting in the dust selling potatoes.
They were cut out
Because very many of them were already removed from farm labour, when they were cut out of the marketing business, and cash collection responsibilities, they lost the ability to buy the grand Christmas gift— a polyester dress, rubber sandals, and Sandalwood jelly for the wife, and of course a bicycle and suit for themselves.
Giving women money to produce more babies is ineffective, because more and more women have their own money, and want time to enjoy it.
Having babies all the time bogs them down.
So the principal reason there are fewer babies in central Kenya, could be primarily because today’s women have become more integrated in the formal economy, and doing much better than their mothers and grandmothers.
So, we might find the solution from what the colonialists did. The colonialists looked at us, and we were happy hunting hares and guinea fowls in the bushes, and enjoying ourselves away at bullfights and wrestling in the village yard. They came up with a hated tax, the poll tax.This is because, even a drunkard can actually make very many babies. It is not rocket science, and does not require a man to be sober.
The poll tax was imposed not because you had an income, but because you had a beard and a big Adam’s apple.
The punishment for not paying poll tax was severe. You could not even live in your house, because you would wake up and find the chief waiting for you with a rope to tie and take you to the District Administration prison.
The poll tax forced millions of African men to work, and have something they could sell to make the little money required to pay it. But it was a primitive tax, and after independence most countries abolished it. Some replaced it with the graduated tax.
It was still inspired by the spirit of the poll tax, but this time it was based on assessment.
People in the towns who earned high salaries paid more. If you had a tin roof house or a few chicken in the village, the chief decided that your graduated tax was Sh1,500. If you had nothing, you got off the hook.
The same brutish punishment of defaulters, however, continued. And the cost of collecting graduated tax (if you factored in the thousands of defaulters who were arrested and then had to be fed on other taxpayers’ money), was far higher than what was collected.
In addition, in the 1990s on, when elections became common in Africa, and politicians wanted to appease voters, the graduated tax was also scrapped.
Now, apart from the small inconvenience of being laughed at, and facing an annoyed wife, most rural men have no incentive to engage in productive work.
Banning the bare feet
And, to be fair to governments, it is difficult to figure out what incentives to offer. However, there are few examples coming up in East Africa. In Rwanda, in particular. Two initiatives stand out.
The first, is Rwanda’s “One Cow per Poor Family” project. Tens of thousands of cows have been given out to poor families by the State. The official idea is to give them an income from selling milk, and the possibility to grow a herd.
But in cattle-loving communities like Rwanda, a cow gives a poor man something to do, and pride. So it makes him a more responsible citizen — and hopefully husband.
The second and more peculiar one is the law banning the bare feet. The law was passed as part of the aggressive health reforms that have seen nearly all Rwandans having health insurance, and an ambulance service that covers over 50 per cent of the population.
Today no one talks about it, and it is one reason most of the outside doesn’t know that Rwanda has such a law. That is because now it is normal for everyone to wear some kind of shoe or sandals in Rwanda.You go around walking barefoot and showing your ugly toes in Rwanda, you are liable to be arrested or fined. There was an outcry at first, and President Paul Kagame was accused of plotting to finish off poor people.
What were the side benefits? First, men were forced to earn more income to buy shoes or sandals, or to cut down on their beer and nyama choma spending to get footwear for their families.
And what better time to buy a shoe replacement for the kids than at Christmas? So, the footwear law forced negligent husbands and fathers to re-engage with their families.
There are possibly many more such initiatives out there. Those drunkard men of Murang’a might sell the cows or slaughter and roast them with their friends, if Kenya went the Rwanda way. But I doubt that even they are tough enough to eat shoes.
Have a Merry Christmas.
cobbo@ke.nationmedia.com. twitter@cobbo3
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