When Uganda President Yoweri Museveni was in Kenya recently, he stoked memories of railway transport in the years after independence. He linked the railway system to the vibrancy of agro-economy in western Kenya, Uganda and the entire Lake Victoria lacustrine.

In Kenya, successive governments embarked on a scorched earth policy that speedily commuted the economic mainstay of the lake region to an unceasing source of menial labourers that dominate informal settlements in Nairobi, Mombasa and other cities in Kenya. Call it economic and social injustice.

Here we go! There was once a railway line that ran into Nzoia Sugar Company (I was about to say “when I was a child” then realised it was just the other day). It was very busy. Goods trains (we called them “bogi”, then I didn’t know what that meant but we have heard it referred to as coaches) would come in regularly to pick up goods. Sugar, molasses…even bagasse.

There were trucks from everywhere in long queues to pick up products. The factory fed millions. From farmers to sugar traders. Thousands of employees to third level beneficiaries like saccos. When it closed for a month every year for routine maintenance, hundreds of companies would descend on it to spruce it up: from America’s Arkel International to local welding firms owned by random Wafula, Wasike and Musungu.

Like similar factories in the sugar-belt that was made up of defunct Nyanza and Western provinces, the local township relied entirely on the factory. Just like Muhoroni, Awendo, Miwani, Chemelil, Mumias and Pan-Paper Mills in Webuye, these factories were the lives of the people there and their dependents spread over hundreds of kilometres.

Farmers were paid regularly and on time. Payday was celebration day because business boomed! Outgrower cooperatives like NOCO (Nzoia Outgrower Cooperative) were so powerful that wannabe Members of Parliament were hardened in their ranks. Schools readily accepted cheques drawn by sugar companies, their saccos and the outgrower saccos. Heck, even Muhindi cane transport contractors were believable people and their word was their bond!

On payday at Nzoia Sugar, all trading centres within 20 kilometres radius of the sugar factory had their market day! Bukembe, Sikata, Mabanga, Mwibale, Mechimeru, Sang’alo, Nandolia. The factories were powerful. And this was replicated in all the factories across Western and Nyanza.

Then we heard rumours that these plants were being looted. That people were importing cheap sugar and ours couldn’t compete. Slowly, we could tell from the faces of our parents that things were not going so well. People were harvesting their sugarcane then replacing the crop with something else. Before long, we were old enough to know the truth. Especially because we had seen cotton disappear too. It just vanished from our farms. The word mtumba or mitumba became a ‘fashion currency’ for imported second-hand clothes that banished local made textile from the shops.

The scorched earth policy on, and I was furiously being executed and cheered by a part of the country that felt the economy was their entitlement. They ridiculed sugarcane, cotton, maize farmers and fishermen as lazy and primitive. The harsh tag sticks to this day.

The much-touted African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) US economic policy and commercial engagement with African countries has not been able to jumpstart the cotton-based economy of the region, which at independence was a mainstay of the region’s agro-economy.

Previously, every five kilometres of road in this region had a place called “Store Pamba”. There was a plant called Kicomi in Kisumu. In the summer, you could stand on the road and the plains would be pure white from Kibigori on the foot of Nandi Hills, to Onyuongo Store Pamba on the banks of River Awach, deep in Nyakach. Then we heard of a word called “liberalisation”.

We were told we couldn’t compete with Gikomba. Our cotton disappeared. Cotton as a cash crop was abandoned. Our sugar was on steep decline. But we could still look across the river and see Ahero Irrigation Scheme. My people called it “Regesen”. In my childhood, it was the only place with electricity in the neighbourhood, so we used to stay out in the night to watch its shining beauty. When the full moon was not in the skies, regesen was a marvel. A wonder that reeled off legends. Then it died, too! Nay, it was killed!

Benga legend, Owino Misiani, did an emotional song called Nam Rumo, which translates to “the lake is becoming extinct”. In it, he bemoans the death of all industries in our land, then tells community leaders that now that we had lost everything, they should not let us lose the fish! That our fish was now our last frontier.

Even though we were producing the fish but the fish processing factories were all in Thika! What do you know, now ships are docking in Mombasa bringing Chinese fish! Then they hit the road to Kisumu. Our fabled blue economy – our last frontier – is staring at its deathbed too! Chinese fish is strangling it.

You know something else” Nobody spoke for us when all these happened. Sometimes I see River Nyando flowing just behind my home and I am surprised nobody has diverted it into a private dam upstream! Corruption and official looting are easier to understand when you look at them from a tribal angle. Now, we Luos and Luhyias, whose factories have been looted dry, what more can anyone steal from us?

Our children now sit their Form Four (secondary school) exams and thereafter head to Kibra and Kawangware to look for menial jobs. They are ridiculed as pagazi (slaves). We are so poor that when the NCPB (National Cereals and Produce Board) Kisumu edition of the scandal was exposed last month, all the players in the team were Kip-This, Kip-That and Kip-Steal! The granary is bang in the middle of our land, but the products kept in it, plus the keepers and the thieves, come from elsewhere. How about that! Our own sons and daughters qualify for pagazi roles, their skills level notwithstanding.

Those coastals who are squatters in their own ancestral land, what more can you loot from them? Their sugar factory at Ramisi died. Their cashewnut industry died. Even their pweza (octopus), the Chinese now hunt them with trawlers! We may be staring at the sunset of the blue economy at the coast and the lake region.

We have been looted to the bone that we can only watch nonchalantly as the next tribe gets eaten. When KCC (Kenya Creamers Cooperative) was dying, I kept wondering; how does an enterprise collapse when its raw material is in every square inch of the country and the market for its finished product expands by the hour? They didn’t see it coming. Now their maize is up next! Soon you will hear “let’s plant avocado, maize is hasara (waste)!”.

Haven’t they already told that they want to lease land in Zambia to grow maize for Kenya? They were preparing the country for that eventuality when they told us that our soils are no longer suitable for maize production – our staple food. When mooted how to kill the sugar industry, they said the seed variety was not good. With that, the sugar industry was on its knees, replaced with a gush of imported sugar! Sugarcane was given the monicker a “lazy man’s crop” and so the Luhyia and the Luo became “lazy tribes.”

We were there over 40 years ago. We were told cotton and sugar were bad, that we should plant pepper (tsipilipili) and amaranth (tsisaga). Even those have been relegated to backwardness. The nutritious indigenous vegetables – deemed primitive – were replaced with largescale farming of cabbage and kales.

Poverty is the greatest tool of slavery. On one episode of NCIS Los Angeles television, a man whose family has been kidnapped so that he could give gangsters the formula for a secret military weapon, says “they first take away your choices, then they control you”. We were robbed of our choices. They are coming for your tea, maize, coffee and milk! Then you will all be like us.

My contribution and that of millions of others was to go to the ballot five times to elect someone I thought would overhaul the entire system. Someone who would recalibrate the governance style and give us a fresh start. Across the aisle, others went to the ballot to affirm their faith in the exact system that baby-sits this looting. I have done my part. I will not speak up anymore.

I would like the whole country to be looted dry so that we understand each other. Then maybe we can have a discussion as equals. Equal in poverty. Equal in affluence. I don’t think the “hardworking tribes with money” will understand our needs – we the poor people from lazy tribes. I don’t think the resignation or sacking of two people can remove an evil system that has shown its uncanny ability to move from one regime to the next like a virus.

So I won’t speak up, just like nobody spoke up when my people gathered their belongings and crossed the river from Miwani as the boiler smoke died away. The books I read tend to say that an entrenched system is almost always removed by only three methods:

• A popular uprising that removes the entire ruling class.
• Wars
• Military coups.

None will happen in our country, so let’s wait for the more predictable death of all industries so we can have a national discussion.

Meanwhile, people of the information age think looting started with National Youth Service (NYS). Looting started as soon as the white man lowered the Union Jack and the Blackman screamed Haraaaaaambeeee! Those huge tracts of fertile land, the 80 per cent of our elephants poached, 95 per cent of our rhinos, etc, created the billionaires who lord it over us within 10 years of independence…. You think that was hard work? Maybe. Stealing gluttonously!

But I don’t care!

• A Tell report