Biting the hand that feeds you. A Kenyan Story

Mwana wa nyoka…

The Kenyan food system is broken. It’s a venal and extremely predatory system that is both child and acolyte of the society that produced it, including our system of governance. In that way, one could say that it functions exactly like it’s supposed to function. It’s a dysfunctional system that is built on legacies of colonial and post-colonial occupation, extremely contentious, bloody and contested clashes over land use, unresolved rights of occupancy, and the right to resources.  It’s characterised by regional inequality, corruption, deep and normalised gender inequality, and a fundamentally broken land tenure system amongst others. Global politics around access rights to seeds, fertiliser and other farm inputs play out in how we produce and consume our food with the agro-food oligopolies being winners in an increasingly winner takes all global system. Kenya, like many African countries, is also finding itself increasingly less able to weather the volatility in food geopolitics. As a result of all the above, the food we eat is often contaminated, unsustainably farmed and improperly regulated. Food security is a dream for many of our citizens, and our birthrights- including seeds passed down from our ancestors- are being sold out from under us as ‘leaders’ loot and plunder from the very system that feeds us.  

It’s a system where schismatic inequities translate to the right to food being enjoyed on a regional basis. The privileging of dominant cultures means that agrarian production methods, systems of land tenure, labour and access to foods dominate. And that poverty and marginalisation for non-agrarian populations (e.g. pastoralists and low income urban dwellers) remain the primary cause of hunger in Kenya. It’s a problem that has regional dimensions where e.g. food poverty is endemic in the North Eastern region with a wasting rate of close to 20% as opposed to a 7% national average.

That the system is fundamentally not fit for purpose is seen in that the food that we are consuming is not always fit for human consumption. Recent reports in the media remind us that the food we eat is unhealthy, sometimes carcinogenic and poisonous. It is certainly not from a lack of agencies to oversee food safety in the country. There are at least 22 MDAs that are charged with overseeing our food and at last count, at least over a dozen acts and ordinances that regulate our food system. Despite this, the food on our table- especially for the low income urban consumer remains unsafe, and at times dangerous to health.

In addition to the food being down right unhealthy, citizens are also not getting enough food. Including farmers! Over half of farmers are buying food, and close to 75% of small holder income goes towards food. And while the right to food is enshrined in the Kenyan constitution, it’s clear that we are quite far from fulfilling our obligations to our citizens on this front.

Like clockwork, Kenya experiences drought every three years. And like clockwork, people face hunger and malnutrition. Over a third of Kenya’s population is chronically food insecure. And hunger and malnutrition, is the diabolical gift that keeps on giving. The impact of under-nutrition on lactating mothers and children is devastating and sometimes irreversible where children who’ve experienced stunting display poor mental development and slower brain development. They’re smaller and less able to concentrate in class than their counterparts. Malnourished mothers have malnourished babies- and as part of a twisted legacy, stunted children will in all likelihood give birth to malnourished babies. Rinse, wash, repeat. In a twisted, vicious cycle.

A look at just two of the major pathologies that give rise to the broken food system- gender injustice and corruption shows that if we are serious about creating a food system that is capable of producing safe, healthy and sustainably produced food- we need to correct the underlying conditions that give rise to this unequal and predatory food system that we find ourselves with.

Gender Injustice...

The food system is rife with many contradictions that defy any sense and reason. I’m still unable to parse the fact that Kenyan women & girls produce most of our food and that most of Kenya’s hungry are women and girls. If we are serious about broader social and political reform in Kenya, a good point to start would be here. As Gloria Steinem says, if we accept in the homestead that there are those who cook (or farm), and those that eat, we internalise and accept that in the larger society, there will be those that produce, and those that eat.

Traditional gendered subordination of women means that women have less land ownership (‘marry it, or inherit it’) and they have less access to inputs of production. While the Kenyan constitution corrected a long standing injustice that allowed customary law to dictate inheritance and land ownership rights of women, and it is now possible for women to inherit family land, the reality on the ground is slow to change where e.g. Kenyan women run over 80% of our farms, but women held land titles are only at 1%. 

This matters. Where women don’t own the land, they consequentially have less access to loans and other agricultural inputs. As a result, women farms will have lower than expected yields. The FAO estimates that we could easily increase agricultural production by 25-30% if women had equal access to agricultural inputs.

Women also face atrocious working conditions in the agricultural sector. They occupy the lowest rung of the workforce and get lower wages and also have more vulnerable work (e.g. seasonal work that comes with no social benefits).  Sexual harassment in the farms is rife and endemic. In a study by Labour Rights, over 90% of people reported that they'd witnessed or been victim to a sexual harassment. Women in the farms also report cases of sexual assault not only against them- but also against their young daughters. Children that they had to take to work due to the absence of social protection like acceptable child care facilities. A staggering 70% of men interviewed viewed sexual harassment as normal and acceptable. A truly deplorable and shameful state of affairs.

Women are underrepresented in decision making structures in our food system with e.g. 17% of women being represented in agricultural cooperative boards. Membership and leadership is also gendered when it comes to type of crop with membership & leadership in ‘cash crop’ cooperatives being mainly male (coffee, tea, tobacco) and women are found more in ‘food crops’ cooperatives (spices, cereals, dairy etc.).

Kenya has a billion dollar agricultural export market. And this is built on the backs of women. The system calls for urgent and radical reformation that is fair and equitable to women if this is to be a tenable and functional food system.

Corruption....

Reading the Auditor General reports on the steady looting of resources meant for assuring food access makes for very, very depressing reading.  Kenya relies almost predominantly on rain-fed agriculture and the systematic loss of resources meant for building dams and irrigation systems has consigned farmers to praying  and watching anxiously for the rain. This situation is made even more fraught by the utterly short sighted and mindless gobbling up of land in the main water towers that produce the rain we (still) rely on for the food we eat.

Corruption is without a doubt the termite that’s eating away at the very fabric of our agricultural system. We lose billions every year paying for a fertiliser company that doesn’t exist. The systematic looting of state corporations and assets meant means that cronyism replaced vital and needed research and investments in our agricultural sector.  It’s a system where a state corporation that owns over 80% of our seeds was “secretly sold’ and ownership of our seeds- the commons- irregularly passed into private hands. A story as old as independent Kenya is the one of the fraud and mismanagement of our strategic maize reserve which has the dubious distinction of being independent Kenya’s first mega scandal. 

That corruption is truly hurtful to farmers is seen for instance in the coffee industry.  Despite Kenyan coffee being the second most lucrative global commodity, coffee farmers are still impoverished due to the predatory and profit seeking nature of the global commodities market and its local minions. It's a situation that is then compounded by the shenanigans in and around the Nairobi Coffee Exchange where up to a hundred dollars per bag are routinely skimmed off the top of what farmers should receive for premium coffee.

While corruption exists in every human society in the globe, we need a new name for the type of corruption that ails us. It’s a system that in its utterly soulless nature was perhaps last seen during colonialism. It’s an extractive, predatory and society destroying system that will lead to the guaranteed and total destruction of Kenya unless we make urgent steps to curb it.

The Fix…

If the agricultural system serves as the canary in the coal mine, it’s becoming obvious that we may have reached the tipping point, and that we have systematically cannibalised the very system that feeds us. It’s clear that our system needs urgent transformation- and not just reform. We need urgent solutions that shall transform the underlying systems that reproduce this unjust and unsustainable ways of food production, distribution, procurement, consumption and disposal of food.  As such, merely addressing the economics or tackling the issue as a problem of one of yields means that we fail to tackle the interlinked and mutually reinforcing systems means that give rise to the problems. If we attempt to apply a market based solution to the food system without addressing the underlying food justice issues, we apply a Band-Aid solution at best.

Equally problematic is the pitching of Kenya’s food problem as a technological or logistics problem that requires us to increase yields, decrease post-harvest losses etc. This so-called Green Revolution is a fix that will in all likelihood spawn even larger problems as this approach fails to take into account the even greater consolidation of power into commercial hands. The private sector remains a key and integral part of the agricultural system, but taking a neo liberal approach promises to entrench labour practices that will continue to disadvantage the small holder farmers- especially peasant women farmers in the country.

Fixing the food system requires that we address the social justice issues that underlie it. This is a call to arms for all of us working to fix the food system be it in food sovereignty, food security and food justice movements. We need redistributive land justice to be effected- years after the Ndung’u report made its findings. Urgent systematic changes in the lands department need to be made- and the current leadership of this ministry suggests that this is unlikely to happen. We need to review social protection for informal and ‘casual’ labourers especially women. We need to protect our inputs from predatory intellectual property rights. We need to be serious about curbing the excesses of corruption and we need to dismantle the systems that lead to perennially food insecure low income urban dwellers. All else is doomed to fail.

Wakanda movements?

Erik Killmonger in Black Panther is arguably *the* most nuanced, incandescent antagonist/ super villain in the comic world– perhaps only rivalled by Heath Ledger’s Joker. To a child of a (former) colonial state, I identified and understood his struggle. I got Erik. I was rooting for him! But in the end, I was totally disappointed by just how badly women fared at his hands.

If we use Black Panther as an allegory of women’s role in Kenyan social justice movements, the disposability of women in Erik’s quest (death of his female partner, the choking of the heart shaped herb guardian), are disappointingly familiar.  Contrast this with T'Challa's Wakanda where women are integral and vital. It was so refreshing to see women taking crucial and non-supporting roles. In Wakanda- women were core to the struggle. Generals, tech geniuses, spies, rulers. They served and they saved. 

And looking inwards at our non-fictional nation of Kenya, it should serve as a cautionary tale to all the social justice movements that purport to be working for the greater good of society. Where are the women in your ranks? How are they being treated? Are we sanctioning- and casting out misogynists? Are we actively working to counter anti-female rhetoric and misogyny in the rank and file of the organisation?

If not, the movement is at its heart an unjust movement. And unjust movements bring forth unjust outcomes where they simply populate the same unjust structures with new faces.

Her Dress, Her Choice

Gendered Citizenship

Where citizenship can be defined as the process of exercising rights and protections; and the expectation that specific obligations (by state or other parties) shall be fulfilled, it’s obvious that in Kenya, not all citizens are created equal. Despite the recent hue and cry over the “plight of the boy child”, it’s clear to even the most cursory observer, that women and girls constantly get the short end of the citizenship stick. National data on school attendance, political leadership, corporate leadership etc. all attest to the fact that it’s still easier for the man/boy to make his way in Kenya than for his female counterpart.

We see this differential quality of citizenship every day where e.g. assault of a male is seen as deserving a response by the authorities towards the perpetrator, but an assault of the female first requires a discussion on what the female was doing/ how she was dressed before she’s accorded the moral right to a response by the authorities towards the perpetrator. This is seen in all walks of life- from the humblest back street to parliament where the quality of female leadership and the regard it’s held in is still very, very degraded.  

Patriarchal Anxieties

It’s in this context where you find our female leaders are still not accorded the respect and rights that their male counterparts fully expect. It is in this toxic environment where Duale feels fully comfortable perpetrating what could be considered workplace harassment of female MPs. His attempt to dress his fellow female MPs echoes and validates the louts and criminals that were stripping and assaulting women who were “indecently dressed” not too long ago.

His patriarchal anxieties over fellow parliamentarians’ bodies are misplaced and particularly insidious as they try and limit female agency in the one place where we fully expect the full assertion of rights and expectation of equal treatment by and for all members of parliament. Make no mistake about it- this wasn’t an off the cuff remark by an avuncular MP who’s upset by the “tight” trousers that are being worn by his colleagues. On utterances, Foucault cautions that we should focus on the statement not just as a descriptive utterance, but as a discursive event.  Our clothing and dress is very much structured and shaped by power. A parliament that’s still largely in the control of men has dressing standards that are shaped, determined and dictated by men.  Where equally powerful women, and other marginalised populations are able to penetrate these spaces, they bring the potential to expand and de-familiarise the notions of what ‘acceptable’ dressing is. It is this discomfort with the shifting of boundaries that leads to these utterances by Duale and his ilk.

Break down that statement down, and you see it for the non-benign statement that it is.  It’s an argument that’s meant to discomfit fellow parliamentarians and reduce them to the sum part of their female bodies.  It serves as a reminder to female MPs that their bodies are under observation, and that the tightness of their trousers makes them even more observable. It seeks to rob them of agency over one of the most basic choices- that of how they dress. It deliberately seeks to disadvantage female MPs as once “tight trousers” are tabled as an acceptable point of order, it is but one more thing that the female MPs have to navigate in addition to the other more pressing and legitimate business that brought them to parliament.

Fear of a Female Planet

Duale’s problematic statements are but more of the same of what African women faced during and in post-colonial Kenya. The colonial encounter’s obsession with the black female body has been well documented where the clothing of Kenya was considered an integral part of ‘civilising’ Kenya. The colonial trope of the unclothed female body as unclean /unwell still persists in independent Kenya where post-colonial agents like Duale continue in this tradition of monitoring public exposure of female bodies.  

Women in Kenya occupy this paradoxical space where we’re both custodians of all that’s virtuous and decent, while still being morally polluting Jezebels (unless guided by men) - truly a Schrödinger's cat that’s simultaneously madonna and harlot. This fear of the ‘unclothed’ female form, the differently clothed female form is rooted in a fear of female sexuality and ultimately fear of female freedom.

It’s however a fear that has no space in a Kenya whose Constitution accords both men and women equal rights, and it especially has no fear in parliament where we fully expect grown women and men to do grown people’s business. If someone’s clothing offends Duale, he should simply avert his eyes. He has no absolutely no business in the ‘tight’ trousers of MPs.

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Atieno Yo!

The Good Life

The pages of Drum or True Love offer a peek into the dreams and aspirations of the Kenyan woman. With stunning shots of exquisitely furnished homes, interspersed with mouth-watering food, and articles on how to attain a beautiful (read, fit) body at home with equipment easily bought at Nakumatt, the magazines both create and curate Kenyan aspirations and hip Kenyan aesthetic. 

This lifestyle with its parquet wood floors, beautifully wrought burglar proofing, high thread-count cotton sheets, and faux-aged sculptures from Maasai markets by necessity require high maintenance. Someone needs to dust and polish the wooden floors, dust the ornaments- something that is inimical to also working out, maintaining that high-octane career, entertaining friends with tastefully prepared in-season & sustainably produced food. A calculation of the person hours required to maintain this lifestyles underscores a central truth: Kenyan domestic prosperity is contingent on the use of lower-income persons’ labour. This is a life that requires a steady supply of cheap and low maintenance labour. The domestic worker is a necessary input into what’s needed to maintain and preserve the employer’s valuables including children, expensive furniture, and ultimately peace of mind from the time consuming work of running a household.

Feminisation of Domestic Labour  

Women make up the vast majority of domestic workers. The female domestic is called on to perform and enact the ‘feminine’ role in the household due to the feminisation of reproductive labour in this sector. This life, a part relic of colonial master-servant relations perpetuates notions of what it means to be a successful employer couple. The idleness of a colonial wife was the mark of a successful colonial husband. He was expected to produce enough money to allow the employment of a coterie of servants. The wife would ensure that the household ran smoothly- without the back-breaking labour required for this of course. In contemporary Kenya, the nanny-cleaning lady-gardener-guard are also deemed as requirements to ensure that the two-income family is possible, without sacrificing the comforts owed the successful man (cooked & hot food, clean house, changed diapers etc).

Consumption/ Work Dualism

The dualism inherent in paid domestic labour is seen in the conception of the house/ home as both public/ private places and spaces for either production/ consumption. For the employer, the home is a sanctuary from the job and state. It’s a space where the employer consumes the fruit of their labour- the flat screen TV, a good book and clean children. It’s the rewarding space where one can purchase both the time and activities for relaxation. For the domestic worker, this is a productive space where labour is traded for a pay check. It’s also a place where the domestic worker also trades in their identity as part of the procurement of their labour. It’s often expected, especially for the live-in domestic worker, that she shall trade in her identity as an adult wage earning Kenyan to a kinda-sorta family member (albeit one who is never present in family photos or events). She’s expected to be asexual (no visits from husbands/ lovers) and her dietary preferences are subsumed by the employers’. While expected to cherish the employer’s children as her own, she is however expected to eschew her familial ties - e.g. the domestic workers’ children are only noticed when they are the underlying cause of a labour interruption “Her child got malaria so now I don’t have a nanny”.  

Workplace Violence:

In Kenya, and elsewhere, this sector is characterised by being very competitive, little regulated and attempts to unionise workers have had little to no traction. Domestic work is characterised by low pay, long hours, job insecurity and high vulnerability which translates to high incidents of workplace violence. The issue of sexual violence against domestic workers presents one of the more egregious cases of victim blaming- even in a country where victim blaming is rife. At bridal showers, wisdom on how to manage house and husband is dispensed with the proper and wifely management of the domestic worker taking centre stage in this curriculum. The bride to be is usually given life hacks on how to ensure that the domestic worker ‘stays in her lane’. “These women will eat you out of house and home if you’re not careful” the bride to be is told (“Lock the store and only remove the tea bags/ sugar you need for a few days”). These Jezebels are also out to entrap your husband and future sons. Care must be taken it’s emphasised, to ensure that she doesn’t sway those hips as bent over, she washes the floor (General advice: “Buy a mop”). If you ever unexpectedly walk into a furtive and quickly interrupted embrace between spouse and domestic worker in the kitchen, fire her immediately.

While there have been gains in labour law favouring domestic workers, power relations are still skewed very much in favour of the employer. While the statistics on this are notoriously hard to come by, anecdotally one assumes it’s prevalent in the sector. It’s quite usual to hear that many men’s first sexual experience was with a domestic worker. It would be highly unusual that these sexual interactions were always consensual from the perspective of the domestic worker.  Domestic workers however have little room for redress or relief, and a study by Oxfam on the working conditions of women drawn from the Mukuru informal settlement seems to validate this. The study showed that attempts by domestic workers to get redress faced obstacles where employers corrupted officials (e.g. chiefs & police) and/or the workers were asked for payment by the police to initiate an investigation.  

While the courts have started logging some impressive victories for domestic workers, a central truth (paraphrasing Audre Lorde) is that the personal and the political should illuminate all our lives. Just societies invariably emanate from just workplaces and just homes. A fair & prosperous Kenya, where citizens aren’t deprived of the rights due them, is dependent on the majority of Kenyans abiding by the spirit and letter of the law. In this case, this entails paying their domestic workers minimum wage, NHIF & NSSF, a valid contract, sick leave and time off. Anything less is not only illegal, but also guarantees the continued existence of slums and unjust society.

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First Takes: Global Gag Rule & Kenya

Within the first week of assuming office, US President Donald Trump reinstated the Mexico City Policy, also known as the Global Gag Rule. Simply, this policy prohibits any entity that receives US Government (USG) funding from carrying out any abortion-related activity, regardless of the source of funds. 

This Mexico City Policy is a partisan affair that’s passed in DC, and plays out internationally on women’s bodies. Ever since it was enacted by President Reagan in 1984, it has enjoyed Republican support with Democrats opposing it. Following its passing, all Republican Presidents have since reinstated it, with Democratic presidents rescinding it every time there’s a President from the Democratic Party in charge.

The problem with this Policy is that studies show that abortion rates increased when the Policy was in effect. This is largely because organisations that provide reproductive health services tend to provide the entire slew of reproductive health services including information and in some cases, access to abortion. Where they are defunded, they can no longer provide information on contraception which leads to an increase in unwanted pregnancies and safe abortions. Indeed, during the launch of the She Decides Initiative that’s aimed at meeting the shortfall from the Global Gag, Minister Liliane Ploumen of the NL pointed out what activists have long known: Denial of safe abortion services leads to increase in unsafe abortions- not less abortions.  

The Policy leaves a wake of 'collateral damage' as it's too blunt an instrument to provide any meaningful differentiation of ‘abortion services’. It prevents any sort of service related to abortion, so for instance, an abortion referral by a health practitioner to a woman who’s been raped or is at risk of death, jeopardises the funding of all other health services. It doesn’t matter if the referral is done in a crisis health outreach clinic funded 100% by non USG funding. It’s sledgehammer policy that puts the millions of Kenyans who access health care in Kenya at risk.  

In the Kenyan context, this is particularly worrying.  About half of the pregnancies in Kenya are unintended pregnancies. About 40% of these lead to an abortion which translated to about 460,000 abortions in 2012. Kenya has made great strides in reducing maternal mortality, but conservative estimates show that around 1,600 women still die every year from complications from abortion. We have also made great strides in increasing information and access to contraception, but a lot of work still remains to be done because we still live in a country where 29% of Kenyan men believe that access to contraceptives ‘makes women promiscuous’. This is also a profoundly anti-poor policy where safe abortions in Kenya, at about $200 are largely out of reach of poor people.

Kenya Public Health Exposure to Global Gag Rule

While previous Republican administrations brought back the Policy, unlike his predecessors, President Trump also expanded the Policy.  This current executive order in addition to legislating on how non-US NGOs can operate, it also includes “all global health facilities”. While the Trump administration has since clarified how the non-US NGOs should act, there is still no information on how the “global health facilities’ clause should be interpreted. Does this for instance also include Government facilities? This would mean that GoK medical practitioner cannot provide referrals or provide safe abortions without forfeiting all GoK health funding including vaccinations, malaria treatment etc. 

In the absence of these guidelines from the Trump Administration, lifesaving health interventions stand at risk. It is not hyperbole to state that this is a matter of life and death for many Kenyans in the coming years. This is because the USG remains the largest funder of health in the world. It is expected that there will be a global funding shortfall around $600m for the next four years because of the reinstating of this policy. While Initiatives like She Decides have stepped up to fill the gap, it is unlikely that they will completely make up the shortfall. 

For Kenya, exposure to the Global Gag Policy is potentially quite high. The USG currently provides almost across the board support to the health sector including health services, population and nutrition support for the people of Kenya. 

The policy has in the past been shown to increase censorship and self-censorship by civil society on the abortion issue; to skew the abortion debate with a lot of bias and misinformation on abortion; to expose women to unsafe abortions and to decrease women’s access to reproductive health services.  Unsafe abortions are a critical public health issue, and the isolation of groups working on providing information and access to these services is a regrettable and unfortunate development. 

In addition to the climate of censorship and fear it engenders, the Policy promises to profoundly impact health services. This is because of our dependence on foreign funding- especially USG funding to supplement our national health budgets. 

To illustrate, of the approximately 60B allocated to health in the 206/7 budget, about 29B of this goes to recurrent spending, and 31B to development expenditure. About 62% of health development spending is financed by development partners with much of this being support for Reproductive health services, immunisations and health systems support. 

The US Government remains the largest bilateral donor for health globally. Regionally, Kenya is one of the biggest recipients of this (after Ethiopia) where e.g. USAID in 2016 disbursed $265m for health in Kenya. Of this, about $233m was for population and reproductive health services $233m and $25m for basic health. Defunding of these programmes would be have major implications on Kenyan Government health spending.

For NGOs working on this sector, while still early days yet, many of the health providers e.g. Marie Stopes & Planned Parenthood have already stated that they will not accept funding from the USG under the Global Gag conditions. This also puts at risk Hivos programmes providing critical support to key populations on HIV/AIDS because of other work that we do e.g. provision of information on safe post-abortion care by other partners. 

Musings on way forward:
The Policy is unlikely to be rescinded as long as there is a Republican President in the US. Supporting the advocacy efforts of US allies in limiting the effect of this policy might be the only avenue still available to us. 

Domestically, we need to have a sober discussion on our domestic spending priorities and how we finance then. As a country, we chronically under-spend on health. The total national health budget allocation for the 2016/7 fiscal year was 3.6% (down from 3.7% in the previous year). Total health expenditures for 2016/7 was at 7.6% way below the 15% target set by the Abuja Declaration. While the counties are currently spending about 25% of their budgets on health, we need to not only resource the sector appropriately, but also plan on how to wean ourselves off donor spending which is a profoundly unsustainable way of financing such a critical health sector. Where over 60% of our health budget is dependent on development partners for funding, we end up with a situation where we become anxious foreign election trend watchers, and less domestic health policy planners.  In a world of growing nationalism and the rise of conservatism, it becomes even more important that we prioritise domestic health care funding. 

This is especially more urgent because the re-classification as a lower middle income country means that many development partners are moving away from aid to trade. For the health sector, this has also meant a growing interest by development partners in investing in the private & commercial health sector and divesting from the public health sector. This is a development that should be of great concern to public health actors in the country. In a country where out of pocket health spending has proven to be catastrophic with about 1 million Kenyans falling below the poverty line because of health spending, it’s imperative that our tax shillings are directed towards a health system built on policies designed around Kenyan priories and needs. 

More immediately, we can provide material and moral support for initiatives like She Decides which have sprung up as the moral alternative to the Global Gag Rule. Countries that have rallied to fill this decency gap include the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada, the Gates Foundation and private donations from individuals from multiple groups in many countries across the world. The presence of shining stars like  Cape Verde and the absence of some like the UK to me shows that this is more than an economic argument, and more a “do right” attitude displayed by these countries. Despite a dearth of resources, and competing exigencies like the current drought, insecurity and a host of other clear and present priorities, it would be good if as a country, we also stepped up on this issue, and provided moral leadership for the region.