After his truce with President Uhuru Kenyatta in March 2018, Raila Odinga’s hand continues to be felt inside the current administration’s second term, with the latest being the radical move by the government on Unga.
On Wednesday, President Uhuru Kenyatta gave a directive to the country’s millers as well as the Ministry of Agriculture which will see the high Unga prices slashed by more than half, for the first time in a decade.
This is the cheapest Unga has ever been in Kenya since 2012 when the grand coalition government under President Mwai Kibaki and PM Raila Odinga set the price of the commodity at Ksh 100 per 2kg pack.
The Agriculture docket at that time was under the Prime Minister’s office and directly supervised plus coordinated by Mr. Odinga.
Ten years later, President Kenyatta borrows from the grand coalition leaf to help unburden Kenyans.
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Speaking from State House on Wednesday, the Head of State disclosed there seems to be an engineered ‘Unga Crisis’ every election year and there was a trend to the artificial shortage of the commodity, exposing the connection between Kenya’s election and the high prices of unga.
”If it is not a coincidence that every election attracts high prices of unga, then we must question the role played by the political class and the millers. We must also blame the sufferings of the vulnerable to the unscrupulous schemes of the two,” the Head of State who was flanked by members of his cabinet and country’s millers said.
”And I say so because if one of them acts unethically by hoarding their products, the other benefits by politicizing this irresponsibility. But in the meantime, who suffers from this mischief? If the politician gets his votes out of it and the miller gets their profit, what does the common mwananchi get? And in the end, who carries the burden of this mischief? The common mwananchi of course!” he added.
President Kenyatta went ahead to appeal to the millers to practice a reasoned level of social ethics and asked the political class to exercise civic responsibility and cease politicizing the pain of Kenyans without offering solutions.
Unga processors after the closed-door meeting with the Head of State have agreed to lower cost from Ksh 205 to Ksh100 for the two-kilo packet.
