Listen to This Article Enhance your reading experience by listening to this article.

The “mambo ni matatu” mantra has gained traction and elicited quite some debate.

It’s not clear whether it is because of the President’s resolve to deal with corruption in this populist manner or because of Kenyans’ desperation to be excited by political rhetoric.

Well, it did start with the sugar issue and specifically Mumias and it need to be situated broadly as a pathway to solving the sugar crisis once and for all.

Corruption and cartels aside, sugar is about farmers, the staff and labourers in Sony Sugar, Mumias, Nzoia, Muhoroni, Miwani and Chemilil and the local economies that these sugar companies supported in the past.

Even back then the country was experiencing sugar deficits and there was a quota to be imported. This is where the rain probably started beating us. The commercialism that characterised the Narc administration was infiltrated by cartels.

Driven by the desire to make money quickly, importers and cartels started packaging imported sugar in local companies’ brands. That’s how farmers started the odyssey that successive governments have failed to address.

Whether ‘mambo matatu’ solves the sugar crisis or not is a story that will be told. Many have condemned the President’s remarks, but one of his characteristics is stoic determination never to retreat when he believes in a cause.

But some have questioned his moral authority to fight graft. It is not lost on Kenyans that in his administration, there are a good number of individuals with the history of corruption.

We have not forgotten the Kenya Kwanza campaign that had the war on graft nowhere on its agenda. We are also alive to the many high profile corruption cases that were immediately dropped when the new administration took office. And what about the judiciary?

Now the Damascus moment has unveiled allegations of a corrupt system, do we now want to question the appointments of officers that were rejected by the previous government? We may want to step back from our excitement and interrogate what these ‘mambo matatu’ means to those who a high-ranking economic advisor said are wasting public funds.

Wastage should be understood as what it is – corruption. Have these corrupt fellows left Kenya and will our vilified criminal justice system send them to jail? And what exactly is the route to heaven?
I like the excitement around mantra and the memes and the excitement it has elicited. It could be the surest way to deal with graft.

As a native of Migori County, I just want see the vibrant sugar industry back to its former glory. Sony Sugar was our pride. Vibrant Sony Sugar just like Chemelil, Muhoroni and Mumias supported farmers and the local economies and most importantly nurtured talent.
These were sandboxes of economic prowess. Going to school, we would pass through sugar plantations and well-maintained roads with trucks loaded with sugar cane from farms whose owners reaped big from their farming.
Even though sugar prices shot up during President Kibaki’s time, it was good for the economy, especially the local economy, because that money went back to farmers.
Folks in Migori yearn for those days when in every major supermarket they would buy Sony Sugar. And we will be happy to buy it expensively if the government can use the ‘mambo matatu’ rallying call to get the factories running vibrantly again and the farmers paid handsomely for supplying the factory.
Well, with the ‘mambo matatu’ mantra, lets just agree that no one is ever wrong to do the right thing, and as they I learnt from one Prof Mulbah in Liberia, you can never be that which you have not become.

— The writer is a PhD candidate in political communication