Why miraa farmers should accept the cheese has moved

When I was in university, there was a phone known as Nokia 3310. Whenever you turned on one of Nokia’s legendary handsets, you always got the same thing: That famous signature logo, holding hands.

For my generation, it was the phone that took us through the mobile revolution. It even had a mobile game that ruled them all. It was called Snake.
But I would be doing you an injustice if I didn’t tell you the story of Nokia and Finland.

For a start Nokia is older than Finland. Much older. It was founded in 1865 while Finland- after over 700 years of Swedish rule and 109 years of Russian rule- only attained its independence in 1917.

The Nokia name appeared in 1871 when founder Fredrik Idestam renamed it after a small nearby town and over the next hundred years it grew by continually switching industries.

It moved from paper to rubber to robotics to chemicals and eventually electronics and telecommunications in the 1970s.

Nokia even threw their weight behind the GSM mobile standard. Nokia signed the world’s first network roaming agreement with Vodafone in 1992 and GSM went on to become the world’s dominant network standard.

Then all of a sudden, in January 2007, Steve Jobs (late Apple founder) walked on to a stage and pulled an iPhone out of his pocket and changed the world forever. The fall was swift.

Now I would like you to replace the word Nokia with miraa (khat) and Finland with Meru.

Two weeks ago, the government released Sh1 billion to assist Miraa farmers to get a market for their crop.

The director- general of the Agriculture Fisheries and Food Authority (AFFA) Alfred Busolo said that part of the funds is to be used in conducting research to prove that Miraa should not be classified as a class C drug thus categorising it as an anabolic steroid.

In fact I will quote him verbatim. “We need to hire experts who will carry out high level research to prove that miraa is not a drug. This will be a key step towards opening the now banned European market.”

But let me tell you a few things about miraa. Considered a divine food by the ancient Egyptians, miraa is known for euphoric effects.

Typically, fresh leaves are chewed and kept in the mouth, but can be dried and brewed in tea. In Europe, which was the key market for Kenya, men are the primary users, due in part to a commonly-held belief that the khat plant enhances communication and causes relaxation.

It has been used worldwide, thanks in part to migrant cultural behaviour, and thanks to its reputation as a, not-as-addictive-as-tobacco, recreational drug.

In 1980 the World Health Organisation deemed it to be a ‘drug of abuse’. Its production, sale and consumption is controlled in some European countries and North America, but it is still grown relatively freely in areas of Africa and Asia, including Yemen, Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya.

Here comes the catch. Statistics from areas like North Eastern in Kenya show that a lot of men spend large proportions of their income buying the leaves.

There is also some evidence that khat increases the risk of mouth cancer and could lead to mental health problems. Illuminating this is the classification of khat by the Australian government, which places the drug in the same group as cannabis.

Nokia underestimated how important the transition to smartphones would be. And this was, in retrospect, a classic case of a company being enthralled (and, in a way, imprisoned) by its past success.

Nokia was, after all, earning more than 50 per cent of all the profits in the mobile-phone industry in 2007, and most of those profits were not coming from smartphones.

In that sense, Nokia’s failure resulted at least in part from an institutional reluctance to transition into a new era.

In 2008, Nokia was said to have one of the most valuable brands in the world. But it failed to recognise that brands today aren’t as resilient as they once were.

The high-tech era has taught people to expect constant innovation; when companies fall behind, consumers are quick to punish them. Late and inadequate: for Nokia, it was a deadly combination.

Somebody please whisper to our miraa brothers in Meru that there are problems that Sh1 billion from the government will not solve.

Mr Waswa is a management and HR specialist and managing director of Outdoors Africa. E-mail: [email protected]