Inadequate enforcement continues to place a great strain on Kenyan health and safety, despite the existence of a rank of seemingly sufficient protective legislation. Yet consumer power is set to go a long way in replacing State oversight – as the latest scandal on food additives is showing us all.
Food safety is an area where legislation exists - in particular, regulating which chemicals may be used in foods. But policing additives requires personnel.
In the US, where food regulation is currently being reformed into a single food agency, the government last year announced that 14,200 employees were working full time in the regulation of food safety and standards.
Of course, the US has a population of 327 million, versus Kenya’s 40 million , and thus eight times as many people, but policing food safety doesn’t necessarily grow in the work involved based on population size. A significant driver is the range of food and food issues, which are not one-eighth as many in Kenya as in the US.
Thus, as a first-base estimate, Kenya could be supposed to need several thousand staff regulating its food safety. It also needs efficiency, strategy, and focus: as in, a clear agenda for how it stops toxic chemicals from being put into milk or onto red meat to lengthen their shelf life. In the absence of these things, however, journalists have stepped in: and good for them.
We may have seen some Tweets about sensationalism, and maybe the reporting style is not to everyone’s taste. But no one is denying the chemicals have been used, or that Kenyans have been eating them - and look at the race by supermarkets to offer assurances that their own meat is ‘bad-chemical’ free following from this journalistic focus.
In many ways, this represents the genuine function of journalism as a watchdog. But its importance goes further. For the fact is our government is very short of funds. We just cannot keep playing ‘the government should’ card. The government doesn’t have the funds to triple the food safety staffing, or triple the training, or triple the capacity to strategise and execute more efficiently.
But when consumer power rises and consumers are prepared to boycott suppliers who add poisons to our foods, then the need for government intervention is lesser.
Thus the role of information and transparency is profound in ensuring consumer safety: and can probably never be replaced by regulation. Sunlight cleanses everything. When we know what is being put on our foods, we don’t need government penalties: we can decide for ourselves not to give our children bleach-enhanced milk.
Knowledge is power. Yet we can so often get cowed into withholding information, or self-censoring, or covering up. All the pressure is towards secrecy, and minimal explanation. But the greatest empowerment for consumers comes with more information.
Thus, let us learn from this new and latest food alarm. Of course, we need to know what our food suppliers are doing to our meat before it goes onto the shelf, and a quick taskforce of assistance on that would be wonderful – thank you ‘government should’. It wouldn’t take a large team to go and buy one meat pack from each of our supermarket chains in Nairobi and test them. A day’s work, for four people? And publish the results?
If we cannot afford blanket coverage on food safety, at least let us have some quick and instant remedy once a flag is raised. And that will make every supermarket work hard to ensure there are no dangerous additives on its meat.
Not daily testing, not legions of staff. But a fast-track collection and testing of single samples, randomly, without warning, once a year – where a supermarket that gets caught out gets named and shamed and will then leap hoops to prove its suspension of chemical use to get its customers back.
If we recognise the limits of our available government funds, and our regulators work with small teams, cleverly, with low budgets, and frank and fearless transparency in publishing information, life would get safer for all of us, without extra taxes.
The key is simply open government. In the end, it’s just about mindset.
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