When he took office in 2022, President William Ruto inherited an economy under pressure, which he described as “dilapidated”. Rising food prices were among the biggest concerns facing Kenyans.

🇰🇪 Breaking It Down

Ruto promised to tackle the cost of living by introducing sweeping changes in the agricultural sector to ensure that every Kenyan could afford food.

He said his administration would support farmers by subsidising fertiliser and seeds rather than subsidising consumption.

According to Ruto, the interventions would help reduce the price of maize flour from Ksh230 for a 2kg packet to between Ksh100 and Ksh120.

📌 What You Need to Know

Four years later, however, the record presents a mixed picture. While the government has delivered on its fertiliser subsidy promise, the pledge to bring down the price of maize flour has proved more complicated.

At his inauguration on September 13, 2022, Ruto announced that his government would make 1.4 million bags of fertiliser available at a subsidised price of Ksh3,500 for a 50kg bag, down from about Ksh6,500.

“Our priority intervention therefore is to make fertiliser, good-quality seeds and other agricultural inputs affordable and available,” Ruto said in his inauguration speech.

“There was an attempt to subsidise unga in the run-up to the election, a programme that gobbled up Ksh7 billion in one month, with no impact,” he added.

Ruto was making a deliberate break from the previous administration’s consumption-subsidy approach, arguing that subsidising unga had cost taxpayers billions without addressing the underlying cost of production.

“If we had spent Ksh7 billion on fertiliser, it would have been a different ball game,” he said.

📰 Source: Kenyans.co.ke