of drought early last year that saw Kenyans all over the nation contribute to feed fellow Kenyans who were facing starvation.

The crisis brought on by the worst drought to hit the country in 60 years did not only see over two million Kenyans go to bed on empty stomach but also demonstrated the incompetence by the government in terms of disaster preparedness and management.

Despite the major causes of extreme food shortage in the country obviously known to be poor rains, floods, massive crop failure and loss livestock facilitated by poor farming methods, relevant authorities have sat on their jobs and done little to mitigate the situation.

The Government has always responded to these crises through ad hoc measures such as supplying relief food and buying livestock from the affected areas which last for a short while and after a few months leaves the residents in these areas in a quagmire situation.

Lack of coordination between relevant departments such as the Ministries of Agriculture, Livestock, Water and Irrigations, the meteorological department and Ministry of North Eastern and arid areas development has seen the country fail to recover from the recent devastating drought which could hit the scale of humanitarian crises.

Over reliance of the rain fed agriculture in the country has also seen the government frequently grapple with ensuring that there’s enough food in the country. The Ministry of Agriculture has not changed existing policies despite the challenges posed by the growing population and the increasingly unpredictable weather patterns which have affected food production.

Further complicating the situation is the recent fungus infection affecting maize crop in some part of the country. This threatens food security and also provides a huge test to the Government on the method that will be used to plume the disaster.

With Kenyans being said to consume over 44 million bags of maize which is the country’s staple food, the disease that will definitely cause poor harvest is a clear indications that hardship time for Kenyans is far from over.

Experts have warned that they expect the current situation to deteriorate further over the next few months because of the high cost of food, floods that have caused havoc, and crop and livestock loss.