CANNABIS CULTURE – George Wajackoyah is a former street kid who worked as a grave digger in England. Now he is a law professor and this week he could be voted in as the next President of Kenya, Africa’s 6th largest economy. Wajackoyah’s message has created a sensation thanks in part to eccentric bets on cannabis.
George, 63, hopes that on 9 August, Kenya’s millions of voters will make him their new president and thus give him a platform to slash debt and joblessness via unleashing a cannabis exports boom.
Breaking the internet with cannabis
Throughout his wildly ecstatic election rallies, George has been the ultimate anti-establishment street hero, just like cannabis is. He prefers to don unremarkable tracksuits, T-shirts, and headscarves – the typical anti-corporate wear and mimics smoking a joint of weed with his fingers.
George is adamant that cannabis if properly harnessed from cultivation to export, will earn Kenya $76bn per year, and heavily indebted Kenya may never need to borrow again. George’s most famous act is his savvy use of TikTok, Twitter, and WhatsApp to argue before his audience that, since 90 kilograms of raw cannabis fetches $3.4mn, Kenya needs just 2000 giant bags to dilute all her foreign debts.
Of course, realistically these are insane figures but it’s the outrageousness that has endeared George’s theatrics to the millennial public.
‘We can have billions of dollars every year to sustain the economy,’ George told the BBC in June without revealing proof of his financial models.
Debt and cannabis
Kenya is a heavily indebted country. Starting in July, it needed a whopping $12.1bn just to service its debts. At the same time, its national forex reserves stood at $9.bn in April.
‘George knows that the emotion of debt makes cannabis an intriguing option in the minds of his audience. But I think it’s outrageousness, I mean his financial projections of tens of billions of dollars in cannabis receipts,’ says Winnie Oruma, a political strategy advisor in Nairobi Kenya’s capital.
George’s cannabis election bait, adds Oruma, is pitched on the message that Kenya’s leaders are hopelessly corrupt and their corruption is the reason why big cannabis deals have not come to Kenya.
‘That’s a clever connecting of dots and emotions,’ says Oruma.
Africa’s cannabis sector is projected to grow to $7bn in 2023 and in Kenya, ‘the Africa giant’ is not at the heart of it. In general, cultivation, use, and trading of cannabis are illegal in Kenya and offenders face heavy jail terms. Kenya is so slow in attracting cannabis investments even at an experimental level. In 2019 Kenya went as far as publicly mocking a hopeful LA-based company that mistakenly thought Kenya has gifted it a 25-year lease to grow cannabis. Yet casually, cannabis is highly popular, especially among millennial youths who make up the biggest chunk of the country’s population, says Oruma the political strategist.
In the last decade, Kenya’s peer countries, South Africa, Uganda, Lesotho, Ghana, Zambia, Rwanda, and Morroco have legalized cannabis cultivation for medicinal and scientific purposes. This makes Kenya a surprising outlier, says Dennis Juru, president of the Africa International Cross Borders Traders Association in Johannesburg, South Africa.
‘Kenya is Africa’s ‘Silicon Valley’ for tech innovations and attracting hundreds of millions in venture funds. For Kenya to restrict cannabis, a commodity tied to futuristic tech and science possibilities, is bizarre,’ Juru says.
Over the past five years, 10 countries have passed laws to legalize production for medical and scientific purposes. These include Lesotho, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Uganda, Malawi, Zambia, Ghana, Eswatini, Rwanda, and Morocco.
George’s election victory hopes are unrealistic as local polls in Kenya puts him at a distant third behind a wealthy ex-prime minister and an incumbent vice-president.
However, as Oruma, the political strategist says, ‘(George) has centered cannabis onto Kenya’s public psyche, especially GenZ. I won’t be surprised if a new president steals his cannabis manifesto and change course.’
Feature image courtesy Reuters
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