Kenya is worth Sh286 trillion; but who is buying?
By MUNGAI KIHANYA
The Sunday Nation
Nairobi,
28 April 2019
After reading last
week’s article about planting 1.4 billion trees in Nyandarua, Dawson
Ndegwa wrote to ask whether I was right to assume that all trees are
planted in the 4m-by-4m pattern. Well; I used only the information that
I am confident about in order to illustrate the calculation.
Nevertheless, now
that we know that the project will be on a 140-hectare piece of land, we
may do a reverse calculation and ask: what spacing would be required to
fit 1.4 billion trees in that area?
One hectare is equal
to 10,000 square metres; so, 140ha is the same as 1.4 million square
metres. Therefore, they would need to plant 1,000 seedlings in every
square metre of land. Is that possible?
Now the small plastic
bag that holds one seedling is about 10cm in diameter. Ten of these in a
line will cover 100cm; that is, one metre. Ten such lines arranged in
parallel will cover 1m-by-1m; that is, one square metre.
In one square metre,
there will only be 10 x 10 = 100 seedling bags! In other words, 140ha is
not even enough space to store 1.4 billion seedlings – let alone
planting them!
*****
Another reader
wondered: How much is all the land in Kenya worth? My quick response
was: who is buying? I said this because the price of anything really
depends only on what buyers are willing to pay for it.
Thus, if there is no
buyer, there can be no price. Still, I suspect that the reader wanted to
know two things: first how many acres is all the land in Kenya and,
second, what is the average price of land in this country.
The territory of
Kenya measures about 580,000 square kilometres. One square kilometre is
about 247 acres. Therefore, the total area of our country is about 143
million acres.
That’s the easy part;
the difficult question is about the average price of land per acre. Now;
this is just a 500-word newspaper column written in a couple of hours
and not a PhD thesis written over several years. So, I should be allowed
to do a quick estimate.
I looked at the
classified adverts in the Daily Nation of 24th April. There
were 13 parcels of land of different sizes offered for sale from all
over the country. I calculated the price per acre for each one of them
and tabulated the results.
The prices ranged
from Sh240,000 to Sh36,000,000 per acre. It would be tempting to add
them up and dive by 13 but would give a misleading result. The variation
in the data is just too wide.
Instead, I arrange
the prices in ascending order and picked the middle point. It turns out
to be Sh2,000,000 per acre. At this rate, the price of all the land in
Kenya comes out to about Sh286 trillion.
But the question
remains: who is buying?
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