Bishop Titus Masika shows the Star a demonstration farm at his home in Yatta, Machakos county / GEORGE OWITI
Machakos county was rocked by media reports
in 2008 about a woman who died of hunger after giving birth to twins in Yatta.
Touched, Bishop Dr Titus Masika left
Nairobi city for the village, a man on a mission.
Recounting the story to the Star, Masika said he headed to the then very remote and dry subcounty to train communities on ‘mindset change’ and to practically help them produce food. As an arid and semi-arid lands (Asal) area, Yatta was reeling from erratic rainfall, water scarcity and food insecurity.
Masika got out of his comfort zone, a posh home in one of the high-end estates in Nairobi, and settled at Kinyaata village in Yatta subcounty.
His goal was to transform lives by making
the locals self-reliant, food and financially secure and also reduce mortality
deaths due to inadequate food and nutrition.
Masika is the founder of the Christian
Impact Mission, a Faith-Based Organisation started as a fellowship of
Christians who were trying to help the villages where they came from in matters
education and livelihoods.
He believes his resolve for moving to the
village was not in vain. Eighteen years later, it has borne fruits.
The village where Masika’s home is located
is now known as a ‘breadbasket’.
The project includes a bakery producing
5,000 blocks of bread daily, enriched with orange-fleshed sweet potatoes,
benefiting local farmers and hundreds of local communities.
Looking back, the retired high school
teacher said the woman’s death happened years after he had bought land in
Kinyaata village.
“I bought this piece of land in a dry area.
It was green then when I bought it since it was in November during the rainy
season, but when I returned in February, it was very dry and I felt cheated,”
Masika said.
“To mitigate the situation, I made a water
pan for myself so I could have a source of water for my poultry, livestock and
domestic use.”
He didn’t settle on his farm immediately
even after the water pan was completed.
Later on, there was a drought between 2006
and 2011. A national initiative emerged amid this plight in 2008 called ‘Kenya
for Kenyans’.
“I got it from the media that Yatta people
were seriously affected. Their livestock had died and they hadn’t harvested for
more than 10 years,” Masika said.
A local newspaper reported that a woman had
died after giving birth. She had no food, died of hunger and her twins were
left suckling in vain.
“This touched me and I decided to move from
the city of Nairobi to come down and help that community,” he said.
‘MANUFACTURED POVERTY’
The locals were so needy when he got to the
community that he felt helpless.
However, he had faith and confidence that
the people could be food-secure and regain their dignity.
“I had drafted a model after studying the
models of development in Africa,” he said.
The model was called ‘Empowered Worldview
from Mindset Change’.
“I realised and observed that generally in
Africa, it wasn’t about lack of resources, capital or anything else since as a
continent we have more rains,” he said.
“The rains we receive in ASAL areas are
sufficient, more than what other countries in other continents receive.”
So he felt the problem was more about
mindset.
“It’s the same problem in Ukambani, Lake
and Coast regions of Kenya, as well as other countries, like Tanzania, Uganda
South Africa — everywhere all over Africa,” Masika said.
“I discovered that because of the history,
Africans have a dependency syndrome, which in Kamba we call ‘mwoiyo’ (relief)
mindset,” he said. “In other communities like the Luo, it’s called ‘gonya’
mindset.”
He explained the mindset as believing ‘We
are poor, Africa is poor, our community is poor, so help us. Our country is
poor, so, the West, help us’. And that this concept cuts across the minds of
the village boy, woman, man, chief, up to presidents of Africa.
“Because of that mindset, we have
manufactured poverty which is untrue. It isn’t there, it’s only a mindset
because we aren’t poor,” he said.
“Africa has mineral resources, natural
capital and human capital. We also have sunlight throughout, almost 12 hours in
a day every year, which isn’t the case in other parts of the developed world.”
CHANGING THE NARRATIVE
Masika said Africa is the recipient
consumer of finished products because of ‘our mindset’, and due to that, “We
are not advancing.”
He said having realised all these
challenges, he invented a model called ‘Empowerment Model’ and a one-acre rule:
How to do one-acre farming after mindset training and become food-secure,
create wealth and employment.
“I realised in Africa, we talk about rain,
that we don’t have enough rain. We don’t need rain to do agriculture, we need
water,” Masika said.
He bemoaned how people living near
freshwater lakes are poor.
“Tana River flows through to the Indian
Ocean, yet the communities living around it are poor. River Athi starts from
Ngong through Athi River and Kibwezi, yet this is the belt where people are
poor,” Masika said.
He said the first colonisation was not done
when there was a lot of rain but where there were rivers.
In Masika’s model, this is called the Aden
principle. The principle embodies the idea that ‘a river flowed from Aden and
watered the land’.
“So you use water to do agriculture. If
Africans got that principle, then Africa and Kenya alike would not be
food-deficient,” he said.
He said most African countries have big
rivers, which can make the continent rich.
Masika said it’s for these reasons that he
established the transformation model, which runs on the motto: ‘Operation
Mwoiyo Out’.
“This is where we do mindset change. That,
we have resources within ourselves, outside us, within our environment. And
using all the available resources within our environment, we can change,” he
said.
The cleric said he had to study all the
worldviews in world history not only to be graded in class but for him to
understand why Africa is the way it is and why we are poor yet we have
resources.
“When I came to Yatta, I knew the word
Yatta meant dry and indeed, it’s dry,” he said.
The Government Economic Survey had
indicated that Yatta was among the poor of the poorest in the region.
“I did the first water pan, called the
locals and encouraged them to do their own,” Masika said.
Using the Empowered Worldview model, he
trained the residents to become self-reliant, self-sufficient and
self-sustaining.
By 2009, there were about 1,300 water pans
in homesteads in Yatta, and that’s how the subcounty’s transformation started:
by mindset change and water pans for food production. Two years later, the
water pans grew to 4,500, enabling locals to practise agriculture throughout
the year.
GOVERNMENT INSPIRED
Masika said former President Uhuru
Kenyatta’s government borrowed his model in 2018.
“When the Head of Public Service in the
last government passed through Yatta in 2018 when there was disaster, he came
and borrowed my model,” he said.
“The government then constructed many
household farm ponds across the country and in the county. It also did some
more in Yatta subcounty.”
He said there are more than 8,000 water
pans in homesteads in Yatta subcounty currently.
“People think in terms of large-scale dams,
but water pans for small-scale farming is a game changer,” Masika said.
He cited small-scale household farm ponds
for small-scale farms that are fitted under the one-acre rule.
“The one-acre rule gives lots of advantages
because you can grow crops when others are not growing. If you grow during the
hot season, prices go up. When prices go up, you get more money. So you
elongate the period for farming,” he said.
Masika said such farmers can then do simple
cottage industries.
“We, for instance, make bread out of fresh
sweet potatoes. We fortify with the wheat flour,” he said.
“By doing so, many people grow sweet
potatoes. They have a market and when you make bread, you can sell it back to
the community and beyond.”
He said by creating such-like new products,
wealth is created, too.
“If we all took the value chain and
addition, we would have created wealth and jobs in the country,” Masika said.
He said his farm was the first to become a
place for training and benchmarking. Many development agencies had invested
heavily in Africa, yet there was not much change to be seen due to high
dependency.
The cleric believes that development is
what people are helped to do for themselves.
He established a training centre in his
farm where individuals, churches, NGOs, government agencies, governments and
other organisations go for learning and benchmarking.
Masika said they developed a curriculum on
Mindset Change and Economic Empowerment, which they have trained across the
region.
“We empower people to go and train others.
We began with champions who go to train others,” he said.
“We inspire development agencies to use a
people-based as opposed to a project-based approach, which hasn’t given any
transformational change in Africa.”
He said they had replicated the project in
Baringo county.
“After succeeding, we decided to go to the
North Rift. We chose Baringo because we realised it looks like the centre of
North Rift. We celebrated our 10th anniversary of existence in West Pokot in
December last year,” Masika said.
CHARITY WORK
Away from farming and mentoring, Masika
likes giving back to the community. He does not do it for recognition but has
received local and international acclaim for it, including from charity
organisation Tearfund.
“As a human being, when people recognise
what you are doing, it gives you inspiration and encouragement,” he said.
Masika said the government has recognised
his initiatives and efforts to improve humanity by branding him a national
hero.
He received the Elder of the Burning Spear
award during Mashujaa Day celebrations on October 20 last year for his
humanitarian service through Operation Mwoiyo Out and famine relief
initiatives.
He’s the founding director of Christian
Impact Mission, focusing on empowering communities to become food-secure and
self-sufficient.
He got a similar award from the presidency
in 2023: Order of Great Warrior Award.
The cleric said his Christianity is about
helping people to develop capacities to have better livelihoods.
“I do it as my service to humanity as a way
of Christianity, working and serving as a Christian,” Masika concluded.