Kenya: a parliamentarian proposes a law to legalize cannabis

Compared to America and Europe, Africa, like Asia, is still fairly closed to cannabis legalization. However, 2018 heralds new times. After the Lesotho legalized cannabis last year, Zimbabwe did the same at the beginning of the year and, more recently, South Africa has just legalized, by legal decision the use and possession of cannabis for recreational purposes. Now, Kenya is turning its attention to the plant. A parliamentarian by the name of Ken Okoth plans to introduce a bill on the legalization of cannabis in the National Assembly.

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The approach and its scope

Last week, Ken Okoth sent a letter to the Assembly spokesman asking for help in drafting a bill entitled Marijuana Control Bill. The latter aims to decriminalize cannabis consumption and possession, eliminate cannabis-related criminal records and launch a legal, regulated market with progressive taxes to “boost Kenya's economic independence and promote job creation”.

The objectives are: “legalize, regulate, tax. Protect children, eliminate drug cartels, reduce incarceration costs. Promote medical research and protect our indigenous knowledge and plants before foreign companies steal and patent them”.

The legislation will first have to be approved by the ministerial cabinet before it can be published for inspection by stakeholders and then submitted for parliamentary debate. The process is likely to be lengthy, but the text may yet meet with some success. Indeed, the legislator is not the only one in Kenya to support the cannabis legalization.

Other Kenyan voices

Chekai Musa, a political activist who wanted to enter the Senate, made the legalization of cannabis one of his campaign promises. In his view, legal cannabis would reduce the resources tied up in the war on drugs, caused by the unjustified criminalization of a harmless plant. Cannabis cultivation could also provide Kenyan farmers with an alternative to sugar cane, which generates little income. On this point, Gwada Ogot, a Kenyan researcher, presented a petition last year to legalize cannabis and classify it as an income-generating crop, mainly intended for export.

More recently, Dr. Simon Mwaura, a Kenyan scientist from the Hyaquip company Kenya, which is also campaigning for the legalization of cannabis, called on the Assembly Health Committee to legalize cannabis. He is said to have found a way to separate the psychoactive compounds in cannabis from the non-intoxicating ones, making the plant harmless. His ambition is to use the plant as is to create food supplements thanks to the nutrients it contains, such as magnesium and hydrocarbonates. “You can mix it with coffee, tea, beet, alcohol; it's very compatible,” he explains. Visit plant extracts also have medicinal and dietary virtues and are harmless.

If his project comes to fruition, the researcher points out that Kenya would be the first country to export cannabis in the form of dietary supplements, which could represent a windfall of 1.5 trillion Kenyan shillings a year, according to his calculations (roughly 12 billion euros, which seems a tad overestimated). The project would also create numerous jobs. It recommends that the National Assembly grant licenses to around 150,000 farmers to grow cannabis. For the moment, the petition is still pending, but Simon Mwaura isn't giving up: «We're getting ready to go to court. Things are dragging on so long,» he declared.