On April 14, 2023, Kenya’s courts put the brakes on Agriculture Cabinet Secretary Mithika Linturi’s plan to enter an agreement allowing maize to be grown on Zambian soil for the Kenyan market.

The Farmers Party of Kenya had taken the minister to court, arguing that it made little sense for Kenya to contract farmers in a neighbouring country with broadly comparable climatic conditions and agricultural potential to grow the staple food when the government could instead invest in local farmers.

Justice Mugure Thande temporarily stopped the implementation of the proposed Kenya-Zambia Memorandum of Understanding pending determination of the case. The farmers argued that the arrangement amounted to an admission that Kenya had failed to create the conditions necessary for its own farmers to produce enough food.

The matter appeared to fade until Zambia once again found itself at the centre of Kenyan maize politics.

Kenya, reports now say, has entered into an agreement to import up to six million 90-kilogramme bags of maize from Zambia, remarkably, the same country whose farmers were at the centre of the controversial 2023 arrangement.

The government says it is moving with speed to plug a widening supply gap after poor harvests, with drought and Kenya’s heavy dependence on rain-fed agriculture affecting production.

Agriculture CS Mutahi Kagwe has said the maize will be white, Grade A and non-GMO, intended for human consumption in a country where maize remains a staple food. Per-capita consumption is commonly estimated at between 60 and 100 kilogrammes a year.

“It all smells like the typical operating standard of the state tenderpreneurs. I doubt it’s a coincidence,” says Kenyan governance expert Prof Gitili Naitule.

“You can be sure that tenderpreneurs were already doing maize farming in Zambia, likely with Kenyan government officials’ support, and now want to bring in their maize to the country at exorbitant rates. I can also guess that it could be GMO maize after the CS took to clarifying that it is non-GMO. I mean, who asked for that clarity?”

Naitule’s claims about possible interests behind the deal have not been independently established by any Kenyan investigative agency, including the DCI or EACC. But they reflect one of the concerns hanging over an import deal widely questioned by Kenya’s major dailies, whose scale has placed the private company at its centre under intense scrutiny.

The import deal comes after the government opened a duty-free window for private traders to bring in maize to ease shortages and contain pressure on maize flour prices. Millers had pushed for a much larger import window of up to three million tonnes.

At the centre of the latest deal is a September 9, 2026 agreement between Zambia’s Food Reserve Agency (FRA) and Kenyan company Baita Trading Company Limited for up to 540,000 metric tonnes of white, Grade A, non-GMO maize, equivalent to about six million 90-kilogramme bags.

Zambian authorities say the country has a surplus following a bumper harvest of more than 5.1 million tonnes in the 2025/26 season, allowing it to export grain while maintaining domestic supplies.

The deal is significant not only because of its size but also because of the company at its centre.

Baita Trading is a private Kenyan firm represented in Zambia by its director, Martin Kinoti. Kenyan media reports have identified businessman and politician Henry Mwingirwa as the company’s principal shareholder, holding 999 of its 1,000 shares.

Publicly available trade-data records cited by Volza, a global trade data platform, indicate that Baita has previously been involved largely in the importation of alcoholic beverages and other goods, rather than large-scale grain trading. This raises an obvious question: how did a relatively little-known trader come to secure a maize contract of such magnitude?

Granted, Kenya’s laws allow all manner of private traders to import maize, provided the grain meets the required food-safety and quality standards. But that freedom comes with regulatory requirements. Under the Crops Act, 2013 and the Crops (Food Crops) Regulations, 2019, private importers are required to meet registration, certification and documentation requirements. Among these are an import clearance permit from the relevant authorities and evidence that local sources have been exhausted.

That last requirement raises questions in the current case.

Agriculture CS Mutahi Kagwe has projected that Kenya’s 2026 maize production will fall to about 50 million bags. But that is still higher than the 44.8 million bags produced in 2024, when the country did not have a comparable massive duty-free import window. If production is now projected to be higher than it was in 2024, the justification for declaring local supplies exhausted becomes less clear.

Baita had initially indicated that it was prepared to buy 10.8 million 90-kilogramme bags, or roughly 972,000 tonnes, from Zambia, with a further three million bags potentially required later. The eventual agreement, however, covers 540,000 tonnes.

The deal’s pricing has not been publicly disclosed. Zambian reporting indicates the price will be determined at the beginning of each shipment based on prevailing market conditions. A figure of about Sh25.8 billion circulated in Kenyan reporting, but that is an estimate based on prevailing Kenyan retail prices rather than a disclosed contract value. Kagwe did not respond when we sought clarity.

The shipment schedule has also attracted attention. Reports indicate that the 540,000 tonnes will be delivered in six consignments. One Zambian report says 100,000 tonnes will be moved every 90 days, with a final 40,000-tonne consignment. If that schedule holds, deliveries would stretch beyond a single agricultural season.

The imports also sit uneasily alongside President William Ruto’s earlier pledge that Kenya would become self-sufficient in maize.

In 2024, President William Ruto said: “From 2025 we won’t import even a single sack of maize. All the maize will be produced in Kenya.”

Kenya’s maize production, however, has barely changed. The Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) estimates that the country produced 44.8 million 90-kilogramme bags in 2024, equivalent to about 4.03 million tonnes. Production rose only slightly to 45.8 million bags in 2025, or about 4.12 million tonnes, despite the government’s much-publicised subsidised fertiliser programme and seed distribution efforts.

The largely stagnant production has left Kenya—a country of about 57.5 million people, more than 2.6 times Zambia’s 21.9 million, and an economy of about $135.9 billion, nearly five times the size of Zambia’s $28.9 billion—turning to its smaller southern African neighbour for maize.

Zambia is about 2,200 kilometres by road from Nairobi to its capital, Lusaka.

The irony is heightened by Kenya’s continued dependence on imported food commodities. While the government has sought to expand domestic production, maize shortages have repeatedly forced the country to look beyond its borders for supplies.

“I have no issue with the country importing maize if at all it goes towards ensuring food is available to the people and that the price of unga remains stable. But looking at it holistically, it is a tad shameful. What is the Zambian government doing that it is having a surplus, as reported, that the Kenyan government doesn’t do?” says Victor Ali, a maize farmer in Rift Valley.

Ali, who occasionally invests in maize farming, says his heart is no longer in the crop because it is becoming less profitable compared with alternatives such as beans, wheat and potatoes.

He fears the lacklustre attitude of the state towards developing maize production to ensure consistent supply is to blame for repeated disruptions that have either produced shortages or periods of excess.

“We went for government-subsidised fertiliser only to realise that it was in fact stones with zero value on our crops, and we are yet to see heads rolling. The government has not acted on that,” he says of the subsidy that was supplied through the government-mandated agro-dealers designated by the National Cereals and Produce Board (NCPB) depots and Kenya National Trading Corporation (KNTC) stores.

In Zambia, the government’s Farmer Input Support Programme uses an e-voucher model through which participating farmers can choose inputs from registered private agro-dealers rather than being restricted to a single government-selected input. The World Bank says the e-voucher programme reached about 740,000 farmers in 74 districts in 2024/25.

Kenya also subsidises certified seed and fertiliser, although farmers have repeatedly generated complaints owing to the quality and distribution of subsidised inputs.

The two countries also have broadly comparable rain-fed farming systems, although their agricultural environments are not identical. Kenya’s major maize-growing areas include the Rift Valley, Western Kenya and parts of Central Kenya, where altitude and rainfall patterns vary considerably. Zambia’s maize belt has a pronounced rainy season followed by a dry season.

Kenya also has highly fertile volcanic soils in parts of the Rift Valley, while Zambia’s central maize-growing areas contain extensive plateau soils, including weathered soils that can be acidic and relatively deficient in some nutrients, particularly nitrogen.

That notwithstanding, Zambia has recorded a large maize surplus, but at the same time faces a serious food-security challenge.

According to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, about 698,000 Zambians are currently experiencing Crisis-level acute food insecurity or worse. That number is projected to rise to more than 1.2 million between October 2026 and March 2027, driven partly by anticipated El Niño conditions, climate shocks and economic pressures.

Zambian authorities, however, say the country has sufficient maize stocks to meet the needs of vulnerable populations despite the projected deterioration in food security.

In Kenya, critics are questioning whether repeated reliance on imports addresses the underlying problem of domestic production and storage.

Stephen Mutoro of the Consumer Federation of Kenya (COFEK), for example, has questioned why the government is importing maize instead of directing more support towards Kenyan farmers.

“We were told it was about cutting food costs. Fine. Then why import the solution instead of investing it in Kenyan farmers who’ve been asking for exactly that support for years?” he said.

The controversial maize imports from Zambia, beyond Kenya’s traditional East African Community (EAC) trading partners and into the wider COMESA region, may do little to deepen meaningful regional trade, according to economist Alfred Mangula.

“There is little economic sense in importing maize from Zambia, some 2,000 kilometres away, when it can be sourced more cheaply from Tanzania or Uganda. This is more of trade diversion driven by the upcoming Kenyan elections; is someone hunting election campaign money?” Mangula poses. “We are also facing an artificial shortage of milk, and it would not be surprising to see another similar politically driven trade arrangement, with one or two traders taking the lion’s share of the business.”

He argues that such trade arrangements, if driven more by political considerations than market forces, may not be sustainable. “The trade will definitely die like any other political deal,” he says.

Mangula acknowledges that large maize imports could push down the price of maize flour on supermarket shelves, benefiting consumers in the short term. But he warns that lower prices could come at the expense of farmers.

“Farmers will definitely have nowhere to sell what they harvest in the next season if market prices remain low,” he says, arguing that the government must protect local farmers from the effects of a flood of cheap imports.

“Or else the tenderpreneurs would get their plate of Ugali extra full as millions of farmers and their families go hungry.”