How mitumba business will shrink

The scale of the economic hit from coronavirus appears to be a moving target as the world grapples with the pandemic. Yet, often, as we plot our way, we are only looking at home, where the real trouble is set to come from overseas. Take, for example, mitumba or second-hand clothes.

This week, there has been much excitement that our mitumba imports have resumed.

It’s a key business in our informal sector, perhaps even the best, until this year. Employing hundreds of importers at Mombasa Port, hundreds more wholesalers at Gikomba market, and tens of thousands of retailers, mitumba has been a big business.

Thus, the ban on mitumba imports from late March hurt a lot of people. But, as it now lifts, the sector will not just jump back to where it began.

For, first off, just as the bales of clothing arrive in tonnes in Kenya and move into a long-established infrastructure of markets and stalls, so they are collected in an equally well-established network in Europe and the USA: that hasn’t been working in 2020.

In the UK, for example, just one charity, the Salvation Army, has more than 5,000 clothing recycling banks placed countrywide, where a large drawer opens and receives bags of donated clothes. Those banks have been closed and locked for months. Other UK charities collect second-hand clothes too, chief among them the British Heart Foundation, Oxfam and Scope: all closed for most of this year.

Moreover, a particularly big player is the Bag2School scheme that since 1999 has paid more than Sh3.6 billion (£27 millioN), at around Sh50 per kilo, to schools for second-hand clothes collected — all of which then get baled up and sent across the world.

SOCIAL DISTANCING

In fact, the UK schools are starting back this week. But will teachers be wanting to handle second-hand clothes even as the pupils must sit apart to ensure social distancing, and the big debate is whether they must wear masks at school.

Who wears mask and stays at a distance and then everyone happily handles their germ-ridden old clothes in the meantime?

For the new rules, Kenyan imports demand fumigation certificates.

But for those collecting the clothes, fumigation from every home isn’t an option and they can get coronavirus too.

Thus, the clothing recycling banks in every town remain sealed, despite the forlorn piles of bags beside them after six months of no collections. Likewise, the country’s charity shops remain mostly closed.

So, no new mitumba supplies this half year and possible until 2021.

In fact, the new rules bring extra costs by requiring smaller and fumigated bales, but the weeks until collections in the West resume ‘as normal’ will mean short supply too, and thus higher prices.

Yet demand is also not where it was. Most Kenyans have lost all or part of their incomes, which has seen buying clothes disappear as a priority. Many more haven’t visited a market for months due to Covid-19.

TOURING MARKETS

In fruit and vegetables, the emptying of the markets has been accompanied by a surge in home deliveries as people cannot do without vegetables.

As the virus finally eases back and even disappears, will families who are now getting vegetables delivered go back to touring markets for them, or has the pandemic created a permanent replacement for our food markets?

And what then of mitumba, once the virus stops?

For now, will allowing imports again see Kenyans immediately return to riffling through clothes also handled on the stall by their fellow buyers?

For sure, with mitumba imports banned, the sector was closed.

But the mistake, perhaps, is to assume that with imports restored it will now be open. For this whole pandemic adds up to rather a fistful more than just our own home bans.