Michael Kimari Kigochi is a 57-year-old small-scale coffee farmer in Kiambu, central Kenya.

I have 11 children, because I am a man of the church. My wife doesn't take contraceptives. Three are adults and with their own families and eight others are still with me at my farm. Some of them go to school but it is very difficult to keep them there because I cannot pay school fees for all of them at the same time.

We all depend on a 1.5 acre farm where we have planted coffee, maize and bananas and we keep a cow and goats.

	Independence was only a dream and gradually we began to realise that independence and the new flag was not going to sell our coffee or bring food to our families

Farming is all I know and what I learnt from my father who died when I was still a young man, when we were still ruled by the British colonialists. We survived the Mau Mau rebellion and we sang and danced with joy when we got independence in 1963, believing that we were beginning a new life of prosperity.

It was good in the beginning. The cost of living was not so high even if you earned little money. You were living as a free man in your country. But that was only a dream and gradually we began to realise that independence and the new flag was not going to sell our coffee or bring food to our families.

Hard times

Recently my life has been very hard. In the past, in the mid-1980s, we could take our coffee to the factory, then it would be taken to Kenya Planters and Coffee Union and after three months we would get our money.

	President Moi may be a good man but those who work for him are bad people. They have not been helping poor people like us

We would have money to pay school fees for our children and buy food and other things for our families. Life was okay then. At that time coffee fetched a good price. We could get up to 10 shillings (approximately $0.12) a kilogram. We used to get a bonus three times a year. From that time the prices went down and never recovered.

And now when I sell my coffee I cannot get about five shillings. That's nothing. We are losing a lot.

For milk, things were also better in the past. I could sell a kilogram for 10 or 11 shillings. Even today you get more money from milk than selling coffee. All this time we have been told by government officials that our coffee is first class. But where's the money?

Greedy leaders

I blame our government for what has happened to our life and our farms. We have had local leaders who are greedy and have not helped small farmers like me. They know that in Kenya we don't have oil. Our oil is farming coffee, tea, pyrethrum, vegetables and maize. We have been farming very hard but when you send your produce to market there's no good price for your sweat. When you send your coffee now, you have to wait for six months before you get paid.

President Moi may be a good man but those who work for him are bad people. They have not been helping poor people like us. Ask any other coffee farmer – he will tell you the same story. Look at our roads, schools and hospitals. What do you see? Ruin everywhere. Where is the money going? Into their pockets, of course.

I only hope that the new government will be able to help us. We hope that the new leaders will see our problems and how we have been exploited for so long, and come to our help.

I don't know these opposition leaders or what they can offer us. All my life I have known Kanu (President Moi's party) and the Kanu government. It's in our blood. Kanu is not bad but it's the people who have made Kanu bad. So we are depending on the new man, Uhuru Kenyatta to help us. He is young and when the head of a homestead gets old, he hands over to his son, to the young people.

And if everything gets better, then my children will have a future. They can go to school, get an education, find work and take care of their children when they start their own families.

I just want them to have a new life in a new Kenya. It's not too much to ask.