A farmer plucking tea.
Generally speaking, fertiliser is a grossly underrated catalyst of agrarian miracles.
Subsidised fertiliser, in particular, is the most inspired form of productive magic, igniting spectacularly explosive escalation in yields wherever crop comes in touch with it.
This is how villagers all over the place, from Meru and Kirinyaga to Bomet and Nandi briefly abandoned their toil and substituted placards on which the irate inscription “Must Go!” were appended to proper nouns, for their baskets, hoes and pruning knives.
In a manner of speaking, they had become victims of their hard work and success, as well as problematic governance at the tea factory level.
The pervasive umbrage was instigated by great expectations, given that leaf production has been on the steady rise ever since the subsidised, reformulated fertiliser became universally accessible due to digitally coordinated farmer registration and input distribution logistics.
Instead of more “kgs” translating to more money on the payslip, the opposite occurred, and the disappointment was devastating.
At least 680,000 of us cumulatively delivered 570 metric tonnes of tea through 54 factories, an increase of 32 million in a single year.
Unfortunately, not all the processed tea made its way to the world's tea cups and, in fact, over 100,000 metric tonnes of the good stuff remain stuck at the warehouses down at Mombasa with the tea auction’s infrastructure seemingly overwhelmed.
Consequently, the ministry of agriculture has had to intervene rather robustly, mobilising various mechanisms to expedite the sale of outstanding stock, and designating a task-force to formulate a strategy to manage the present glut and avoid its future recurrence.
Obviously, there exist additional facets to grower disenchantment, among which are high production costs and loans taken by factories to pay growers when tea sales had underperformed.
This, in a nutshell, comprises the primary set of phenomena which explicate the indiscriminate inimical inflexion of grower incomes in the face of a categorically hopeful grower performance.
In other words, these elements account for the collapse in earnings for every tea factory without exception.
As the Nilotes observe, we share sunlight, but not homes and as Tolstoy sums it up; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Notwithstanding the observed ubiquitous diminution of revenues, abysmal disparities nevertheless subsist between what growers in different factories were ultimately paid.
Therefore, after accounting for all common determinants, we the growers of green leaf are reduced to a state of furious perplexity, when we see with our very own ears, and hear with our very own eyes, that those of us who delivered their leaf to Gitugi tea factory earned Sh53 per kilogram, and those who delivered to Chinga took home Sh50 per kilogramme, while those who delivered their leaf to Kaptumo made away with Sh29.
Ceteris paribus, our earnings should be in the same neighbourhood, but as matters stand, one would be forgiven for imagining that we delivered noxious leaf like, say, olea welwitschia instead of camelia sinensis. It is an ineluctable fact that these dispiriting disparities emphatically indicate underlying problems of a more malignant order.
I suggest that the hierarchy of respective earnings offers a reliable index of each factory's conformity with best governance and management practices.
It is clear that many factories are run with an exemplary sense of collective responsibility and transparency, as well as rigorous accountability for performance.
It is also equally clear that others are mismanaged with reckless disregard, with growers expected to take whatever they are offered without question.
For instance, the growers of Thumaita in Kirinyaga took to the rural access roads because they had been paid Sh46 against a promise by management to ensure payments of Sh60. This is a more encouraging accountability problem that that of Mogogosiek in Bomet, where growers so bitterly protested desultory payments of Sh20 that one grower was shot dead.
In Kaptumo, growers petitioned the factory management for a proper explanation and, after a long wait, received an atrociously condescending, evasive yet verbose reply which explained, inter alia:
“There is transparency and accountability in factory running costs together with all deductions and retention made on grower funds. This is because the factory financial records are maintained electronically by professionally qualified, competent and experienced staff under the supervision of KTDA-MS ltd, the Managing Agent.
This is in accordance to the Management Agreement. Financial statements are presented to the Board every quarter to review, discuss and adopt. The same are audited by an External Auditor appointed by the shareholders. Audited financial statements are presented for deliberation by the shareholders during an AGM. The shareholders retain the AGM booklets which contain Financial Statements for reference.”
According to Kaptumo Tea Factory Co. Ltd, this sufficiently furnishes the whys and wherefores for paying us KShs 29 for a kilogram of leaf delivered to them, when our counterparts of Gitugi rue the considerably more preferable disappointment of KShs 53, against about KShs 57 last year. A friend from Baragoi sums up such situations concisely thus: ”Ero, iko shida manyatta.”
