Tea farmers want caretaker committee to oversee KTDA polls

Tea farmers have threatened to boycott upcoming Kenya Tea Development Agency (KTDA) elections unless they are conducted by a caretaker committee.

The Kenya Union of Small Scale Tea Owners (Kussto) is demanding that elections must be held in conformity with the one man one vote principle and be held in factories.

Kussto Secretary-General Kagondu Karanu said failure to heed to the demands will result in a national tea picking boycott that he called off last Thursday.

He lamented that “the authorities are giving KTDA too much playing space to a point where tea farmers are getting frustrated that the government appears to be inferior to the agency and its power grip shenanigans.”

“We want to make it very clear that we will not participate in elections presided over by KTDA. We have identified KTDA’s current office bearers as the main problem and that is why there is this raging war in the tea sector,” he told Nation by phone.

Court ruling

Mr Mugwe Njunu — representing a lobby group from Mt Kenya — told the Nation that last Thursday’s court ruling that gave KTDA the go ahead to hold the elections “did not give the agency a criminal license to now go ahead and hold them in bushes and in lodgings as has been the case over the years”.

In the ruling by Justice Anthony Mrima, the agency won against Agriculture and ministry and Agriculture Food Authority (AFA) who jointly wanted the polls temporarily suspended awaiting the enactment of legal structures under to guide the exercise.

Mr Njunu said “the elections are about farmers picking their representatives in KTDA but not KTDA picking managers on our behalf”.

He said the articles of association that are supposed to guide the elections in the absence of the proposed tea reforms have always been trashed by KTDA’s top brass “and this is the import of their opposition to the reform agenda in the sector since they want to continue putting into office directors who can only sing the cartel-like song that blatantly steals from farmers”.

KTDA’s list

Former Makomboki Tea Factory director Kamau Kaguma claimed that KTDA has already drawn a list of people it wants to be directors. He further claimed that the agency intends to hold ambush elections in undeclared venues to endorse them “and then rush to court to seek injunctions barring farmers from challenging the fraud”.

Mr Karanu accused the Council of Governors (CoG) of applying double standards in the raging tea reforms debate.

“The governors have openly lied to the world that they have not been involved in the formulation of the Munya tea reforms and the Tea Bill now in Parliament. We all know what makes majority of our elected leaders to side with KTDA to a point they are not afraid to lie,” he said.

He said the CoG wrote a letter to Kussto — Ref: COG/6/48/Vol:11/34 — dated March 30, 2017 acknowledging receipt of several memorandums on behalf of tea farmers for use as a resource in the ongoing engagements with actors in formulating the Tea Bill and the reforms.

“The council notes that most of the issues (in the memorandums) were articulated by farmers and interventions proposed in the Tea Task Force Report of 2016. The implementation of the report is in progress and both the national and county governments are committed to implementing the report to address the challenges faced by the small scale tea farmers in the country,” reads the letter.

CoG not side-lined

Mr Karanu said the spirit in the letter does not portray CoG as having been side-lined and wondered why the governors are opposing the reforms.

The tea reforms taskforce Chairman Irungu Nyakera said that so far, there are two factions in the debate — those who support KTDA to “entrench itself deeper in enslaving tea farmers and the patriotic legion that seeks to reverse the servitude”.

“Any time you hear or read anything to do with tea, judge for yourselves what platform is being advanced between that of enslaving and that of liberation…But KTDA must be told clearly that it will fail in its schemes,” he said.

Mr Nyakera said tea bonus has formed a clear pattern of a downward trajectory, falling consistently from Sh50 to a low of 9.30 cents this year.

“As farmers continue to get poorer every year of toiling, the big fish of KTDA continue to swim in money withheld from the farmers…Money they do not even know what to do with, giving it out for free to shaky banks to sink with and sparing much more to fund political support and media propaganda,” said Moffat Mbote, a tea farmer who is also an accountant.