The much-touted reforms at the Kenya Tea Development Agency Holdings Limited (KTDA) is dead.
Tea farmers and factories are crying over the mistreatment and runaway corruption by the new directors.
Kenya leads the world in black tea exports and the KTDA is at the centre of it all.
When reforms in the sector started in earnest by the Uhuru Kenyatta regime, it sought to rid farmers of middlemen and comment that had saddled them in debt and poverty.
KTDA was a rot.
However, the more things change, the more they remain the same.
It is now emerging that the new directors that took office to spearhead the reforms are no better.
The looting game has begun and some factories managed by the agency are on the brink of collapse.
Meanwhile, directors are getting rich in the melee.
‘KTDA itself is being looted through numerous unnecessary meetings where directors pocket huge allowances instead of working for the farmers,’ a source wrote.
The above mismanagement means that farmers and factories get nothing as they sink deeper into debt, deprivation and poverty.
As directors enjoy easy money, employees and creditors suffer.
Employees are made to work overtime without any additional pay. Threats and intimidation are the order of the day.
The new looting has meant that staff and farmers in the know don’t want anything to do with the new directors.
The belief in a new revamped and working KTDA has waned and the corruption and mismanagement of the past is even more brazen.
Subversion of changes
A powerful and ruthless cartel controls the tea sector.
Tea farmers across Kenya are beginning to suffer under the newly appointed KTDA directors, through crooked pricing and open exploitation.
Like in the past as shown below, farmers are getting the short end of the stick.
Of the 200 million kilograms of tea that KTDA processed annually, 60% is sold at Mombasa Tea Auction on Tuesdays all year round. The other 40% was handled through private arrangements where certain well-placed players were given wealth on a silver platter.
One of those cartels that cons farmers through a crooked, opaque and corrupt price discovery is KTDA’s marketing department through Chai Trading Limited, and Lipton.
The two entities buys over 100 million Kilogrammes of tea from KTDA annually.
Treatment of Chai Trading Limited as a non-entity of KTDA was the fraud in itself.
Big multinationals and Chai Trading suppress the auction prices by bidding rock bottom prices. So brokers are unable to sell them the tea below reserve prices.
Therefore, when the multinationals and Chai Trading fail to get tea at rock-bottom extortion prices, they go to Marketing Department on Wednesdays where they are offered the tea at rock-bottom prices.
Chai Trading Limited deals mainly in premium tea grown in the region known as east of Rift Valley: Kiambu, Muranga, Nyeri, Kirinyaga, Embu and Meru.
The tactics used by the ousted KTDA cartel directors, of reaping where they do not sow, is back in full swing.
If the situation continues, farmers across the country will uproot their tea plantations in protests over KTDA and there will be no boasting, by the govt, about how Kenya tea is international.
This must change.
Arrest and charge the new directors, and appoint a caretaker committee which should serve for 3 years to oversee true reforms.
The new and the old directors belong to Kamiti Maximum Prison.
The same rot that is now past in the tea sector is still alive in the coffee sector.
Early this year, Coffee cartels raised Sh15 million to bribe various govt officials and judges to scuttle reforms.
Through a law firm Manyonge Wanyama & Associates LLP, coffee farmers continue to toil for nought.
The tea sector must not degenerate into this.
Arrest and charge the new directors, and appoint a caretaker committee which should serve for 3 years to oversee true reforms. The new and the old directors belong to Kamiti Maximum Prison.
