The Bill, popularly known as the Wangwe Bill 2022, which is sponsored by Navakholo MP Emmanuel Wangwe.
Recently the Bill was passed in the National Assembly before going to the Senate for final approval. Later, President William Ruto will sign it into law, an act may salvage the country’s tattered sugar sector.
There are concerns that financially powerful individuals want to manipulate some of the senators to amend or doctor the proposed law to suit their individual interests at the expense of those of the nation.
In case they succeed in securing the billionaires’ wishes, it means that the Bill will be thrown back to the National Assembly, where chances are high that it will die considering the kind of Parliament the country has and possible death to the sugar industry.
What the billionaires want is the zoning of sugarcane farming as per individual processing factories against a free market for the raw sugarcane.
It is this kind of thinking that led to the widespread sugarcane poaching crisis that saw the collapse of sugarcane growing in huge areas and the subsequent collapse of the giant miller Mumias Sugar Company, among other cane millers.
The whole cane poaching mess erupted soon after the Rai Group under Jaswant Rai bought West Kenya, now Kabras Millers, from the Biku Patel family – a miller did not have any substantive contracted sugarcane farmers to supply it with the raw material.
A recent classic example why the Rai Group is determined to use its financial might to poach sugarcane in a purportedly free market of un-zoned regime was the impounding of the group’s more than 20 tractor trailers in Narok county which had gone on a cane poaching spree. The cane in question belonged to farmers contracted to Transmara Sugar Company.
The area is hundreds of kilometres away from the Rai Group’s factories in Western and Nyanza regions, and that is why the Senate should not be compromised or influenced to tamper with the Wangwe Bill 2022, but only improve on it for the President’s signature.
The entire community of sugarcane farmers and millers in the former Western and Nyanza provinces heavily supported the zoning practice. They regions argue that that's the best way for their survival of sugarcane production instead of a free market for raw cane which can be manipulated by a single dominating group.
The Rai Group wants the latter.
There are many other critical issues that the Bill covers, which mean the sugar sector’s lifeline like the introduction of the Kenya Sugar Board, the Sugar Development Levy, the Kenya Sugar Research Institute and the Sugar Development Fund, which are all critical to enable the badly impoverished cane farmers start producing the crop.
The journey for this proposed law has been tough, rough, long and arduous since the Western Development Initiative Association petitioned Parliament over the decayed and dying state of the country’s sugar industry in a document titled, “Crisis Facing the Sugar Industry.”
At one time the Speaker of the last Parliament Justin Muturi who is currently the Attorney General was forced to personally intervene when it emerged that some members of then Agriculture committee had been compromised.
According to the Wangwe Bill, the stewardship of the sugar industry by the Agriculture and Food Authority has been infective since 2013 since the introductions of the Crops Act, which effectively swallowed up the Sugar Act.
It documents that the authority has contributed to non-payment of farmers by public sugar companies, increased costs of sugar production, affected land acreage under sugar, triggered lack of markets for sugar and failed to control imports and exports of sugar. There has also been poor management of sugar companies and lack of research and cane development initiatives.
It adds that every license shall, unless earlier revoked, expire on June 30 following the date of issue, it is also seeking to impose strict rules on the sugar import business which continues to wreak havoc not only on the country’s sugar industry, but also the market.
The Sugar Bill 2022 further seeks to reinstate the Sugar Act which was repealed through the enactment of the Crops Act, 2013. That is why the Senate is on the spot, over the same if some members are compromised to manipulate and tamper with the Wangwe Bill, 2022.
Effectively if enacted, the Bill will bring back the country’s dead Sugar Development Programmes and that is why zoning becomes paramount, since sugarcane farmers contracted to millers in their respective zones will be empowered.
It is a well-known fact that sugarcane production in the country is very expensive and an extremely limited number of farmers can afford to grow and sell it on a free market right from land preparation, husbandry, harvests, transport to milling.
Indeed, hundreds of thousands of smallholder farmers have abandoned farming the crop, leaving the sugar industry to near total collapse, with millers having no sugarcane to process and the country flooded with illicit sugar imports enriching a few dealers.
The only most notable development is the fact that since the Sarrai Group was awarded the lease to revive Mumias Sugar, it has planted more than 2, 205 acres of sugarcane in an area where the farmers had literally stopped planting the crop and destroying its former sugarcane plantations.
It is from this background that President Ruto had to intervene by ordering Jaswant Rai to withdraw cases against the giant miller Mumias Sugar Company in endless legal battles financed by the Rai Group with interest to take over and become a monopoly in the sugar industry.
The author is a journalist and media consultant
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