Tea is the economic backbone of both counties and is responsible for the growth and glitter of Kericho town, the economic hub of the South Rift.
But rather than safeguard this legacy and nurture the goose that lays the golden eggs, residents, egged on by utterances of elected leaders, chose the path of destruction that eerily mirrored the invasions of white-owned farms in Zimbabwe some years back.
The police initially seemed to watch the destruction nonchalantly, making someone on social media comment that if it this was happening in Kisumu, the police would shoot first and ask questions later.
The problem between residents and owners of tea estates in the Rift has been boiling under the surface for some time. At face value, it is packaged as rising disquiet over the deployment of tea picking machines by the tea factories. Local politicians and union leaders have consistently maintained that the deployment of these machines either be shelved, or a phased introduction be implemented that does not lead to massive job losses.
There are two major problems with this argument. One, these tea estates are private enterprises and the decision on how to run a private concern relies with the owners and shareholders. In a world where energy costs rise by the day and the global market gets more competitive, business managers have the unenviable task of making production cheaper and more efficient, quite often by use of modern technology.
The second major issue is that no sector of the economy, not anywhere in the world, can delay technology too long. I am sure the youths who went burning property at the tea farms carried along their smartphones, rather than cow horns or smoke signals for communication.
The irony would obviously have been lost on them and their political benefactors, that in a fast-changing world, technology always takes over analogue systems.
A tea company seeking a competitive edge for its production in Kenya has no option but to keep with the trend of other producers in other parts of the world. In fact, if the Kenya Kwanza government was a choir, one of its most famous songs would be the one where they campaigned on the platform of “digital away from analogue” and their promise to make technology a mainstream driver of the economy.
By this measure, you expect the government, or at least its MPs and elected leaders in the two counties, to lead the way in educating the people about possible changes anticipated via the use of technology. They clearly didn’t get the memo.
There is a bigger conversation around this matter, revolving around jobs. The sustainability of casual jobs, like tea picking, doesn’t have a long-term face. Policy makers know this. Union leaders do too.
Campaign manifestos always acknowledge this and politicians on the trail always create rosy blueprints of how the sectors that thrive on casual jobs would be retrained, recalibrated and reviewed to safeguard jobs while keeping up with global patterns. It is once they enter government that memory loss sets in and promises of better days become just that, mere promises.
If politicians in tea growing zones are looking for a real benchmarking tour, I would invite them to visit the towns and trading centres around the plants previously known as Panpaper as well as Nzoia, Sony, Muhoroni, Miwani, Mumias and Chemelil sugar companies.
In their heydays, these were typical giants of industry.
In our childhood, there wasn’t a homestead in Nyanza and Western provinces, where you would miss someone working for one of these companies. The towns around them were buzzing commercial hubs, bringing traders, professionals and agents of nocturnal sin, everyone, for a share of the cake. To many residents, Nairobi was a far-away imagination.
But due to bad policies, marginalisation and politics, these companies collapsed. Many of the previously thriving towns became ghost towns. Families packed and left, many going into depression and dying in godforsaken villages.
In subsequent years, the only thing one heard about these companies was the perennial habit of government sending billions to write off the debts of these plants. Those on the ground wonder where these billions usually go to, because nothing ever changes.
At any rate, trying to revive factories, many of whose milling plants were installed in the 1970s, doesn’t sound very clever without a complete overhaul to begin with. In a civilised world, what has happened to western Kenya with regard to these factories would be classified as economic genocide.
The Kericho and Bomet gangs are playing a very dangerous game, and their enablers probably know but don’t care. Ordinarily, foreigners, as it happened when the Zanu-PF government encouraged the invasion of white farms, will fold their investments and head elsewhere.
The clever mouths in politics who encourage this madness in the belief that residents would take over these plants, soon realise that running a a factory isn’t easy when tenders are allocated to the spouse and mills are managed by incompetent cousins and sons.
There is of course the possibility that the political class in the locality want these foreigners to leave, hoping that new players would extend them some shareholding or that whatever goodies come out of these glittering factories can reach them too. However, destroying an existing factory in order to negotiate better deals with a new entrant often ends up only one way, doom.
After the collapse of erstwhile economic giants in form of crops like sugar, maize, pyrethrum, wheat, cashew nuts and with coffee tittering on the brink, tea was left as the last frontier of the country’s agricultural and export base.
It has been a relatively peaceful sector, albeit one where brokers and tea auction gurus still fleece the farmer dry. But images of tea farms going up in flames, or illegal harvesting of private tea by gangs, will only help paint a pessimistic forecast of tea heading in the direction of its cousin crops.
In this disturbing forecast, it will not just be the tea-picking jobs going. It will be all the jobs within the industry, as well as the economic welfare and wellbeing of major towns like Kericho and several counties.
Many multinational companies only thrive in this country through efficient management and a keen eye on the bottomline. Even though jealousy over the success of these multinationals probably eat our politicians in their sleep, we must not allow incitement of youths to drive away investors.
If anything, we should send elected officials into these multinationals to learn a thing or two about proper management and efficient systems, in the hope that they can replicate these in government, which obviously would amount to a huge miracle.
At the very least, we can try, so that jealousy over the success of others doesn’t destroy the country’s business institutions, whether private or public. That benchmarking tour is long overdue.
