Why politics and sugar have always produced a toxic mix

Sugar farmers protest after the closure of a sugar firm in Kwale. The storm in the sector has been building for more than five decades. [File, Standard]

Reports about daylight bribery in Parliament to shoot down a report on irregular sugar importation did not come as a surprise.

Kiambu Woman Rep Gathoni wa Muchomba told Parliament that some legislators accepted between Sh10,000 and Sh30,000 in bribes dished out in toilet blocks to shoot down a damning report on the sugar imports.

Severalof her colleagues who had also acknowledged that there was rampant bribery in the corridors of the House beat a hasty retreat when they were challenged to prove their allegations.

Influential traders, who are also huge financiers in politics, had irregularly imported sugar worth billions of shillings, were suspected to have dished out the cash to have a House committee report tweaked in their favour.

From what had happened in the past, little was expected out of the joint committees that investigated the fraudulent sugar imports because all previous probes have ended in naught.

Similar inquiry

In a similar inquiry on the collapse of the sugar industry three years ago, the MPs made vague recommendations in their report and failed to indict any culprits despite spending millions of taxpayers’ shillings.  

Some members of the investigating committee alleged massive bribery. This cause the bitter split that would later play out when the report was presented before Parliament.

MP Benjamin Washiali (Mumias East), who was a member of the committee, described the eventual report as “rubbish”, claiming it had been heavily doctored after huge bribes were paid to members.

John Baraza, the secretary general of a sugar farmers’ lobby group, said sugar politics were at the heart of high poverty levels among cane growers.

“We have been impoverished by sugar cane farming and our leaders are the biggest culprits,” he said.

Mumias Sugar was specifically a target for the fraudulent imports, where its counterfeit products would be on shelves long after its factory stopped running owing to frequent breakdowns.

As the miller struggled with maintenance, the dues to farmers kept piling up as cash flow dried up.

Politicians used the opportunity to dangle funds to settle outstanding dues and meet maintenance costs in return for votes in the last election.

Funds from the National Treasury started arriving, but in small amounts, just enough for the political class to fool voters that they had the interests of farmers at heart.

Mumias had requested a Sh3.2 billion bailout at the start of last year. It only received Sh500 million just weeks to the elections, which was quickly swallowed up by unpaid  salaries and farmers’ arrears.

But the money was a big enough tool to win voters’ support.

The Opposition was, on the other hand, promising a complete overhaul of the sugar sector, but with an eye to the same target - votes.

It has been a steady decline for the industry that at its peak employed over 600,000 people. Experts say things started going south when political cronies started overseeing public sugar mills.

The politicians were central in the ejection of professional sugar company managing agents.

Peter Wanyande termed entrusting foreign management firms with public sugar firms as a “hot political issue” because politicians wanted their cronies appointed.

Besides, expatriate managers were earning significantly higher salaries than the local counterparts, informing in part the push to edge them out.

According to Prof Wanyande, basing appointments on political considerations rather than merit meant that the best minds were edged out in the management of sugar mills.

“One of the consequences of this was that the managers feel that their duty is to serve the interests of the State, not those of the farmer,” Wanyande wrote in a journal titled Management Politics in Kenya’s Sugar Industry.

As a result, the morale of public sugar firm employees hit rock bottom. They were not even sure they would keep their jobs.

“Thus they turn and treat the company as mere sources of personal capital accumulation,” said the don who teaches at the University of Nairobi.

Political tool

Way before the sugar factories came to be, sugar cane farming was already a political tool. The Nyanza sugar belt was not by accident.

Pundits point out that soon after the fallout between President Jomo Kenyatta and his then deputy, Oginga Odinga, the State hatched a plan to roll out massive sugar cane growing and processing in the region.

The State acquired huge portions of land around Muhoroni, where smallholder farmers were settled and given plots to farm cane, whose prices it started regulating.

The State then had a tight grip on the fate of millions of sugar farmers. Distribution of the finished sugar was also the mandate of yet another parastatal, the Kenya National Trading Corporation.

The liberalisation of the sugar industry, which started in 1994, sounded the death knell for local farmers, who were ill-equipped to compete with cheap imports.

By then, the sector was in chaos. Two private firms, West Kenya and Butali, were setting up factories without developing their own cane, as required by the law.

Protests by Mumias Sugar that the two were encroaching on its catchment were ignored.

The rest, as they say, is history.