Farmers should eat bonuses without apology

Half of my days on earth was spent in the lush scenic sugarcane fields of the Muhoroni sugar belt overlooking the Nandi Escarpment, on the ridges of Aldai and Tinderet constituencies. My father – a no nonsense government officer posted to sugar companies around the Lake Victoria basin to help balance their books and mentor young revenue clerks – was always a man with a crystal sense of public duty.

Kisumu County is blessed with seven constituencies with diverse geographical physiology. Rice farmers fighting ravenous quelea birds in the low lying Nyando basin would wish to swap places with sugarcane farmers losing sleep over decaying mills and diminishing government support, while tourists visiting the scenic beaches along Lake Victoria often decry limited time to explore the mysterious rock formations deep west in the Seme prefecture.

In between boyhood mischief and parental grip growing up along the Muhoroni-Mamboleo stretch, I had the life changing benefit of studying the clockwork relationship that existed between sugarcane farmers, agricultural extension staff attached to the mills, and factory employees who only interacted with their suppliers at the point of payment, usually in their cool offices manned by hawk eyed security.

The sociocultural ecosystem around Miwani Sugar Company – where I cut my teeth as a career participant observer of intriguing human behaviour – might be dead and buried, and we may not know whom to hang for killing the goose that laid my family’s golden egg; but this week, when the debate about sugar bonuses came back to my television screens, I flashed back to my innocent days fighting sugarcane farmers and company security for juicy cane through rat holes that led to dead ends.

If there is a topic I can discuss the whole day without breaking a sweat, it is this one involving beneficiaries from proceeds of sugar cane farming.

Kisumu County is known for many things, but sugarcane farming has increasingly become the least of them; and wrongly so. In the belly of Muhoroni constituency lies Kenya’s pioneer sugar company, established in 1922 by the Devji Hindocha family as an offshoot of Kakira Sugar Company in Uganda.

State-owned sugar companies

By 1946, records tell us, Miwani was chewing out in excess of 20,000 tons of sugar eaten up from its vast nucleus estate originally surveyed at 15,000 acres – the only sugar company in Kenya to produces its own sugar from its own farms.

At the peak of its production, Miwani employed upwards of 4,200 technical staff, ranging from boiler operators, agricultural extension workers, hydraulic machine engineers, to industrial chemical analysts.

Miwani Estate Primary School – originally Miwani Asian School – once a preserve of children of non-African elite families, topped the national examinations charts and was the envy of every child around the hood. In the vicinity was also Miwani Nursing Home, a 260-bed capacity hospital serving the managerial class and their families.

I checked government records two weeks ago, and to my surprise there are only five government-owned sugar companies in their books (Mumias, Nzoia, SoNy, Muhoroni and Chemelil). Of these, only Mumias can be said to have damaged lungs that can still survive on their own with less laborious ventilator support.

So this week, when President William Ruto visited the Nabongo Mumia kingdom to meet sugarcane farmers at their point of need, questions were asked where he got the money to spray out bonuses to farmers who had been waiting for the second coming of Jesus to earn from their sweat. In Kisumu County, where the bulk of the sugar factories originate from, farmers could only smell the aroma from their radio sets.

Those who say money is a bad thing have never interacted with those who only dream of money. There is no reality, anywhere in the world where money is frowned upon as a medium of exchange. Even in the olden days, when the concept of paper money had not evolved to minting status, those with cowrie shells and ivory disks were considered the society’s elite.

Loss of livelihoods

There are farmers in the Muhoroni sugar belt who have never felt the texture of bank notes since Miwani Sugar Company went to be with the Lord more than 24 years ago, let alone feel the warmth of comfort that comes with receiving bonus dividend from cane delivery to the mill. And they are not alone.

Many families in this country have suffered from the adverse effects of loss of livelihoods occasioned by poor government policies, hostile business environment, public sector corruption, or all of the above. There is need to be sensitive to the immediate needs of this category of victims who, through no fault of their own, find themselves fighting for their lives under extreme economic conditions. It’s the humane thing to do for a country whose citizens pride themselves in being conservative Christians.

As we wait for the last word between the two bickering groups on the source of the funds the bonuses given to Mumias sugarcane farmers might have been dredged from, allow me to make a charitable request – on my own behalf and that of all sugarcane farmers attached to Muhoroni, Chemelil and Miwani Sugar Companies – that the bonuses be channeled to a suspense account to be withdrawn by the farmers mentioned above. Since 2001, farmers in the three companies mentioned above have been waiting for someone to mention that thing called bonuses, even if in passing.

Unlike other proud farmers who can only accept payment after being informed in detail where their dues are sourcing from, farmers in the three companies above have no preconditions whatsoever to the mandarins at Kilimo House crunching numbers in the direction of settling outstanding farmer arrears.

We will accept anyone coming to us with news – any news, for we have waited for a lifetime for the white smoke and all we have seen are that from the Sistine Chapel. We will be grateful if our counterparts in Mumias could share with us the good news they received this week, in the spirit of sector collegiality and familial comradeship, as they wait for the debate to die a natural death. We will remember them when we get to Paradiso.