Workers at the Thwake Multipurpose Dam site on the border of Kitui and Makueni counties Sunday downed their tools protesting a delay in their April salaries.
Tens of striking machine operators, truck drivers and hundreds of general labourers braved attempts by armed police officers to kick them out of the dam site even as officials at China Gezhouba Group Company Limited, the company tasked with delivering the Sh64 billion project, pleaded with them to resume work.
“Many of us are parents with children in school. We are supposed to take our children back to school tomorrow. Yet we are broke. We have not been paid for more than 45 days. Police officers are ejecting us from the dam site without telling us where we should go when we are broke. We have no money to pay for our rented houses. We are devastated,” a striking Thwake Dam worker told Nation on condition of anonymity to avoid being victimised.
“Talk is rife that the Chinese company will also not be able to afford the May salaries. Our bosses have pleaded with us to bear with the situation but we have defied them and decided to down tools to make our voice heard,” another worker told the Nation in an interview.
Attempts by the Nation to get a comment from the China Gezhouba Group Company Limited bosses were futile.
They were said to be holed up in a meeting over the strike that had also gotten government officials concerned.
A statement posted by managers of the Chinese company on the main gate of the Thwake Dam project site blames the national government for the delay in salaries.
“The delay in the payment of March/April salaries has been caused by the current financial crisis in the government of Kenya. Whereby payment to the company has not been made for a long time. The employer/company is therefore not able to facilitate your salary payment on the 5th as it has done before. We deeply apologise for this inevitable situation and kindly ask all employees to be patient with us as we purpose to solve this inconvenience. We greatly value your work and we will pay you at the earliest convenience,” reads a part of the statement seed by the Nation.
A Ministry of Water and Irrigation official privy to the strike exuded confidence work would resume.
“I am sure the government will give the contractor money this week,” he told Nation in confidence as protocol bars him from commenting on the Vision 2030 project. Thwake Multipurpose Dam project is the biggest water project by President William Ruto’s administration in the region. In the latest visit to the project site, Water and Irrigation Cabinet Secretary Alice Wahome announced the extension of the deadline for the completion of the first part of the project, which entails setting up the water reservoir, to February next year.
“We shall not extend the deadline again,” she said.
The dam is designed to address water woes in the semi-arid region and provide water for use at the upcoming Konza Tecnocity.
