BARASA: Sacking state sugar millers staff cruel, against the law

Workers at Chemelil Sugar protest over their July salary arrears /FAITH MATETE

This directive has emerged at a time of outcry from leaders, sugarcane farmers, factory employees, and other stakeholders over the government’s decision to lease the corporations.

It comes at a time of ridiculously high prices and without the public and stakeholder participation required before making leasing decisions in ‘suspect boardrooms’. A reminder: these entities belong to the public, not the Executive.

In fact, declaring redundancies as directed by the Ministry of Agriculture to the lessors of Nzoia, Chemilil, Muhoroni, and South Nyanza Sugar companies is cruel and in total violation of the labour laws.

Factory management has already issued redundancy-termination notices. As many as 5,000 workers, or more, will lose their jobs in October, according to the directive by Agriculture PS Paul Ronoh. They are required to reapply.

It covers workers and farmers.

The affected employees are state employees’ who by law must be given tangible reasons why their services are declared redundant and told their terminal benefits, including severance pay for what period, amongst many other requirements.

To reach that decision on redundancy, the law requires that unions must be involved at each and every stage, the most critical factor being stipulations of their Collective Bargaining Agreements with the affected corporations.

That aside, the law is also clear that agreements with the leasing parties must clearly stipulate that employees must be given first priority in retaining their positions. Their years in service must be taken into consideration, even if they have to get new contracts with the new leasing entities.

In this case, the facts indicate that all these requirements were never taken into consideration by the Ministry of Agriculture, and worker’s unions completely ignored them. The most critical question is why? To serve whose interests?

As a matter of fact, the unions and leaders in the affected areas, notably Kisumu Governor Anyang Nyong’o, have gone silent [Nyong’o recently protested]. They have not commented about protests against these illegal developments that were covertly orchestrated, engineered and executed by top government operatives.

The immediate drastic consequences, apart from the immediate impact on jobless employees without any hope for the future or any income at all, mean that those directly and indirectly dependent on them will not be spared. They won’t be able to feed their children and immediate relatives at home, nor will they be able to pay school fees and meet many other daily survival demands.

Many local businesses involving millions of Kenyans, which for decades depended on those employees as their lifeline, will most likely be consigned to oblivion by these cruel orders from top government operatives.

Ironically, the operatives of the same government led by President William Ruto have repeatedly been widely quoted publicly in mainstream and social media as saying they were committed not only creating tens of millions of new jobs but also ensuring job security for those employed.

Who is fooling whom on the question of redundancies? Consider the context of the highly sensitive sugar industry plagued annually by the nightmare of illicit imports of cheap sugar, high costs of production and the endless sugarcane poaching crisis.

It must not be forgotten that of all these state-owned milling corporations, the only sterling performer, in which government has a 20 per cent stake, was the giant Mumias Sugar. It was salvaged from collapse over its multi-billion-shilling debt accumulated by the Sarrai Group when the corporation leased it from the receiver manager.

By the time it went under receivership, since its establishment in 1976, it was the only sugar milling state corporation making annual profits and paying taxes to the national exchequer. This status led to it being privatised at the Nairobi Securities Exchange.

To date, the giant operation with 1,913 employees (about 30 per cent are old workers) has revived towns that were decaying with collapsed business, right from Mumias, Shibale, Harambee, Ekero, Mayoni, Shianda and many others.

What many Kenyans are asking is why the Ministry of Labour is loudly silent on this matter when, as a matter of fact, redundancies of state or private entity workers are under its mandate.  That mandate protect the country’s workers is enshrined in the Constitution.

Kenyans also are questioning the silence and inaction of Francis Atwoli, Secretary General of the Central Organisation of Trade Unions and veteran leader of the Kenya Plantation and Agriculture Workers Union (KPAWU). Where is his well-known abrasive rhetoric in addressing this critical national problem that will consign millions of Kenyans to abject poverty because wrong decisions?

Unless the Ministry of Agriculture revokes it redundancy orders to the leased state-owned milling corporations ¾ and directly involves the public in all matters concerning these corporations ¾ chances are that those who have leased them will have no peace for the 30-year leases they covertly have been granted.