BARASA: Historic cane bonus and challenges to overcome

The awarding of cash to sugarcane farmers contracted to the giant Mumias Sugar Limited, formerly Mumias Sugar Company, is a historic development.

This is the first time the farmers are benefitting from such windfall since the establishment of the sugar industry in the country in the 1940s.

The farmers who received the windfall from President William Ruto during a presidential function at the Mumias Sugar factory complex grounds had been supplying the raw material over a period of one year.

It emerged during the function that the cash awards would be maintained as an annual event. This is to ensure farmers reap bonuses for their sweat to grow the raw material for the miller.

It is a well-known fact that for the past decades, tea and coffee farmers have been annually smiling to the bank after being awarded such bonuses.

The bonuses are usually paid to the farmers on top of the cash they are paid by the processors for the crop delivered for processing, packaging and selling to consumers.

This development in the sugar industry comes at a time when tens if not hundreds of thousands sugarcane farmers in the former provinces of Western, Nyanza and Coast, including parts of the north Rift Valley, have abandoned farming of the raw material.

This is because of high production costs, lack of a sugar development fund, low payments for the crop delivered per tonne and delayed payments.

The worst affected miller for more than 20 years is Mumias Sugar.

The miller used to produce half of the country’s annual sugar requirements.

It’s also the only miller with ultra-modern diffuser technology factory to process its sugarcane supplies that were worsened by rampant poaching from its contracted farmers.

Mumias Sugar has since late 2022 when it resumed production after endless legal battles that had grounded its operations, paid out more than Sh60 million in cess with about Sh30 million going to Kakamega county, Sh20 million to Bungoma and Sh10 million to Busia, where the company sources its sugarcane.

It is expected that with the emergence of bonus awards, hundreds of sugarcane farmers who had stopped producing the crop will be motivated to go back to production.

The other critical factor is the immediate payment of monies due to the farmers for the crop delivered per tonne.

During the awarding of bonuses, President Ruto also declared that his government would ensure that stateowned millers such as Nzoia, Sony, Chemilil, and Muhoroni perform well enough to start paying bonuses to their contracted farmers.

Other critical issues that need immediate addressing include drastic reduction of sugarcane production costs, eradication of the sugarcane-poaching crisis and the implementation of highly efficient and effective sugarcane development programmes.

Others are the introduction of high sucrose content and fast maturing seed cane and ensuring the strict enforcement of zoning requirements by all the millers.

For Mumias Sugar, the other critical issue is making operational ethanol production to start running. President Ruto told farmers that the production would be in action after three months.

The only challenge is the claims by an investor who years ago before Mumias ran into legal roadblock that he bought the ethanol production facility.

The ethanol production facility, the sugar production unit and the electricity production are co-joined, with the central factor being sugar production triggering off the production of the other two.

Therefore, there is no way some outside private or public entity can claim any of these single entities from the central factor and hope to stay into production.

Where will they get the raw material because these linkages cannot be broken off? Perhaps the worst enemy of millers in the country, leave alone Mumias Sugar, are greedy politicians who hardly champion the interests of the cane farmers’ interests.

In fact, over the last two or three decades, not a single politician has articulated the interests of farmers.

The politicians’ virulent involvement in the industry has been responsible for the sorry state of the miller.

This was clearly demonstrated at the Mumias function when some of them financed by the greedy investors sent their hooligans to set fire on the company’s sugarcane even before the President’s military chopper took off.

For cane farmers to succeed, this will highly depend on the governing regulations being crafted by the new Kenya Sugar Board following the enactment of the Sugar Act into law.

This brings the KSB acting CEO Jude Chesire into focus to bring the country’s sugar industry back to its former glory after decades of corruption, greed and abnormal profits.

By Joseph Barasa, a journalist and media consultant