“A deadly threat to prospective investors in future”
Endless vicious legal battles have delayed the commissioning of the more than Kshs. 4.6 billion Busia Sugar Industries (BSI) sugar factory for more than a year.
The commissioning of the factory was supposed to be done last year in May by President Uhuru Kenyatta, but as we go to press that remains a pipedream as the sugar industry regulator has thrown the spanner in the works.
The Agriculture Food and Fisheries Authority’s (AFFA) sugar directorate threw the spanners in the works recently when it gazetted a notice calling for objections from people opposed to the establishment of the new factory yet it is the same directorate then Kenya Sugar Board (KSB) which licensed the construction after getting its clearance and other government agencies.
The Directorates notice read: “Any objections to the processed grant of license with respect to the applicant should be lodged in writing with the Agriculture and Food Authority within 14 days from date of this notice.”
This brings in the question who is fooling who? What intrigues are going on behind all these business? What role is its arch-rival West Kenya sugar Company playing in the whole mess? What other forces are behind this mess and why is the government not flexing its powerful muscles? Why are they committing industrial development murder or massacre and getting away with it?
The most obvious fact is that any investor who is forced to stay out of production and sales out of his own planned working time frames is on the chopping block losing millions of shillings every day that he is out of production.
The Kenya Sugarcane Growers Association (KESGA) has declared that the endless expensive legal battles were a bad signal to both local and international investors because they will not want their projects to make profit tied up in crippling baseless legal battles.
The Association’s outgoing chairman Ibrahim Juma said the facility which is the first ever to be officially licensed for construction in Busia County since independence is being unfairly crippled by deliberately engineered legal battles.
Mr. Juma said: “Busia is a county that has been desperate for any factory since independence. When her neighbours like Bugoma, Kakamega and Vihiga all had factories since the mid 1970’s. None was forthcoming for Busia until BSI came in to save the situation.”
Kakamega is the leading with at least three sugar factories, Mumias, West Kenya, and Butali followed by Bungoma with Nzoia and Vihiga with Mudete tea factory whereas Busia had none.
The factory is being constructed at Busibwabo area in Busia County’s Matayos sub-county with a capacity to directly employ more than 3000 workers, but West Kenya encroached on its operations zoned with more of a juggery than a factory at Olepito on the Busia – Mumias highway.
According to the company lawyer Hassan Ali, the embattled sugar processing facility was supposed to have been officially commissioned to start production before May last year.
Mr. Ali said that by this month the factory should be celebrating one year of being in production but competitors who were interested in poaching sugarcane from the county went on rampage with endless court battles one after the other to stop the construction of the facility.
“Since Busia Sugar Industries was licensed to start construction of the factory by the now defunct Kenya Sugar Board (KSB) and ground breaking activities begun, we have had more than 12 cases and two are still pending in the high courts in Kisumu and Busia. Others were in Bungoma, Kakamega, Bungoma and even Nairobi,” he said.
Last year President Uhuru Kenyatta was forced to intervene telling the warring parties to withdraw the cases they had filed in the courts and amicably settle their differences out of court – this did not stop the deluge.
Mr. Juma said that more than 30, 000 sugarcane farmers who were contracted by the company to supply it with the raw material were stuck with the crop on their farms with no options where to sell it.
He said: “We must not forget the fact that more than 600 million was ploughed into sugarcane development and all these monies are going to waste with farmers not being spared the brunt of the impasse.”
The factory in question has the capacity of green field sugar plant project 3000TCD with 55 TPH boiler & 6 MW captive power expandable to 4500TCD within a period of five years after commencing production.
