How top managers and farmers joined hands to loot parastatal

But investigations by Business Daily indicate that many middlemen — among them local chemical manufacturers and agents of Chinese firms — have since emerged to cash in on the board’s inability to pay farmers promptly.

The chemical firms, most of them based in Nairobi, said they are aware of the restriction on the purchase and sale by the Act but were ready to face the law instead of seeing their businesses die as they await the rebound of PBK.

Business Daily also established that older farmers were reluctant to break the decades of bond with PBK.

“I sell 80kg of my flowers to the Chinese who pick them from farm gate with cash on delivery while PBK takes the remaining 70kg whose payment I normally treat as savings,” said Mr Mbugua Mbiu, a 71 year old pyrethrum farmer at Kinungi, Naivasha.

Up to 2003, pyrethrum was Kenya’s third principal export crop after coffee and tea with the country commanding an impressive 70 per cent of the world’s pyrethrin market.

At its Nakuru factories, lorry loads of pyrethrum flowers used to arrive from Kisii, Nyandarua, Limuru, Naivasha, Gilgil, Mau Narok, Molo and Subukia. Not anymore.

The crop has since disappeared from the country’s export radar and is no longer treated in the government’s economic surveys as a serious export commodity.

Unlike the old days when the board’s management would hold extensive field tours to promote crop’s growing in the fields, PBK’s management is besieged lot, forced to take cover from farmers and retrenched employees who are owed a fortune.

Up to 2003, the board used to receive hordes of foreign visitors looking for strategic stakes or competitors seeking to learn secretes for success.

Respected authority

“This organisation is respected as an authority in pyrethrum issues and entities from all over the world send us samples of insecticide to test here in Kenya because we have been a mark of quality for over 70 years,” PBK’s former managing director Mrs Pauline Sego told Business Daily in a 2007 interview.

Going through the PBK’s books, the deep financial troubles that the board is grappling with contrasts with its 1996 status when it could easily afford to put Sh1 billion in a fixed deposit account without hurting daily operations.

Between 1996 and 2006 the board and top managers flouted government regulations and procedures in running the affairs and tenders were awarded without following the procurement rules, says the report.