Staff, locals of sugar belt deserve dignity

The effect? Overnight, thousands of citizens and their families were thrown into limbo. South Nyanza Sugar has 680 permanent employees, Nzoia 640, Chemelil 461, and Muhoroni 662.

Nearly 3,000 livelihoods extinguished by a directive authored in a red-carpeted Nairobi office — a single stroke of the pen rippling through villages impoverishing households, and denigrating living standards.

In modern, well-run societies, workers’ rights are treated as non-negotiable in privatisation. Employees automatically transfer to new employers on existing terms.

Where redundancies are inevitable, governments cushion the blow with voluntary exit packages funded from privatisation proceeds. The principle is simple: restructuring the economy should not translate into social devastation.

Here, however, nearly 3,000 workers were told to pack up and leave — no safety net, no transition, no dignity. Their only option is to demand better redundancy terms. Let me be clear; jobs must first and foremost be productive. Nor am I opposed to privatisation. Done right, it can drive efficiency and growth.

But it must be carried out with a human face, mindful of the real people behind the statistics.

Now consider this: as part of the leasing, the government wrote off Sh65 billion in debts. These include tax arrears owed to KRA, loans to the Kenya Sugar Board, government debts, and salary arrears to workers.

We have fattened the cow only to hand it over to private oligarchs at a bargain who then send workers home.

The tender documents reveal the mindset. The fate of staff was relegated to a vague clause: “the lease shall provide a plan in ways of dealing with existing employees. No specifics. No guarantees. Workers were an afterthought.

The result? A transaction designed less as reform than as a transfer of public assets into private hands, abetted by elites who stand to benefit. The government receives meagre concession fees; the private sector gains a cash cow. It is a textbook case of privatisation without a human face.

The most telling shortcoming in today’s policy elite is the failure to register the gravity of unemployment. In speeches and policy papers, the crisis is acknowledged. At every opportunity, leaders proclaim their determination to address it.

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Yet in practice, decisions like this one treat joblessness as background noise, a permanent feature of society.

The loss of jobs no longer galvanises collective anger. Strikes have become rare, trade unions irrelevant, workers voiceless. Indeed, the predicament of the worker has been compounded by a weak working-class movement. Trade unions have been on a decline for many years. Rising unemployment has also led to loss of membership and influence.

Until 1994, employers wishing to declare redundancies had to seek authority and approval from the powerful office of the Commissioner of labour.

They had to send audited accounts to the commissioner to justify the job cuts. All these protections ended after we uncritically swallowed prescriptions of the Washington Consensus.

Yet we all live in a society where unemployment is a severe problem for individuals and families but no longer a unifying issue.

History is repeating itself. When Telkom Kenya was privatised in 2000, it had 17,480 permanent and pensionable employees, complete with staff housing. When Kenya Railways was being restructured, it employed 10,500.

All these decent jobs disappeared on the promise that leaner, profitable institutions capable of offering many decent jobs to the citizen of this country would rise from the ashes. They never did.

We risk walking the same path with leasing of state-owned sugar mills. Before proceeding any further, the government must conduct a thorough social audit of the likely impact of job cuts in leased mills. Privatisation – whether implemented in the form of a PPP, an outright divestiture of public assets or leasing without social safeguards is not reform. It is economic violence disguised as policy.

In the history of Western Kenya, no crop has created as much misery to man as sugarcane.

Thousand were moved from their land to create space for called -nucleus estates for the sugar mills and forced into joining the ranks of the urban poor.

Let us not cause the citizen in the sugar belt to suffer double jeopardy.

The writer is a former Managing Editor for The EastAfrican