Economy

Swazuri team exit turns focus on tea zone governors

tea

A tea estate in Kericho. FILE PHOTO | NMG

Governors of tea producing counties have suffered a blow after the first crop of the National Land Commission (NLC) bosses vacated office on Wednesday without resolving their land issues.

Most of the governors won elections on the platform of recovering the huge chunks of land from multinational tea estates whose leases have mostly expired.

Not a single acre of land had been reverted to the communities by the time the six-year term of the first lot of NLC commissioners lapsed on February 19, posing a continuity challenge on the efforts to recover the parcels of land.

Governors Stephen Sang (Nandi), his Kericho counterpart Prof Paul Chepkwony and Bomet governor Joyce Laboso were particularly vocal in the campaigns seen to be targeting the remnants of British firms.

A number of MPs also sailed through both the 2013 and in 2017 elections by promising local communities they would recover their “ancestral land” upon expiry of the 99-year leases.

Sources told the Business Daily most land title deeds for the multi-national in Kenya are kept in Britain because Kenya was under British Colony when the whites forceful took over the land from African in between year 1890 and before 1963.

Last year Nandi community leaders passed “the second declaration” which instructed Governor Sang to ensure all the land under tea estates is recovered.

Mr Sang declared during the meeting “the county government will reclaim the expired tea land and return it to the community.”

Sang was elected into office in 2017 upon promising voters in Nandi to recovering tea plantation land.

Majority of tea companies remain operational despite expired leases, a pointer that they could be processing renewals.

Nandi and Kericho counties plan to sue the British Government over the historical land injustices where they want thousands of hectares of land which they claim was snatched from them by the colonial government.