Are workers being sacrificed on the altar of business?

By Bramwell Murugu

Kenya: Two recent events linked to two men, but separated by just a week have put the spotlight on the status of the Kenyan worker and the growing influence of corrupt business people over the Jubilee Government.

The first event was the suspension of the Tassia II Housing project by Labour Cabinet Secretary Kazungu Kambi. The second is the plight of workers on flower farms in Naivasha. The Tassia II project is fast acquiring the smell of a skunk, and it won’t be long before everyone associated with it is heading for the hills.

Writing as an accountant, for me the project simply does not make sense — unless the NSSF is a charity. Workers and plot owners will lose money in this deal and the only winner is the contractor and the custodians of corruption in Government.

In Naivasha, flower farm workers are suffering because they have not been paid their dues. These are people who earn money through hard labour. They literally eat their sweat, yet the Government is unwilling to step in and end their plight.

The other day I was having a chat with a journalist from a leading media house in Kenya. I am a great admirer of the journalistic profession, but not necessarily some of their unorthodox methods of arriving at their version of the truth.

But I regress. The journalist, a well known writer posited that there are people within the Jubilee government determined to cut the wings of the Central Organisation of Trade Unions (Cotu) because it has become a stumbling block to their plans for “eating”. 

Normally I don’t put much currency in things that sound like conspiracy theories and to be honest, I find Atwoli too loud for my ears. But I have come to appreciate that he understands what makes workers tick, hence his rise in the trade union movement to his current status.

However, what my journalist friend said next made me think harder about the recent course of events. The journalist, a reputable individual in the profession, stated that his sources had intimated to him that the some people in Government feel it is time to clip the wings of Cotu, whose Secretary General Francis Atwoli they regard as a nuisance.

They believe that unless his influence is reduced, it will become very difficult to “make money” from projects linked to the National Social Security Fund (NSSF) and the National Hospital Insurance Fund. They had hoped that the appointment of Kazungu Kambi to the Labour Ministry would be advantageous in the sense that he knew little or nothing about the “dirty” side of the business.

What they did not bank on was the wall of resistance from Cotu and the Federation of Kenya Employers (FKE) when it came to NSSF’s Tassia II, which they had earmarked as the first “eating point” in the Fund under the Jubilee administration.

Things got worse when the relationship between Atwoli and Kambi deteriorated beyond repair. From my perspective, there was no way Cotu’s Atwoli was ever going to have anything but contempt for Kambi.

Atwoli, a man schooled in the rough and tumble of the labour movement from his younger days, would always see Kambi as a political opportunist who benefited from powerful individuals in Government, and is thus blind to reality. To Atwoli, Kambi’s lack of grounding in labour matters renders him gullible to the tricks of people keen on milking the NSSF of workers’ money.

The farm workers in Naivasha are Cotu to the core. Why am I not surprised that the Labour Ministry is yet to raise a finger to help them? Kambi appears to have bought into the secret plan to weaken Cotu if his piece, published in The Standard on Monday last week, is anything to go by

He even suggested that Cotu does not speak for the Kenyan worker when he intimated that Atwoli was operating a “like warlord” and “going against” the spirit of trade unionism. Kambi and Atwoli are like oil and water; they can never mix. .

I went back and read Kambi’s opinion piece again and again, and despite his claim that he is not imputing improper motive on the alliance between Cotu and FKE, it is clear who his promised new investigations of NSSF’s past dealings are targeted at.

It is not Kambi’s rider — that he is not imputing improper motive on Atwoli  — that makes his attempt to wash his hands off the Tassia II mess sound hollow, but his boldness.

On whose behalf was he really speaking? I ask this because, like I said before, from my perspective as an accountant, the Tassia II project does not make sense unless the NSSF board is willing to sacrifice workers’ hard-earned pension.

His willingness to push an agenda that could scar his political and professional future for life is puzzling. I am fervently hoping that he has done his homework well because his own admission before the Labour Committee of Parliament that unsigned e-mails were used to validate the contract is a damning indictment of his foresight.

As things stand, there is a very real danger that even if Parliament’s investigations validate what an editorial in The Standard called a “phantom” project, it might eventually destroy him.

The writer is an accountant and businessman